Just after lunchtime on Monday last week, the head of Australia’s Foreign Affairs Department, Frances Adamson, took a call about the government’s planned Jerusalem announcement.
Public servants, even the most seasoned, aren’t unimpeachable, but they are the government’s bedrock for advice on major and complex issues.
So it must have been a surprise for the nation’s most senior diplomat that the call from Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s office wasn’t so much asking for her input as letting her know a decision had been made.
The government would, the following morning, throw into question Australia’s long-held position on one of the most sensitive questions of Middle East policy – the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – and review its support for the Iran nuclear deal, to which Senator Payne had herself recommitted Australia barely a fortnight earlier before the UN General Assembly.
The revelations by Ms Adamson during an extraordinary Senate estimates hearing on Thursday morning constituted the final piece of a puzzle, confirming that not one government official had been consulted about the major foreign policy shift.
Not only did the decision – which virtually all close observers say privately was driven by the Wentworth byelection – receive no input from bureaucratic expertise, it left Australia’s diplomats just hours to soften the ground with key countries such as Indonesia and even less time for military chiefs to ensure their protection levels for troops in the Middle East were adequate.
Read the article by David Wroe in The Sydney Morning Herald.