Australians should take very seriously our inadequate response to a Chinese naval taskforce and research vessel circumnavigating the Australian coast.
China is, of course, making a very strident point. That it has force projection capability into our own neighbourhood, and that is a warning to us. Should we decide to trigger our alliance relationship with the United States in the event of conflict with China watch out!
The fact that we have shown hesitancy and technical inadequacy in responding to this challenge should be a dire warning to our candidates in this election campaign. They should be taking seriously their primary responsibility to defend the nation and its interests. It’s too easy for the political class to think that our defence force would never be called on except to assist with natural disasters in the Pacific or Southeast Asia.
Yet what would Australia do if China imposed a blockade on Taiwan and the US Navy went to the support of Taiwan endeavouring to break the blockade? This, after all, is a real-life scenario: it could happen. It has been assumed by policy planners and commentators that if the United States went to the aid of Taiwan, Japan would automatically support the United States. That is a fair assumption. But in this difficult scenario, what would the Australian parliament and government want to do?
I think we know what the Greens, the Gucci greens – as Peta Credlin calls the teals – and Labor’s left would want to do. They would want to do nothing. Their argument would be that Trump has imposed a 10 per cent tariff on Australia so why would we want to help America? They will use the tariff issue to argue the ANZUS alliance is anachronistic. So let’s think this through. Would they be relaxed about China seizing democratic Taiwan and in doing so becoming the metropolitan power of the Asia-Pacific region? Would they feel okay that a communist dictatorship in Beijing demanded our region pay tribute to it and steer our and our neighbours’ economic policies to the benefit of China and its regime?
Donald Trump wants to pivot US security policy away from Europe towards what he sees as the China threat, not retreat into isolation. He does value allies – particularly Japan and Australia – and we need America to work with us to balance power in the region. That means protecting Taiwan and, above all, protecting an open and free Asia-Pacific region.
The trouble with the more moderate and freedom-loving political class in Australia is that it has made a very poor effort of building up our defence force over the last 15 or so years. Back in 2009, the Rudd government produced a defence white paper and committed to buying Tomahawk cruise missiles, investing in ballistic missile defence systems and replacing not just our Anzac-class frigates and the Collins-class submarines but, importantly, our ageing fleet of minesweepers.
Plenty more was promised in that white paper, some of which has materialised and much of which has not. We are nowhere near replacing our Collins-class submarines, the Anzac-class frigate replacement program is delayed, we still haven’t purchased the Tomahawk missiles, we have no ballistic missile defence system, and we only have two elderly minesweepers left, which are about to be decommissioned.
In recent years, a substantial proportion of the defence budget has been diverted to the AUKUS submarine project. It’s hard to put a specific figure on this but defence sources tell me something like $100bn of the defence budget has so far been diverted from acquisition programs to AUKUS.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favour of Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines. But they are very expensive and will require a substantial increase in the defence budget if we are to maintain defence capability while we introduce – at least in a short term – the Virginia-class submarines. What’s now happened is the non-AUKUS defence budget has substantially declined.
So back to the dangerous risk of a war over Taiwan. If we joined with our friends and allies – the Americans and the Japanese – to help defend Taiwan, what would China do about us? Well, the naval task force that recently circumnavigated Australia should give us a hint. It was meant to. Included in that taskforce was China’s most modern guided missile cruiser, which is armed with strike weapons known as Long Sword.
In the event of war, China could send aggressive task forces down to Australia and strike domestic targets with ship-borne missiles. The targets could include defence establishments, power stations and data centres. China could use its enhanced taskforces to blockade our ports and possibly even mine the access to those ports.
What would we do about it?
We might be able to put two or even three Collins-class submarines to sea to try to attack the Chinese taskforces. We could fire missiles at their ships although they may be able to shoot those missiles down. But the truth is, we would be really struggling to destroy the taskforces. We wouldn’t be able to de-mine our harbours because we don’t have minesweepers, and we wouldn’t be able to defend sensitive targets with anti-ballistic missile defence systems because we don’t have them.
Then there is our essential trade. If the Chinese navy were able to blockade or even partially blockade our ports, how would we import everything from oil to essential medicines? We don’t even have a merchant shipping fleet any more. In times past the government could requisition merchant ships for essential trade but that’s not an option anymore.
Instead of properly funding our defence force to deal with any range of contingencies, and thereby being able to defend our country and to contribute to the security of the Indo-Pacific region, our governments have been wasting money on fatuous windmills and solar panels that will not make one jot of difference to the climate. It would have to be the most extravagant and feckless example of public policy I have seen in my lifetime.
There is still nearly four weeks to go in the election campaign so hopefully these issues will be addressed with a degree of urgency we haven’t seen in recent times. Maybe we will be grateful to Xi Jinping for sending his task force around Australia last month to shake us out of our complacency.
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