US forces, bases, weapons, missiles, spies, ships and plans get the nod
It could mean Australia loses it’s strategic voice, in a setback for the country.
At recent AUSMIN talks, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced a ‘joint missile manufacturing effort’ with US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin. Marles proudly remarked it would be “hugely significant” for the industrial bases of both countries to manufacture and export missiles to the US: a move that further integrates Australia into US war planning with China. In a year where defence seems to have been the main focus of this government, these announcements were starting to strain the public opinion when compounded with the B52 and Marine bases, the potential nuclear submarine pens and the radioactive waste dumps on our shores, leading the public to question why a Labor government meant to address cost of living and climate seemed to be going in double-or-nothing on AUKUS instead.
While Marles’ AUSMIN announcement began to ripple through the electorate, the government gave us the weekend to digest the highly consequential news before revealing on Monday that they had also agreed to allow American military analysts to work at the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) in Canberra. This is an unprecedented move to allow foreign agents into the centre of our strategic decision-making, sending alarm through an Australian population, that still proudly values its independence and sovereign, and looks to these recent developments as tantamount to handing them away.
Marles’ announcements came at a time that had seen some of the most US-centric activity on the Australian mainland since US General Douglas Macarthur commanded a base of operations here over seventy years ago. Joint military exercises were officially underway, AUSMIN talks had rolled out, and the US commissioned one of its Littoral combat ships (LCS) called ‘USS Canberra’ in Sydney Harbour.
In the photo, it is almost like Kevin Rudd is standing conciliatory, staring blankly through the star-spangled kangaroo being unfoiled on the deck of the USS Canberra, at another joint-ceremony marking the rapid and continuing assimilation of Australian strategic entanglement with the United States under this government. The Littoral ship marks a new vision of US maritime projection, away from the warships of deep blue water fleets that acted as stewards of the global seas, to fast moving manoeuvrable ships designed for cruising up and down foreign coastlines deploying anti-anti-access/area denial capabilities and taking out submarines.
The LCS was imagined in the early 00s as a part of a concept to contain China in a potential maritime struggle in Asian waters, but the LCS program has been littered with problems, from its defective propulsion systems, to structurally defective and overcomplex design flaws that have hampered its effectiveness and reliability. Now, our government has given up the keys of our entire fleet of warships to be reviewed by a private consultant who was a former US Admiral, there have been many suggestions that Australia adopts the troubled American made design, and it may be easy to guess that the recommendations of the Warship review could come back suggesting the Royal Australian Navy acquire some of them.
As all of these consequentially significant and apparently unbreakable commitments were being made at AUSMIN, and as the foreign warships were being unprecedentedly baptised in our sovereign waters combined with large scale military training exercises playing out on our island continent, the meat and potatoes of the material aspects of AUKUS (the actual submarines) were looking rather grim back in Washington. Twenty-three Republican senators had written to US President Joe Biden to oppose AUKUS under its current domestic production capability, highlighting the dwindling submarine fleet and deteriorating domestic naval production capability as rationale for opposing the arrangement unless funding to the submarines was doubled. This came as the same senate voted to mandate that 100% of components for all Navy ships be manufactured in the U.S. by 2033, putting into doubt the 20,000 jobs Albanese so proudly announced shortly after announcing his $400 billion version of AUKUS wearing aviators in San Diego a few months into his job with his P-Plates still on.
There is an important case for defending Australia, and a careful consideration of the rise of China as a superpower in the region. There is a substantial but barely aired analysis coming from the rational thinkers still viewing Australian strategic planning through a tinted lens of sovereignty and independent strategic creativity. They speak of porcupine (echidna) strategies and defending Australia through some form of armed neutrality, and with the half trillion dollar figures being bandied around for a submarine deal and the billions more from a government happy to spend up on the military, for those prices, there could be very well be a possibility of achieving it. But those voices are drowned out by the think-tank hive mind messengers of militarism that lurch the discussion towards the direction that suits the benefactors and sponsors of their places of employment: the transnational military industrial complex, the interests of foreign powers who work with them, and the careerist politicians in Australia who outsource our strategic future to them both.
The Albanese government was elected with the lowest two-party preferred vote in Labor’s history, campaigning on how they were going to be a people-facing government prepared to do the hard work that years of Coalition government neglected to do. Instead, what the people got was a Washington-facing government out of its depth and devoid of independent ideas, partial to accommodating the shortened time frames and hasty American premonitions for war, and seemingly willing to put anything on the table, including our strategic independence. The major party-political alternative has proven eager and almost zealous in its preparedness to redefine our sovereignty, and many of us wondered how they could be so certain after only a year in government, after a decade making up the other half of the poorest decade of major party parliamentary exchange since Federation.
Blinken and Austin fly in on a tight schedule, as they have done quite regularly under this administration. And without much time for chit chat, they leave the AUSMIN talks after heading to a Matilda’s game and signing agreements with an obsequious inexperienced Labor government that will change Australia’s strategic destiny forever, and suddenly have us building them missiles for what seems like a forward-facing war with China and housing US spies within the sovereign decision-making centres at our nations defence. Not bad for a few days’ work.
Add it to the B52s at Tindall, the submarine pens and marine bases under construction, the Five Eyes infrastructure across the continent, the constant and regular (and unnecessary) overcommitments and overstatements of solidarity with a crumbling superpower, and the carbon copy foreign policy – Albanese government has encouraged a newly defined US alliance in ways the public are not comfortable, cheapening the concept and value of being a proud nation with proud borders in a post Westphalian world.
Maybe in Canberra they never left the empire, and more importantly, they never left the state of mind that sees them justify living like vassals under a foreign dominion and limits their ability to conceptualise living as a proud independent entity. While the ink was fresh on the AUSMIN agreements, and another chunk of our strategic agency was diminished, despite it all, the American attendees didn’t sign the item calling for the release oof Julian Assange, telling us to our face in our own country that the one thing we have asked for is not going to happen. Not while they keep getting what they want so easily.
Throughout a troubled past, governments couldn’t grasp with our past or embrace our geographical identity in the region and couldn’t reconcile with the people whose culture breathes in this impressive continent. Ceding sovereignty to a foreign power does not contrast well with the campaign of the Voice, nor reflect the change that the electorate voted for, and any skerrick of progressive policy this party still claims to possess is automatically jeopardised by its embrace of militarism as a national priority.
Barely over eighteen months since AUKUS was clumsily announced by Scomo and the vague speculations about the costs were not communicated before the election, after it had been humiliatingly left out of negotiations by his government, Labor fresh out of a decade of opposition has hyper-accelerated something that Australians don’t generally like too much. War and militarism. If the government wants to shill for the Aussie jobs of potential weapons manufacturing industries making weapons on contract for the biggest military in the world, it may do so at the expense of losing its political capital and selling us out to a foreign power. Because, from the looks of things in the public, that’s how a lot of us see it.
These people are insane. I don't know where it came from, were they all picked up and cultivated by the CIA from student politics Uni days? How can they sell our arses so cheaply?
once again we've flicked the switch to vaudeville.