Why defending Australia is not ‘immoral’

Australian Defence Force soldiers training in northern Australia.

One could make a persuasive case that the Albanese government is talking up AUKUS while dismantling the ADF as a credible defence force. Greg Sheridan, in these pages, and former chief of army Peter Leahy, have been making such a case. But how should one respond to an argument that we should not defend the country at all, if it was invaded by China, or some other hypothetical enemy?

That’s precisely the position enunciated by the voluble “revolutionary socialist”, Guy Rundle, who will be well known to any inner-city would-be intellectual who reads little magazines such as Arena or follows the fulminations of Crikey. This was drawn to my attention by estimable young activist Drew Pavlou, and it quite blew my proverbial socks off.

Rundle considers this country to have been founded in extermination, characterised by racism, subordinated by the US and “arrogant” in its relations with the rest of Asia. Yet it has provided him with liberties and opportunities denied to dissidents in countries he sees as leading the global “rebellion” against American-led “settler colonialism”. Go figure.

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Rundle was right about the way Australia has been run by our “ruling class” for two centuries. Would it follow, even so, that we should not defend it against invasion by a hostile dictatorial power? How is that “revolutionary”?

Crikey! One wonders what he thinks of the fact that when, in 1937, Japan invaded Nationalist China, with its many inequities and injustices, the communists insisted on national defence. Not that they contributed much to it.

Stalin, having sided with Hitler in 1939, when faced with a gigantic Nazi invasion in 1941, called upon all citizens of the Soviet Union (and communists worldwide) to rally to the defence of his totalitarian polity. Millions did rally, for the sake of their country. They thought it worth defending. Should they have?

Rundle has actually written that the Australian left is morally bound to question whether Australia should be defended at all, if invaded – which may be considered unlikely in present circumstances. He has offered two grounds for this extraordinary stance. First, he insists we are a colonial settler society that, therefore, has no right to exist in the first place. Second, that if China (he says “East Asia” which is either an Orwellian throwaway or plain incoherent) invades this continent, resistance would be “bloodily futile” and, therefore, should not be attempted. One wonders whether he has ever studied the Winter War of November 1939 to March 1940, in which Finland defended itself heroically against Soviet invasion. Should we do less, if invaded by Xi Jinping’s China, in the scenario Rundle himself evokes?

A woman holds up cards featuring (from L to R) Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, Nicolae Ceausescu and Adolf Hitler.

Apparently not. Indeed, he goes on to assert that we dare not contemplate such a national defence (with or without allies) since we “do not want to be reminded that the one war for national survival on our own soil was fought against whites, not by them”.

He plainly hasn’t the least idea of how wave after wave of migrating and conquering peoples have colonised the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the Americas over at least five millennia, since the Neolithic. As Walter Sellar and Robert Yeatman put it, in their delightful parody of British history, 1066 and All That (1930), history consists chiefly of such waves.

Rundle, supposedly a humorist, waves away such realism with the obtuse observation that the Australia “that would be ended by such an event was begun with, for someone else, exactly that sort of catastrophe”. Truly? So we should not resist such catastrophe? Let’s discuss the Norman Conquest, then, shall we? Or the invasions of Britain by Angles and Saxons and then Vikings and Danes.

Or its earlier conquest by the Romans and their centuries of occupation – with all its roads, cities, markets, theatres, schools and commerce. That, of course, inevitably prompts a Monty Python moment about what the Romans “have ever done for us”.

But that is surely apropos. The notion, which Rundle peddles assiduously, that Australia since British settlement, has been a kind of racist and vacuous non-culture that ought, in good conscience, fold up its tents in shame (if it can’t become a radical socialist “utopia”) is flatly at odds with the political, economic and social achievements of this country.

Rundle published those views a few years ago, in an anti-Scott Morrison tirade. But he is still at it. in an editorial published in the latest issue of Arena, he proclaims what he describes as “The Responsibilities of the New Intellectuals” – think “Queers for Palestine”. He has neither evolved nor repented. Worse still, his verbiage is like a caricature of Theodor Adorno or Walter Benjamin. It’s eye-glazing stuff. If you’re determined to explore his way of looking at the world, in the generosity of your heart, there’s “Rundle in a Bundle”, his 2021 collection of essays, Between the Last Oasis and the Next Mirage: Writings on Australia, published, alas, by Melbourne University Press (as it used to be called).

It’s clear that opinions such as Rundle’s feed the beast that is the “left”. His suggestion that they probably should not defend Australia at all, if invaded, would be treason but for the fact that such an invasion is highly unlikely. But Australia needs defending from within against such nihilistic ratbaggery. That’s increasingly clear. It is, emphatically, worth defending, against either betrayal or invasion. Yes, Prime Minister?

Paul Monk is a former senior defence intelligence analyst. He is the author of The West in a Nutshell (2009).