He’s warned us before on the China threat. Can we afford to ignore him again?

In the catalogue of missed opportunities, Australia’s 2009 defence white paper was a big one. If we’d acted on it, we’d be in a much better position today. It was the first one to dare name China as the emerging threat. And to set out a plan for how to prepare for it.

Instead of today’s frantic scramble to get hold of any long-range missiles, we’d already have them. Instead of today’s desperate attempt to refurbish Australia’s six geriatric Collins class submarines, we’d already be halfway through replacing them with 12 new conventionally powered subs. This wouldn’t have precluded the AUKUS subs, but it would’ve meant that we didn’t have a yawning vulnerability while we wait another decade for the first of them.

Illustration: Dionne Gain. Credit:

But that 2009 plan was published by the Rudd government; Labor dumped it when it dumped its leader. Fifteen years later, we still have no long-range missiles, and our submarines are due for retirement.

The lead author of that white paper was the deputy secretary of defence for strategy at the time, Mike Pezzullo. He was later promoted to head a series of other departments, the last of which was Home Affairs. He was sacked last year after this masthead revealed he’d covertly colluded with a Liberal lobbyist to play personal politics.

He “spent years using a political back channel to two Liberal prime ministers to undermine political and public service enemies, promote the careers of conservative politicians he considered allies and lobby to muzzle the press,” wrote investigative reporters Nick McKenzie, Michael Bachelard and Amelia Ballinger.

From powerful mandarin to squashed cabbage, Pezzullo was disgraced as a public servant. But his qualifications as a defence strategist remain intact. And now he’s contributing to public debate in his expert field. Once again, Pezzullo identifies an important gap in Australia’s preparedness. This time, it’s not in military hardware but in the specifics of how to plan for warfighting together with the US under the ANZUS treaty – for the defence of Australia.

Most of the public debate about any future Australian warfighting is about crises far from our shores – in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, for example. But Pezzullo is directing our attention to planning to protect the Australian continent itself, in joint combat with the US.

Isn’t that planning already under way? You might be surprised to know that it’s not, says Pezzullo, who has been privy to the inner sanctum of security deliberations, the national security committee of the cabinet, for most of the last decade.

The Australian and US militaries “talk about worthy things like exercises and the rotation of Marines but not structured around how we would actually fight a war”, he tells me. In effect, he argues, the ANZUS treaty is asleep and needs to be woken. By making specific plans for joint combat, “Australia and the US would signal that they were putting their alliance onto a war footing”, he writes in a new essay for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“This would signal a credible commitment on the part of Australia and the US to act collectively under their military alliance,” says Pezzullo. “It would enhance regional deterrence.” Other US allies in the region already do this. Japan and South Korea “have planning conferences about how they’d actually fight, and I’m saying we now need to take ANZUS to the same level”.

But wouldn’t that provoke a response from China?

Beijing might make noise about it, but “it would be naive to think Australia is not already factored into China’s war plans,” Pezzullo tells me.

But why would Beijing want to attack Australia? We’re not a threat.

China, Pezzullo writes, “would assess that Australia holds significant geostrategic utility for the US, as a bastion, and as a secure base from which to project military power, by way of US combat operations being mounted from, or through, Australia. It should be assumed that there would be high probability of Australia being subjected to armed attack, cyberattack, and cognitive operations in any US-China war”.

Cognitive war, by the way, is war that affects a nation’s mental state and undermines its will to fight. And it’s important to note that Pezzullo thinks the chances of a war with China today are low, around 10 per cent, but high enough and potentially devastating enough to prepare for.

Is there any way to avoid being a target for China in the event of a war?

“The only way absolutely to stay out of it would be to shut down the joint facilities” on Australian soil, such as Pine Gap and the North West Cape, “and give assurances that US forces won’t stage through Australia”.

Break the US alliance, in other words. “That’s a respectable argument, but if you’re making that argument you should argue for it – why is it in our interests to stay out of war?”

The idea of avoiding war is attractive, of course. But if the Chinese Communist Party were allowed to achieve its aim of forcing the US out of the region and dominating the Indo-Pacific, Australia would lose much of its sovereignty and we’d lose many of our liberties. Remember the Chinese embassy’s list of 14 grievances delivered in 2020? It starts with Beijing’s demand that it should be allowed to invest unchecked in Australia, and ends with the demand that Australian members of parliament and the media be prohibited from any criticism of China. That was a first glimpse of what Beijing’s dominance would mean in practice.

At the moment, says Pezzullo, Australia is in a “halfway house”. We host US facilities like Pine Gap, crucial to America’s ability to detect nuclear and conventional missile launches from Russia, China and elsewhere. So we’re a target. Yet we don’t have detailed plans for joint US-Australian operations to defend our continent under the ANZUS treaty. So we don’t know exactly how the US might help us to protect ourselves in the event of attack.

“Thinking about war is distressing,” Pezzullo writes. “The alternative is worse.”

Peter Hartcher is international editor.