ANZUS pact frays under PM’s watch as Australia underspends

Anthony Albanese jeopardised ANZUS in the very week that heavily armed Chinese warships circumnavigated Australia. Picture: Irene Dowdy

For the first time since the ANZUS agreement was signed in 1951, an Australian prime minister has made statements that potentially put the agreement at risk.

Anthony Albanese jeopardised ANZUS in the very week that heavily armed Chinese warships circumnavigated Australia, revealing just how weak our defence system has become, and how much we need the US.

The ANZUS danger started when President Donald Trump’s choice to be Undersecretary of Defence for Policy at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, told a congressional committee he expected Australia to spend at least 3 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence to combat the rise of China.

Colby at the time may not have been aware that ANZUS commits Australia, the US and New Zealand to “maintain and develop their individual capacity to resist armed attack”.

But Colby would not have made such a statement without the backing of President Trump and/or Vice-President JD Vance.

On a simple reading of the ANZUS treaty, a defence commitment is required of Australia before the US is obligated to defend us. For the first time, at least publicly, the US has put a figure on what it requires of Australia to “resist armed attack” and, as I describe, it is a very reasonable figure that could easily have been pitched a lot higher.

Indeed, the extra money required, which is in the vicinity of $26bn, is roughly equal to what Albanese has promised to spend on his whistle stop tour to gain votes plus the extra public servants being hired. The opposition matched most of those promises.

Albanese should have been aware that in practical terms Colby was defining the Australian ANZUS defence spending obligation.

Instead Albanese made the staggering statement “Australia determines our national interest” and the government has already boosted spending on the military to resist armed attack.

“My government is allocating significant additional resources for defence,” he said. “What is being rolled out including missiles ... is a range of assets that improve both our capability but also, importantly, our delivery.”

Defence spending

Australia currently spends a pitiful 2 per cent of GDP on defence and the Albanese plan is to lift that to just 2.34 per cent by 2034.

The US spends 3.4 per cent and is asking Europe to spend 5 per cent.

Once our Prime Minister rejected the US expectation, Colby and those close to the President and Vice-President would have checked the ANZUS wording.

And already both Trump and Vance will not have been pleased by the Australian stance in the Middle East.

We face an election where, in the public’s mind, the main issues are around the cost of living, the housing crisis, migration and the huge rises in power bills.

But in reality those issues fade into total insignificance when compared to the fact that our Prime Minister has put the nation’s defence at risk at a time when a very volatile US President is in charge who will not take kindly to being told to jump in the proverbial lake. When Ukraine’s President publicly challenged Trump and his people, Ukraine lost all military support and Volodymyr Zelensky had to come back apologising.

When the 1950 external affairs minister, the late Percy Spender, was negotiating the wording of the ANZUS treaty he knew that Australia was a nation that would need to spend a lot of money on defence because of our land mass and coastline.

Australia has the eighth-largest coastline in the world and the 10th highest land area per capita – a huge defence burden. In addition we have long supply lines.

In the past, we were attractive to Japan and in the long term, we could conceivably be attractive to China, India and Indonesia, all of whom have much greater military capacity.

Australia’s current military expenditure of 2 per cent of GDP is 0.5 per cent below the OECD average. Australia is 0.8 per cent below the high-income country average, but Australia has a much harder defence task and is in a more perilous position than most other countries.

Defence disasters

We have wasted vast amounts of our past expenditure on equipment disasters and we have allowed our Australian Defence Force land forces to run down.

Given the rundown of our current defence capacity and the enormity of our defence task, if anything, the US requirement is too low. And the position is set to get worse because our future expenditure level on non-nuclear submarine areas does not keep up – that 2.34 per cent by 2034 forward expenditure is increasingly devoted to the nuclear submarine program.

If there is to be a crisis it will likely happen well before our frigates and submarines are in operation. Accordingly, the US require-ment is very much in line with the intent of the ANZUS treaty.

There have been 14 prime ministers since Robert Menzies approved the ANZUS treaty. Almost all of them realised that we obtained the treaty through a stroke of brilliant negotiating by Spender so they reinforced it by sending troops overseas whenever asked by the US including to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Accordingly, it is important to remind the current government how we achieved ANZUS. In the first half-decade after 1945, Australia made many approaches to the Pentagon seeking an ANZUS-type treaty. It was firmly rejected by the US defence top brass.

Then in 1950, somehow, Spender landed a 15 to 20-minute appointment with president Harry Truman. Legend has it he walked into Truman’s office and found the president distraught. His daughter, Margaret Truman, had been out singing the night before and was absolutely decimated by the press. Whatever Spender had planned to say to president Truman he put aside and spent almost all his time bemoaning the evils of the press.

Eventually, Truman pointed out to Spender that they had spent almost all the allocated time taking about his daughter. He asked whether there was anything specific that Spender wanted; Spender answered something like this: “Yes Mr President – I would like a defence pact between my country, NZ and the United States of America.”

Truman agreed it was a good idea and Spender left the room. Spender signed ANZUS in 1951.