Australia is a sovereign continent not for Richard Marles to gift away

The Defence Minister’s statement amounts to nothing more than a careless betrayal of the country’s policy agency and independence in its ability to make decisions in its own national interest.

Paul Keating

Defence Minister Richard Marles has betrayed the country’s policy agency and independence, Paul Keating says.

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6 hours ago.

Updated 4 hours ago

Monday’s statement by Defence Minister Richard Marles that Australia’s geography and continent would be crucial to any United States prosecution of a war against China will go down as a dark moment in Australia’s history.

A moment when an Australian Labor government intellectually ceded Australia to the United States as a platform for the US and by implication, Australia, for military engagement against the Chinese state in response to a threat China is alleged to be making.

And ceding the continent to the United States that is devoid of an electoral authority – a month after an election where the government had the opportunity – but declined to make explicit – its strategic intentions and policies.

Declined to let the public, the Australian community, be party to its strategic thinking and intent. Instead, as Defence Minister Richard Marles reveals his and the government’s fatalist thinking at a sleazy conference, run exclusively by The Australian newspaper – “sleazy”, in that guests invited to the conference were chosen and assembled according to the paper’s view of their collective propensity to subjugate Australia’s interests to those of the United States.

And without one solid or reliable word as to the “threat” or nature of the threat China is supposedly making to both Australia and to the region.

The fact is, China has not threatened Australia militarily nor indeed has it threatened the United States. And it has no intention of so threatening. Every person attending “The Australian” conference knew this to be so.

China’s singular crime is to have built an economy larger than the United States, with industrial breadth and depth that the United States not only does not possess but cannot hope to emulate.

Paul Keating delivers a keynote speech at the Wharton Global Forum in Sydney, March 2018. Picture: John Feder.

This is the affront which the United States cannot bear, because nowhere in the US playbook is there a chapter articulating the precipitous decline in US industrial strength or in US strategic primacy. Hence now, the US is running about trying to sweep gullible allies into its declining and failing pitch.

Yet, it believes there is always a mug who will buy its venal view of affairs. And in Australia, the United States is not disappointed. The Australian Labor Party, at its grassroots, will not support Australia being dragged into a war with and by the United States over Taiwan. And the large majority of new members of the parliamentary Labor Party will not find community support for such a course of action. This whole problem has arisen owing to Australia agreeing to host military assets on Australian soil.

This began with Julia Gillard and Stephen Smith agreeing to base rotational US troops in Darwin during Barack Obama’s “pivot” moment in the Australian parliament in 2011.

This inauspicious action was locked down further by Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott with the Force Posture Agreement of 2014 providing US access to Australian military facilities as well as agreement as to the types of activities US forces may conduct on and from Australian soil, including the interoperability of each other’s forces.

Yet built upon this agreement is the whole AUKUS fantasy, designed to lock Australia further into US naval operations.

Monday’s statement by Richard Marles amounts to nothing more than a careless betrayal of the country’s policy agency and independence in its ability to make decisions in its own national interest and not in the interest or interests of another country.

Paul Keating was prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996.