AFR has an article about Greg Moriarty by Michael Read, “Why Canberra has chosen this man to take over from Kevin Rudd”, in which many people extol Moriarty virtues. 

The one exception is Michael Shoebridge, who says:

 “He has been unwilling to bring the government to make the hard decisions. How can we have the government saying defence procurement is in such a mess that it needs the biggest shake-up in decades and the head of the department is an unalloyed high achiever? The two things don’t fit.” Shoebridge says Moriarty “has presided over the defence department for long enough to be fully accountable for its problems, and yet he seems to have escaped scot-free”. “He’s a bureaucrat who has done what his political masters directed at every stage of his career and has been rewarded for that.”

A public service colleague speaking on the condition of anonymity said there was a recent history of department’s bosses who excelled at policy and strategy but not at project delivery. “Greg is not a program guy,” they said. “He’s a superb geopolitical guy. But that’s not the same as when the minister says I need 100 missiles by Friday. He would understand why we’d need 100 missiles. He would be superb on the policy question of why we need 100 missiles by Friday. But he’s not the guy to push people hard, partly because of his character.”

In my varied career — Australia, Russia, China — in public service, business and academia, I have often come across people who confidently advocate some exceptional strategy but, when pressed, cannot clearly explain how it would work in practice. Examples include the role of monetary aggregates in Australian monetary policy, business taxation reform in the case of Tax Value Method (TVM), and IMF and “shock therapy” ideas for economic reform in Russia in the 1990s. 

I understand that one individual cannot have a good understanding of all aspects of an issue. But, often the big strategy-type people just do not want to accept that there may be problems with their ideas. It makes them uncomfortable — so best to dismiss such problems as “details”.

More generally, invading Iraq and building a new society there is an example!

In my view, this is a problem with AUKUS and why Moriarty is a bad choice for Ambassador to the USA. He is an enthusiastic advocate with little idea of the difficulties of practical application — particularly building nuclear submarines in Adelaide!