How subs deal freezes Tassie’s polar profits
Hope springs eternal in the business breast and Fader and friends might now be better advised to pursue business with our allies rather than our ideological opponents, writes Charles Wooley
Opinion
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The AUKUS raucous about Australian nuclear submarines has torpedoed the hopes of certain Hobart businessmen who have for some time been enthusiastic about the profit to be made supplying and servicing Chinese ships on the Antarctic route.
The Tasmanian Polar Network is a consortium of at least 70 businesses hoping to market goods and services to Antarctic and Southern Ocean operators, especially China.
Last year Richard Fader the TPN chairman told The Australian newspaper that talks were underway for an extended agreement with the Chinese. “China is active in the Antarctic. They are good business for the state. They are as far as we can tell at this stage complying with the Antarctic Treaty system,” Mr Fader optimistically said.
Nice work if Mr Fader can get it but TPN’s nautical business plans have probably been scuppered by the AUKUS deal to supply Australia with nuclear submarines.
China is now extremely angry and won’t be buying. Still, hope springs eternal in the business breast and Fader and friends might now be better advised to pursue business with our allies rather than our ideological opponents.
Don’t think a Tasmanian nuclear submarine base is out of the question. If the British experience is anything to go by you stick such things up in Scotland and well away from the major population centres .
And if Tasmanian history is anything to go by, something very similar almost happened once before. Back in the eighties at the height of the Cold War a Tasmanian Labor Premier, Doug Lowe, had the brilliant idea to build a dry dock in Hobart for the Russians: for their Antarctic fleet and their Southern Ocean fishing vessels.
The Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser must have been having one of his celebrated ‘trouser moments’ and somehow let the proposal slip through.
Lowe and a Tasmania delegation went off to Russia to sign a deal but back home Denison MHR Michael Hodgman and Robin Gray, the Liberal opposition leader, warned of ‘Communist Danger’ and Fraser promptly withdrew permission.
Back then it was Lowe, not Fraser, who was caught with his pants down.
I know you thought flogging off Tasmania to a totalitarian country was a recent phenomenon.
How soon we all forget.
When the history of our nation’s international role in early 21st century powerplay is written (possibly after the next world war) Thursday 16 September 2021 will be remembered as the day ScoMo did a Julius Caesar and ‘crossed the Rubicon’. Dramatically the Australian PM tore up the ill-fated deal with France and signed a new pact with old friends, the United States and the United Kingdom (AUKUS), to acquire nuclear powered submarines.
ScoMo is no Julius Caesar and for that we can be thankful, though cartoonists would welcome the toga as a pleasant change from the Hawaiian shirt.
The Rubicon river was Rome’s northern border and in 49 BC Caesar ignored orders from the Senate and crossed the Rubicon with his army. It was a pivotal moment in history. Julius Caesar became the dictator of Imperial Rome and left us with the phrase, ‘crossing the Rubicon’ to describe a historical point of no return.
This week such a point was reached in Australia and in our region, where things might never be the same.
The Chinese foreign policy authority Professor Victor Gao represents an outfit called the Centre for China and Globalisation and is often seen to speak for the CCP on your ABC.
Despite being told our proposed nuclear propelled subs will not be nuclear armed, Gao told journalist Stan Grant on the ‘China Tonight’ programme that a line had been crossed,
“Armed with nuclear submarines Australia itself will be a target for nuclear attacks,” the Professor threatened.
Nonplussed, Grant asked, “Australia will be a target for nuclear attacks, from whom?”
Enigmatically the ‘wolf warrior’ replied, “You do not need to know.”
Clearly, we had been told.
The ‘China Tonight’ show follows Four Corners and Media Watch which might explain, sadly, how such an important interview went largely unreported by the mainstream media.
No one was still watching.
Except me. To the annoyance of everyone in my house, I am a news junkie, and indiscriminately consume all the electronic fodder.
Stoically and even-handedly, I withstand patronising lectures from PC leftists at the ABC while being ranted at from the right by Paul Murray and Alan Jones on Sky.
It’s cold and lonely work but someone must do it. Though as a journalist I wish there was a news outlet that reported from the sensible middle ground.
But when it comes to current affairs broadcasting in Australia it seems that everywhere, committed inmates are running the asylum.
No wonder it’s hard to work out what’s really going on in the world.
Sun Tzu the legendary and much revered father of Chinese military strategy, famously advised, “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
The Chinese showed much alarm when Australia signed up for mega-millions of bucks for submarine bang sometime in the remote future. Their agitation looked disarmingly weak (perhaps as prescribed by Sun Tzu) given that the CCP has armed China to the teeth with nuclear weapons.
But seen another way, no one is strong in the face of an all-out nuclear exchange. Given the CCP obsession with order and control, the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max must be so much less attractive to the Chinese than it might be for many Americans who already live there.
To the Chinese government it must seem unlikely that Australia, with about forty percent of the world’s uranium, while happily exporting it to other countries, will continue to deny itself the technology.
That seems unlikely to me as well.
ScoMo’s crossing of the Rubicon this week was the thin end of a wedge which will see Australia renting either American or British nuclear submarines while we wait decades for our own to be built. And if things get nasty, over Taiwan for instance, it doesn’t take too much imagination (especially if you distrust the Anglosphere) to see conventional missiles being one day swapped for nuclear weapons.
As the Australian government agonises about going to Glasgow and the unlikelihood of us ever achieving the required carbon emission targets, the nuclear power lobby has been discreetly working behind the scenes promoting the idea of a power source that produces no C02.
And the whole world knows when you have nuclear technology, you have the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.
That is a giant leap and that’s not how these things happen. They happen gradually, step by step.
And the first step was taken last week when ScoMo waded into the radio-active waters of the Rubicon.
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