Opinion
Australia’s defence plans are a charade
The announcement on Australia’s new ships doesn’t pass the pub test. Like its predecessors, this government isn’t serious about the threat it consistently talks about.
James CurranInternational editorAustralia’s current strategic policy paradigm is trapped.
The Albanese government consistently underlines the urgency of the most deteriorating strategic circumstances facing Australia since the end of World War Two.
Since 2016-17, the “China threat” narrative has been set to a stopwatch, seconds tumbling as the unforgiving minute runs down and Beijing’s strategic confidence grows.
Yet so far as the acquisition of a meaningful deterrent is concerned, Canberra coddles old father time.
Like the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, Australia’s new surface fleet won’t materialise until the early 2030s. At best. That’s provided there are no delays. A big ask given Defence’s form guide on major capability projects.
Last week’s announcement by Defence Minister Richard Marles on Australia’s surface fleet fails the pub test for self-defence in this decade or early next. And arguably, AUKUS itself is designed less for self-defence than it is for joining US military adventures in the name of “impactful projection”.
The conclusion? This Australian government, like its predecessors, is simply not serious about the threat they consistently talk about.
Loyalty and betrayal
The nation’s defence plans are a charade. What’s left is diplomatic reassurance. That’s had some success, but it’s a tough ask when the same political leaders refuse to explain to their own people the basic rationale behind AUKUS.
The public documents on the surface fleet and AUKUS reveal only ghostly galleons, below and above the ocean’s surface. Australia now exhibits a defence policy not unlike the paintings of JMW Turner, the onlooker straining to discern the outlines of a warship through the fog and gloom.
But this points to a deeper problem about how Australia has thought about and articulates its strategic policy – particularly in moments of geopolitical transition. And it raises a question about how a threat has been consistently stoked, and how serious are those threats.
Any narrative account of how Australia has engaged with the world from the end of the nineteenth century has to acknowledge the fundamental paradigm or axis around which that policy revolves: the imperative of loyalty and the prospect of betrayal.
This has played out against the backdrop of a nation-state trying to reconcile its Asian moorings with its European heritage. That tension has been at its most acute when Australian policymakers have faced a regional threat with a knotted stomach, the nagging unease that its great power protector either does not share the same sense of dread or is distracted elsewhere.
Thus fear of Japan, which originated in the 1890s and reached fever pitch before and during World War Two, was accompanied by debate about both the paucity of defence preparedness and whether Britain’s security assurances, especially over Singapore, could be relied upon.
So deep were these anxieties over Japan that even into the immediate postwar period, some American policymakers quipped that Australia was still fighting the Second World War when the West was at that time preparing for a third. It took a while before Australia stopped looking back in fear.
Then, anxiety over Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s, emerging from Sukarno’s taking of West New Guinea, his Confrontation towards Malaysia and his declaration of a Jakarta-Beijing axis, forced Australian governments once more to divine a policy that did not necessarily rely on great and powerful friends.
Indeed in 1959, one cabinet committee raised the prospect of forming an independent defence capability in the case of limited war with Indonesia where Canberra could not necessarily rely on British or American assistance. But Menzies killed the idea, ensuring it never went to full cabinet.
By the following decade Menzies beat the drum of the “downwards thrust of China”. Even so, he directed most of Australian expenditure in this period to domestic priorities rather than defence. Australia fought in Vietnam “to the last American”, as historian Peter King wrote.
From the early 1970s and with the virtual end of the Cold War in East Asia, Defence advisers foresaw no threat to the Australian mainland in the next 10–15 years. continental defence replaced forward defence as the conceptual driver of defence acquisition.
Keating’s search for “security in, not from Asia”, brought the curtain down on 90 years, in essence, of a fearful foreign policy. Albanese identifies with that very phrase but via AUKUS has given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the old bogey of forward defence. Is this really the hallmark of what it means to think Australian now? Albanese apparently told revellers at Christmas drinks that his proudest moment of the year was standing alongside President Biden on the South Lawn of the White House. We are where we are.
Echoes from the 60s today
Into the new century, Canberra has fallen back not so much on narratives distinctive to Australian interests but to those wired from the dominant Western myths shaping the conduct of international relations since 1945.
Speeches littered with phrases about the “rules-based order”, “Munich” and “appeasement” force new circumstances into older patterns.
But underlying it is the residual fear about facing up to a world without America. There is an echo from the early 1960s here, when the prevailing reaction of Australian politicians and pundits to Britain’s application for EEC membership was “unthinkable”. Australia had to be jolted to think anew.
All the same, it is hard to know why fear of abandonment still grips Australian psychology, particularly after governments from Howard to Albanese have steadily turned the nation into a floating American military base. The upshot is that Australia could not ditch its alliance with the United States even if it wanted to. America will have to decide to leave it.
The farce over defence capability timelines is now a credibility problem for Canberra, crimping a foreign policy that has been patiently trying to rebuild Australia’s reputation in the eyes of its Southeast Asian and Pacific partners.
Subscribe to gift this article
Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.
Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber?
Introducing your Newsfeed
Follow the topics, people and companies that matter to you.
Find out moreRead More
Latest In Foreign affairs & security
Fetching latest articles