In March the Chinese “research ship” Tan Suo Yi Hao worked with New Zealand scientists to send a miniature submarine 6km down to the bottom of the Pusegur Trench, collecting samples from the seabed.
“I really hope they come back and look at the trenches again. There’s always more questions,” a happy Kiwi scientist enthused.
There are few creatures on earth more clueless than New Zealand scientists when it comes to defence and security. Trench exploration done, the Tan Suo Yi Hao turned for home, but not by the shortest route. The distance between Wellington and Shanghai by the most direct sea route is 5358 nautical miles.
But the ship is transiting the Great Australian Bight and will round Western Australia before heading north. That adds well over 1700 nautical miles to the trip.
As reported by this newspaper’s Ben Packham, a spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said: “We know exactly where it is, we know the direction it is heading, and the speed it’s moving in that direction.”
Perhaps the spokesman was previously a Kiwi scientist. All those data points can be found online. The key issue is: what is the ship doing? As has been widely reported, the People’s Republic of China makes no distinction between civilian and military scientific research. Xi Jinping’s policy of “civil-military fusion” explicitly directs all research into supporting China’s military forces.
When it comes to Australia, China would have no higher priorities than to understand everything about our submarines, not simply how (and if) we can build them, but how we train with the boats and the sea and seabed areas where we train.
That means the approaches to and seas around the South Australian shipbuilding facilities at Osborne will be a top Chinese intelligence priority, as well as the seas around the navy base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia.
In September 2023, the Australian government announced a contract for $328m had just been let to the L3 Harris Technology company to build a Maritime Underwater Tracking Range near HMAS Stirling.
Then defence minister Linda Reynolds described the project in January 2021 as building a “three-dimensional laboratory”. The system is probably not complete, but it is intended to be an “integrated undersea surveillance network”.
Even Tony Burke might have an intuition that such a facility could be of interest to Chinese intelligence. That’s where the Tan Suo Yi Hao will be heading next. But far beyond learning what it can about our rather limited underwater training ranges, the Chinese simply want to know everything they can about the seabed and hydrographic conditions around our military and civil ports.
Labor has “decommissioned” – that is, taken out of service – the navy’s last two mine-hunting ships. HMAS Huon was retired on May 30 last year and HMAS Gascoyne on December 5.
Our ability to hunt sea mines has effectively been reduced to zero. This has happened because Defence has been forced to make “savings” by cutting the capacities of the current force to pay for a fantasy force being planned for the late 2030s.
Of course, our friends in China understand that point. The PLA navy’s recent circumnavigation of the continent, and now the “research” voyage of the Tan Suo Yi Hao, is a blunt message that Xi has “handsome boy” Anthony Albanese in an uncomfortably exposed position. The government decision to ask Border Force to (in some unexplained way) track the Tan Suo Yi Hao is a pathetically inadequate response.
Border Force is a highly capable organisation, excellent at what it does, but it does not have the electronic and other capabilities necessary to understand what the Chinese ship will be doing underwater.
My suggestion would be that the government should direct the air force to fly P8 maritime surveillance aircraft around the Chinese ship.
We should drop a few sonar buoys in the vicinity to see what the Tan Suo Yi Hao is up to beneath the surface. The mere possibility of doing that will constrain Chinese behaviour.
As always with China and its military forces, if one lets them, they will take every opportunity to advance their interests. Had the Albanese government made a more muscular response to the PLA navy “flotilla” deployment a few weeks ago – by putting some ships and aircraft in the vicinity of the taskforce – the Chinese might well have concluded the Tan Suo Yi Hao could come home by the shortest route.
But no. Appeasement always leads to the aggressor making further predations against the passive.
The US has as much interest in this story as Australia and China. US agencies will be watching the “research” ship’s journey, and they will question the implications for the security of their submarines and the level of protection we can give their military technology.
China is out to steal as much defence intellectual property as it can. Beijing’s J-20 fighter aircraft includes many design features taken from the Americans.
On submarines, however, the US maintains a significant technological advantage over China. Protecting this becomes a top US priority.
For AUKUS to work, the US must have a high level of confidence that Australia has the means and intellectual toughness to protect the technology. Our half-baked defence of our sea approaches will be noted in Washington.
Because of the election we are now in a caretaker period, meaning the government should fully consult the opposition on any significant policy decisions.
The opposition has a right to ask for briefings from officials on, for example in this case, options for protecting our security interests against Chinese maritime intelligence gathering.
In my view, the opposition should ask for such a briefing, if only to force Albanese and his comatose Defence Minister Richard Marles to do the same thing.
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