Time for Mal to man up and stop Chinese

THE submarine defence of the nation has surfaced as a major story but most idiots are ­focused on what will prove to be a fruitless search for an anonymous leaker of sections of a draft section of a Defence ­Department white paper.

They are missing the point. Australia’s defence capability is run down and arguments about leaks aren’t going to change that reality. Our six Collins-class submarine fleet is, as former ­defence minister David Johnston told Sky News, “extremely fragile” and prone to corrosion because of the warm water they operated in. The Collins could defend Australia but only if a great deal of money was spent on them. “It’s an expensive artefact. We are paying about $1 billion a year to keep six boats in the water and we have probably only ever had three to four that are sort of in the water.” Anyone who cares to wander down to Woolloomooloo when a Collins is berthed at Garden Island will be told ­exactly the same thing by the submariners enjoying shore leave at one of the local pubs. The subs are kept running by an extremely depleted but dedicated group of engineers who cannibalise vessels for spares to keep some of the subs operational most of the time. But the issue that those who focus on the leaks want to avoid is the rapacity with which China is encroaching on what we call the South China Sea and the Chinese call the China Sea. The Australian public is largely being kept in the dark about Chinese ambitions for the region by politicians from both major parties because of the sensitive nature of our economic and diplo-matic relationship with China. There is no such delicacy within the international ­defence community, however, and specialist publications have been sounding klaxons about the build-up of China’s blue-water navy for over a decade, as the People’s Liberation Army’s navy began filling the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the US fleet from its bases in the Philippines. In February, 1992, China announced that 80 per cent of the South China Sea would be formally considered Chinese territorial waters. It actively began exercising its historical claims to the territory within what it called the First Island Chain. This is the area contained inside a line that runs roughly from the Kamchatka Peninsula in the north to Borneo in the south. Look it up on your atlas, and yes, there is an area contained by the Second Island Chain in which China has also ­expressed interest. It runs from Japan down to the tip or Irian Jaya, and you should know that there is a Third Island Chain delineated on strategic charts which runs from the ­Aleutian Islands through ­Hawaii and on to Samoa and Tonga. But of immediate topicality is the area contained in what has since the end of World War II been called the Nine-Dash Line — a chunk of ocean extending below Taiwan to Brunei and Borneo and then back up the Vietnamese coast. The Nine-Dash Line contains all of the little reefs and sandy islands — the Spratlys, the Paracels, Woody Island, the Scarborough Shoals — which the Chinese are currently fortifying to the horror of the Philippine and Vietnamese governments and their fishermen who have for generations worked these ­waters undisturbed. The only popular writer who has drawn attention to these matters is British author Simon Winchester, in a chapter of his book Pacific, published last year. It doesn’t take much insight to put together the ­empirical evidence of China’s activities to date with its plans to announce a massive ­increase in its defence spending at the opening of its parliament this weekend. According to a report in The Financial Review on Friday on the lead up to the congress, China’s state media has done nothing to douse speculation that defence spending will grow faster than last year’s official increase of 10.1 per cent. A Chinese defence expert linked to the armed forces, said the defence budget would certainly grow at a faster pace than in 2015. China has previously justified large increases in defence spending by saying they were comparable with its economic growth, but this claim is now unsustainable as the economy has slowed. The Chinese military know what they want and their government is going to give them all the toys and freedom they wish to exercise their muscle. The Australian military supremos appear to be preoccupied with patronising men who wish to dress in women’s clothing, accommodating a Muslim woman as an Islamic adviser to the navy and supplying halal food to a defence force that has fewer than 100 Muslim members, rather than attending to the defence of the nation. We need politicians who are prepared to make the critical decisions. Former PM Tony Abbott was one. Abbott is now making warnings about the Chinese which could be likened to the alarm Winston Churchill expressed about Nazi’s rearmament of Germany, though Abbott would not like the comparison. It is not good enough for the Turnbull government to now wait for departmental officials to make decisions — politicians are elected to make those decisions not the officials. If the government is going to hide behind the public service on critical matters like ­defence, the whole notion of having an elected representation is rendered pointless. The former Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard scandalously compromised long-term defence strategy by putting off decisions, and the Turnbull government is showing that it learnt nothing by such a pusillanimous ­approach to essential policy. The leak is a minor matter. What does count is the defence of the nation and time is running out.