Australia’s strategic posture and the defence ambitions designed to serve it has become a more coherent project now that Defence Minister Richard Marles has powerfully acknowledged that China’s ever expanding war machine poses the greatest risk to Australia and the region’s instability.
The risk is not invasion of the continent per se. It is the disruption of the sea routes, sea lines of communication and the stability of the region that pose the greatest strategic threat.
Yet Marles admitted that Australia’s continental geography would become an issue in the event of a US-China conflict.
“It’s a big thing to say,” says Marles, claiming it is an acknowledgment that hasn’t been made by an Australian government for decades.
“Unquestionably, (China’s military build-up) is shaping the region we live and is at the heart of the complex strategic circumstances we face.
“And it is doing so without strategic reassurance … to its neighbours and the world.”
Marles’s admission to the Defending Australia summit is the most direct he has been about the honest nature of the threat, acknowledging the need to also convey this threat to the public.
But until this moment, discussion of the strategic threat under Labor has been one strangled by political timidity and largely absent from Anthony Albanese’s conversation with the nation.
Anthony Albanese likes to remind us that the world is facing the most precarious time since the 1930s.
This is obvious to anyone. And it is accelerating.
But what this means for Australia’s national security, and indeed the US-Australia alliance, has been made far from clear.
And it isn’t the first time a contemporary Australian leader has made comparisons to a pre-war period of instability at all, or the threat of China as Marles suggests.
Scott Morrison made this first reference to the 2030s in a speech early in his prime ministership. Yet here we are, still locked in tortured debate over funding for capability and uncertainty over delivery and the precise nature of the threat.
What is clear is the obvious historical parallel: Australia was equally ill-equipped and equally ill-prepared for war back then as it is now.
As historian Geoffrey Blainey reminds us, when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, igniting a global war, “Australia was not ready”.
“It was less prepared than it was in 1914 when its navy was remarkably strong for such a small nation,” Blainey wrote in his short history of Australia.
The problem was and remains an apparent institutionalised complacency.
“For years the public disliked heavier spending on defence because that would mean higher taxes and fewer social services,” Blainey wrote.
Joseph Lyons, prime minister in the years leading up to World War II, came late to the sense that war was coming and Labor’s John Curtin, prime minister during the war years after being sworn in in 1941, was surrounded by isolationists.
At least Curtin acknowledged the need for air power and eventually did something about it.
We once again have the warning signs flashing red – in the Middle East, in Europe and in the Pacific with China’s military spending which can only be interpreted as preparation for potential war. The question is whether Australia once again has come too late to the realisation.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas made the point that the biggest challenge is ourselves; that we take our safety for granted, with evidence of complacency and apathy in the electorate.
“We don’t talk about it enough,” he told the summit.
“Forces that precipitate large political events can emerge in an instant … however, hindsight reveals that the upheaval has been percolating for years, if not decades.”
He says the singular event that marked the new global disruption was June 23, 2016, when the UK voted to exit Europe, which provided a destabilising element across Western democracies.
Michael Green – chief executive officer of the United States Studies Centre – agreed with the approximate timing of the precursor for the great disruption but said it was two years earlier in 2014 with the rise of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Former Home Affairs secretary and defence official Mike Pezzullo agreed that the threats hadn’t been discussed sufficiently with the Australian people.
Marles avoided the obvious question, which is what consequences there would be for the integration of Australian forces with the US in any conflict over Taiwan … if it were to come to conflict.
Former defence boss Dennis Richardson was unequivocal about this. Australia would be involved.
The problem with the lack of discussion about this reality goes to Blayney’s point about the pre-war period in the 1930s about a lack of electoral appetite for defence spending or even an appreciation that war was coming.
Chief of Navy Mark Hammond articulated the significance of the AUKUS agreement and said there needed to be transparency about the threats emerging and the consequences of conflict.
“We need to assure our access to the sea; if you can’t guarantee access to the sea, it’s all over,” he said.
Chief of the Defence Force David Johnston said the threats were not limited in the Indo-Pacific to China and Taiwan and pointed to the Korean peninsula and Pakistan and India.
But he said as China sought to expand its blue water fleet, the more likely it became that it would seek to demonstrate its capability. This was code for warning that Australians can expect a greater and regular presence of Chinese fleets off the coast of Australia.
He repeated the reminder that Australians might have to get used to the idea of having the capability of launching missile defence or attack from the “homeland”, with the proliferation of long-range weapons.
It’s all sobering stuff.
Which puts AUKUS in a clearer and more acute context.
If defence is largely deterrence, the only way to do that is with the long-range nuclear submarine capability.
The hysteria over the Pentagon review of AUKUS was considered by most at the summit to be an over-reaction. There was confidence it was not in peril.
Marles, unsurprisingly, argued that Labor was spending more on defence than any other peacetime period in its history and couldn’t resist partisan references to the Coalition’s time in government.
But most of the increase is being sucked up by AUKUS and the new frigates.
And Pezzullo made the point that the 2020 review by the Morrison government had a 20-year horizon, which Labor scrapped. And this included missile defence and interception.
The summit forced a discussion that should have been had before the 2025 election but one that Labor dared not have. As Pezzullo has suggested, Labor was too alarmed by the prospect of agitating the more than one million voters who identify as Chinese Australians.
Just as cogent is the point that for Australia to get close to what it needs to defend the nation, based on Marles’s strategic analysis, it needs to increase the spending envelope on what Professor Ian Langford described as “fight tonight” capabilities as well as the longer-term AUKUS submarines.
The reality is that the defence question raises hard choices for the government.
Richardson says if you look at the defence strategic review conducted by Labor, to fully fund it would take spending to beyond 3 per cent of GDP. That would get close to Donald Trump’s demands of the US allies.
The question comes back to the obvious conflict with Albanese’s domestic political agenda.
The fragility of the budget as it stands would mean Albanese and his Treasurer would have to find savings elsewhere.
There is little prospect of this with a budget in deficit for a decade and beyond and the promises of social spending underpinning Labor’s domestic mission.
But at some point Albanese will be forced to make the choice between the strategic need and the political primacy if he is to act in the national interest.
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