Turnbull’s ‘security’ forum more about personal vendettas
Malcolm Turnbull has chosen 100 people, whom he describes as “leading’” defence and foreign policy thinkers, to participate in a forum at the National Press Club on Monday.
The “Sovereignty and Security Forum” is necessary, Turnbull says, because “the second Trump administration is challenging and overturning assumptions about the international order, which compels close allies to re-examine the fundamentals of their foreign and defence policies”. This includes ANZUS and the AUKUS submarine pact.
Unless we include half the first-year cadets at our tri-service military academy it’s doubtful we’d have anywhere close to 100 experts in these fields. But even so, there’s bound to be quite a few China apologists at the forum. Some may be tempted to cite an article that’s just been published by an Australian think tank by ANU academic Edward Chan.
He argues that Australia should be looking for opportunities to collaborate with China on maritime security and ocean-related issues in areas such as transnational crime, sea lane safety and climate change. Chan notes that many countries in the region remain open to working with China on these topics, and that by being proactive in dialogue with China we’d enhance our role as a regional maritime state.
Reduced to its foundations, this line suggests that any kind of dialogue is good – if only we can quarantine areas of major disagreement, we can find narrow (though shrinking) areas for productive co-operation.
But how can a state such as Australia, one that helped shape the Law of the Sea treaty in international negotiations over a decade and that abides by key maritime laws, have productive engagement with China?
The People’s Republic of China is a power that’s actively and comprehensively provoking us and breaking ocean laws it’s signed up to. It’s “monstering” other nations to take their maritime territories and land features in their offshore zones. China has ignored international legal outcomes on Law of the Sea rulings. It destroys the maritime environment by building artificial islands in the offshore estates of other countries.
If Turnbull’s forum endorses this approach, it would give a false legitimacy to China’s hollow commitments to international law.
We would enable and encourage continued Chinese state behaviour that’s deeply against our interests. Chinese fishing fleets are brazenly exploiting other states’ fisheries. China does little to police its own boats involved in illegal fishing. It deploys its maritime militias, its heavily armed coastguard, and the PLA Navy in ways that are against Australia’s and other regional states’ interests.
On climate change, China urges us to co-operate as a diversion from Chinese strategic objectives and while it opens new coal-fired power stations. On transnational crime, the PRC is behind most of it in Asia and the Pacific Islands region.
Based on China’s record of conduct, we should have no expectation it will be anything but the most ruthless exploiter of undersea natural resources, so co-operating with it on “blue economy” issues would be similarly misguided.
Most of the problems in regional maritime security have to do with the PRC’s behaviour. Thirty years of empirical evidence suggests it knows exactly what it’s doing. And everyone in the region knows it.
We would put our reputation with friends and allies at serious risk if we won’t defend them against the aggression they are experiencing from what General Romeo Brawner from The Philippines calls “ICAD”: illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive Chinese activity.
A few years ago, a Chinese state media editor said: “Australia is always there, making trouble. It is a bit like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes. Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.”
That comment, among others over the years, should tell Australia everything it needs to know about what the Chinese Communist Party thinks of us. The more recent evidence for such contempt is the Chinese navy’s recent circumnavigation of Australia, including live drills off the Tasman Sea, without so much as a courtesy call.
As far as China is concerned, our role in engaging with it on maritime security is to listen, not speak. That’s something to be borne in mind by those participating in Turnbull’s forum who might suggest dialogue is the solution. Elvis sang, “A little less conversation, a little more action please”. That’s good advice when it comes to pushing back against China’s unwanted and excessive maritime behaviour.
We shall see what Turnbull’s press club forum offers, but it will surely not change the former prime minister’s long-held opposition to AUKUS, and his more recent public negativity about Donald Trump. Neither side of Australian politics will thank Turnbull for picking a fight with Trump at the start of an election campaign.
Does Turnbull think an anti-AUKUS or anti-Trump spray will damage his old political foe, Peter Dutton? I can’t be sure, but I can say that it’s irresponsible to play politics with our US alliance in an election campaign. Trump makes alliance management more complex. The carefully timed intervention from Turnbull is unhelpful, irresponsible and more about his political past than Australia’s alliance future.
Anthony Bergin is a senior fellow at Strategic Analysis Australia.
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