Piers Akerman: Australia’s national security needs to be addressed
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has recently drawn attention to threats posed by the world’s two most powerful totalitarian regimes, China and Russia. It’s clear that Australia must urgently redefine its approach to national security, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
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Australia must urgently redefine its approach to national security. It requires a whole of government approach and a dramatic rethink of who we are and who we want to be.
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, the chair of Parliament’s Joint Intelligence and Security Committee, has recently drawn attention to threats posed by the world’s two most powerful totalitarian regimes, China and Russia.
In a well-reasoned article published by the influential Henry Jackson Society and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in their report The Art of Deceit: How China and Russia Use Sharp Power to Subvert the West, the former SAS commander has urged Western nations to start responding to this threat more actively.
“We must take assertive diplomatic, economic and covert measures to push back against authoritarian states that undermine the global order at the very edge of peace,” he wrote.
“Over the last century, the West has built a powerful set of alliances and partnerships, and these now need to be mobilised.”
Mr Hastie has urged a greater sharing of intelligence (at varying levels of security), technical expertise, training, and resources to provide an organisational framework for co-ordinating responses, particularly in the fast-paced cyber and information domains. It would also pay particular focus to smaller states, which are often ill-equipped to resist.
He is also arguing for a raising of public awareness through by enlisting the full weight of democratic institutions in this effort, including the giving of major speeches, initiating parliamentary inquiries and passing legislative measures, and educating the public.
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We have to build resilience against clandestine and overt political warfare campaigns. We must take assertive diplomatic, economic and covert measures to push back against authoritarian states that undermine the global order.
The docu-drama Chernobyl captured the essence of the USSR’s intellectually corrupted bureaucracy; another could easily be made exposing China’s aggressive trampling of civil liberties and freedoms.
Australia, Mr Hastie says, has already begun taking action to protect itself against the most obvious threats.
Arms aren’t sufficient. The great power competition is ultimately a contest of ideas and national leaders must affirm and articulate the values that define Western democracies, not permit our overpaid university administrators to undermine and oppose the core civilities that protect our way of life.
However the threat to the West is not solely from the recognised totalitarian powers.
There is an equally potent threat that is homegrown, nurtured in our universities by academics who are poisoning their students with postmodern anti-Western ideology that decries Western civilisation, its ideals, its enlightened culture.
James Kurth, the eminent US scholar and strategist wrote of this threat 25 years ago in his landmark book The Real Clash, saying the greatest threat to the West was the deconstruction of Western civilisation by the intellectual class. The modern, he said, was being overthrown by the postmodern.
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has listed the three primary threats to the West as the totalitarian states, the Islamist movements that are constantly adapting and migrating to the least governed spaces on the planet, from which they launch against the West both physical and ideological challenges (facilitated by internet and globalisation) and the internal civilisational threats to the West.
We are being assailed from without and within. Difficult decisions must be made. Our defence establishment needs a shake-up.
The outrageous French submarine deal should be jettisoned. We have to stop the witch hunts, too, against distinguished personnel. For a number of reasons, our universities need to be reformed.
Cyber security to safeguard research programs and protect nationally important programs is essential but a rethink of the intellectual direction is also overdue and critically important.
Slashing the amount of money spent pursuing socially faddish programs in both the defence area and academia would demonstrate to the quiet majority that the government understands just how exasperated the public has become with waste.
This, as Mr Hastie has indicated, is the time to step up, not step back.
There will be a cost but if we aren’t to be defeated it will be worth paying.