Greens offer a defenceless policy

The Australian Greens will never form government, so why even bother with their foolish proposal to halve the nation’s defence budget and rely on “effective communication” to ward off military threats? It’s a reminder that in politics and the wider community there is an educated and affluent minority incapable of adjusting its world view to the fact Australia has suffered a rapid, dramatic worsening of our strategic outlook. Open democracies face a serious challenge from authoritarian rivals and China’s belligerent assertion of its interests is being played out in our Asia-Pacific backyard.

Australia’s defence budget is $44.62bn; China’s is at least $278bn. Would China cut its spending if we do? Australians would be delighted if reality allowed the diversion of the defence budget to education or health. But those social goods presuppose an independent nation able to give effect to its values and to defend assaults on its sovereignty. During the Cold War, the political forebears of the Greens used the open society of the West to campaign for disarmament. This was cheered on by the Soviet Union, which rightly saw unilateral disarmament in the West as a gift to it. As the Cold War came to an end, “effective communication” was a crucial element. But Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to the negotiating table with serious intent because Western leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had ignored the peaceniks and maintained credible military deterrence. As the old saying goes, if you want peace, prepare for war.

But there are limits to what communication can achieve when open democracies come up against authoritarian regimes. The Greens see themselves as the great champions of human rights, political morality and social justice. Those norms and values are severely compromised in China; they cannot be sustained in the West without strong institutions and nations capable of self-defence. It’s absurd for the Greens’ “peace spokesman” to characterise Australia-China relations as “holding a gun to each other’s heads”. Australia was poised for ever deeper engagement with China when Xi Jinping became president in 2012, and he chose a new path of intensified militarisation and belligerent self-assertion abroad. Australians – most of us anyway – have been forced to contend with this new, unsettling state of affairs. The same day the Greens were pushing talk therapy as a defence policy, we reported bipartisan approval for federal laws allowing our top cyber spies to take control of critical infrastructure in the event of serious attack. That’s reality; the Greens occupy a fantasy.