‘A country that’s in doubt about itself, that often thinks patriotism is a dirty word, is in no position to fight’
This week the paradox of modern Australia was on full display. With hundreds of thousands of spectators cheering them on, tens of thousands of veterans and serving military personnel marched on Anzac Day to honour everyone who has fought for our country.
On that day, though, the Australian War Memorial’s new chairman pledged that the memorial soon would honour the Aboriginal warriors who’d fought against the British settlement of this country, even though such recognition would be more appropriate in the new $316.5m Indigenous centre called Ngurra, to be situated opposite the AWM on Lake Burley Griffin.
Yet again, it looks like popular enthusiasm versus official ambivalence when it comes to being positive about Australia.
So what’s it to be: pride in our country or shame? Is the Australian War Memorial – which World War I historian Charles Bean intended as the Anzacs’ shrine “in the heart of the land they loved” – now to be turned into a place of division and embarrassment?
It should be possible to come to a nuanced appreciation of our strengths and weaknesses as a nation. Yet it’s hard to be optimistic about getting this balance right in an era so given to fretting about toxic masculinity (even though it’s strong men who have kept us safe in the past and likely will again in the future); the history wars; claims that it’s racist to vote No to giving Indigenous Australians a special say in government based on ancestry; and the tendency to deny those with a uterus the right to be called women while biological men can, if that’s what they choose.
All this matters because the Defence Strategic Review the government released this week says that not since the end of World War II have we been so close to major conflict.
Yet a country that’s in doubt about itself, that often thinks patriotism is a dirty word, is in no position to fight.
In his Anzac Day address this week, Governor-General David Hurley, the former defence force chief who commanded the Australian contingent in Somalia, said what had most concerned his men was not the risk of getting hurt but the worry that they might fail to be worthy of the example of their forefathers.
That’s the key question: if called upon, would we live up to their example? And do we believe in our country and our values enough to fight for it as our veterans did?
For current and former military personnel, obviously the answer is yes. And for the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, who attended dawn services and marches around the country this week I suspect the answer is also yes. But for others, I wonder.
These days we spend so much time acknowledging “country” – with the inference that it’s really the country of only 4 per cent of us – rather than the country of all of us. Among the official class and elites, we spend so much time in angst about our past and rewriting history, even though ordinary people still sense that, in terms of freedom, justice and a fair go, Australia remains the best country on earth and has to be worth defending. But how long will this hold?
There were some very important messages in this week’s DSR. That we can’t count on 10 years’ notice of major conflict. That China’s militarisation of the South China Sea is a direct threat to Australia’s national interest. That our armed forces on their own need to be able to defeat any adversary – China included – that seeks to attack Australia. And, most worryingly, that we’re not ready for armed conflict, on any serious scale.
But it seems that the review, as usual, dances around some of the really important issues. As just about every defence analyst now says, communist China is getting ready to attack Taiwan. Because democratic Taiwan is never going to submit to communist rule, that means an assault on Taiwan is all but inevitable.
All but inevitable, that is, unless the free world makes it clear to Beijing that any assault on Taiwan wouldn’t be just giant China against tiny Taiwan but dictatorship versus democracy.
Deterrence through strength is the only way to raise the stakes enough to deter Beijing because anything other than the status quo would be a catastrophe. A successful Chinese assault on Taiwan, unresisted by the democracies, would up-end the world order as we know it as countries arm themselves to the teeth against Beijing or roll over and make the best accommodation they can with the communist superpower. But helping Taiwan risks a war between the superpowers, with all that entails, in terms of sending the world back towards the Stone Age.
There’s not much in this review, at least in the unclassified version, about how Australia might work to maintain the peace across the Taiwan Strait even though the US would certainly expect our help. What there is, though, is yet more reviews: a further review into our fuel security, given that we have just a few weeks of onshore fuel reserves; and a further review of the surface fleet. There’s plenty of talk about more missiles but, again, no hard dates for their acquisition.
In fact, the only specific commitments to come out of this review are to scrap the acquisition of most of the new infantry fighting vehicles and not to go ahead with the purchase of more self-propelled artillery. Even though the lesson of history is “to expect the unexpected”, as we’ve seen with the rise of Islamic State and the Russian assault on Ukraine.
There’s the obligatory reference to climate change, which the review says is “amplifying our challenges”. Seriously? With China commissioning hundreds of new coal-fired power stations and engaged in the biggest military build-up in peacetime history, we need to get our head out of the sand on energy security being critical to our national security and drop this climate obsession within the bureaucracy.
The Albanese government deserves credit for sticking with its predecessor’s plan for nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS. But like its predecessor, it seems better at delivering words than at delivering actual military capability. For the most part, the plans are good, but there’s no real urgency at putting them into practice and no real attempt to persuade the public that spending on the armed forces might actually be a higher priority than, say, the NDIS. Probably because the government itself is unpersuaded.
If the situation is as serious as the government says, deeds must better match words. The other thing that really needs to change is how we think about ourselves. We can’t honour Australia and Australians on Anzac Day only to spend the rest of the year denigrating our country and undermining the rationale for defending it. Maybe that explains why it’s so hard to recruit the young people our armed forces need. Whatever the reason, let’s hope we all wake up before it’s too late.
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