To defend itself, Australia mustn't kowtow to its rivals. Or its allies

Sydney Morning Herald

13-06-2025

Which is why Albanese left Canberra quite untroubled by the prospect of not meeting the US leader at all. And, if a meeting were to occur, Albanese had no intention of grovelling, no basket of delicacies to offer. Even though Trump tells us that he's open to extravagant gifts. When Ramaphosa said to Trump, 'I'm sorry I don't have a plane to give you,' the US president replied: 'I wish you did. I would take it.'
Australia has had an offer on the table in an effort to persuade Trump to exempt the country from the tariffs he has imposed on every other nation and penguin colony (with notable exemptions for Russia, Belarus, North Korea and Cuba).
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'The ball is now in the US court,' Trade Minister Don Farrell told me five weeks ago. 'We have put our proposition to them, and it's open to them if they want to accept it.' It included an offer of setting up a reliable supply chain for critical minerals to help break China's stranglehold. The offer is still in the US court. Albanese is not going to plead.
The Coalition is still demanding that the prime minister insist on an urgent meeting with Trump at any cost. Opposition defence spokesman Angus Taylor on Thursday said that Albanese must do 'whatever is necessary to meet with President Trump … as quickly as possible'.
Maybe the opposition hasn't quite adjusted to the quiet patriotism that Australians feel about this. The country wants its leader to be on his feet dealing with Trump, not his knees. Or maybe the Liberals do get it, and they're trying to set Albanese up to fail.
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In a poll published this week, non-partisan Pew Research found that, among 24 nations, Australia was one of the countries with the greatest distrust of Trump. Seventy-seven per cent of Aussies said they did not trust Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. This was identical with sentiment in Canada, yet Trump hasn't breathed a word about annexing Australia.
The median distrust rating across all 24 countries was around six in 10. Australians have firm views about the US president. We will not reward a lickspittle leader.
Does that mean we want to dump the AUKUS agreement with the US and Britain? From the news coverage this week of Trump's decision to review the deal, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's deeply unpopular. But a separate poll this week revealed that the opposite is true. The Lowy Institute survey poll found that 67 per cent of Australians support acquiring US nuclear-powered submarines, the first and most contentious element of the AUKUS pact. The poll of over 2100 people was conducted in March. When it was first announced, Lowy's poll found support at 70 per cent.
'Over the past four years, the Lowy Institute poll has shown that Australians' support for acquiring nuclear-powered submarines remains strong,' said Lowy's director, Michael Fullilove. The strident anti-AUKUS campaign led by Paul Keating and the Greens has made no real impact.
The Australian electorate is discerning enough to judge Australia's national interests. And to tell the difference between distrust of Donald Trump on the one hand, and, on the other, an agreement between Australia and the country that Trump leads temporarily in order to acquire a national asset. (With Britain, of course, the third participant.)
Australians have firm views about AUKUS. We will not reward a sellout leader. Which leads us to a key point largely overlooked in the week's frenzied coverage.
America is not the point of AUKUS. The reason it exists is not out of love for the US. Or Britain. It came into being because of mutual fear of China.
Beijing has built the world's biggest navy so that it can drive the US out of the Western Pacific and dominate the region. If it dominates Asia and the Pacific, it dominates the majority of the global economy. Which ultimately means it dominates the world. If you don't understand this, you haven't been listening to Xi Jinping. Or taking him seriously.
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Australians understand the country's vulnerability. For years now, seven respondents in 10 have told Lowy's pollsters that they think China will pose a future military threat to Australia.
The experts agree. The doyen of Australian defence strategy, Paul Dibb, says that Australia's navy and air force would not last a week in a confrontation with China. 'A few days' is all it would take for the People's Liberation Army to destroy Australia's forces.
Not that Beijing wants to invade the continent. Australian strategists believe that China can more effectively and efficiently coerce the country by merely deploying some of the 300-plus vessels in its navy to Australia's northern approaches.
Extended live fire drills, for example, would deter commercial shipping. Australia's supply lines, imports and exports, would be interrupted. The broad concept – cutting Australia off from the US and the world – is the same one that Imperial Japan was putting in place in World War II.
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Knowing this vulnerability, an intelligent island continent would put a high priority on submarines to patrol our approaches. Unfortunately, successive Australian governments proved more complacent than intelligent. The six Collins Class submarines were supposed to be entering retirement about now.
Which brings us to the second key point overlooked in the week's sound and fury. Journalists asked Defence Minister Richard Marles what would happen if the Trump administration review were to terminate AUKUS. What, they asked, reasonably enough, is Australia's Plan B? He answered that there was a plan, and we had to make it work.
More pungently, Jennifer Parker of ANU's National Security College wrote in this masthead: 'Calls for a plan B overlook a blunt reality: AUKUS is already Plan C.' Remember Tony Abbott's Japanese subs and Malcolm Turnbull's French subs? Australia is becoming a byword for fecklessness. China's shipyards are producing two nuclear-powered submarines a year. Australia hasn't produced a single submarine since 2001.
It's entirely possible that the Pentagon's AUKUS review, led by Elbridge Colby, complicates the plan. But an Australian with deep and long experience of dealing with Washington predicts that it will not scrap the three-nation treaty: 'I don't think he will recommend kyboshing the AUKUS agreement because, if he did, he'd be effectively ending the alliance. Not formally, but it would fundamentally change the equation.'
Either way, with or without AUKUS, Australia's priority should be to prepare itself to stand on its own. AUKUS was supposed to add a serious new capability but not to be the be-all and end-all of Australian defence.
'Things have dramatically changed,' Paul Dibb tells me. 'With the Chinese navy on our doorstep doing live fire drills and the unreliability of our great ally, we now need to do much more to develop the independent capability to deal with contingencies in the South Pacific and relevant contingencies in the South China Sea, events where the US would have no interest in getting involved.'
Australia needs to be able to stand on its feet, not its knees, in dealing with its ally. It needs to be able to do the same with its rivals.