Australia, and my Party too, must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and ‘telling truth to power’. Our blind adoption of irrational policies, supine and unquestioning acquiescence to anything the United States proposes must end. Our species, facing an existential threat to civilisation from climate change, Continue reading »
Defence and Security
Australia has been paying insiders of the US war machine for consultation on how to run the nation’s military, a massive conflict of interest given that Washington has been grooming Australia for a role in its war agendas against China. In an article titled “Retired US admirals charging Australian taxpayers thousands of dollars per day Continue reading »
The Albanese government’s Defence Strategic Review is marred from the outset by its bald assertion that China’s military build-up is the largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War. China’s military spending is dwarfed by that of the US. According to the authoritative Peterson Institute, US military spending Continue reading »
The Albanese government wouldn’t be able buy nuclear attack submarines from the US without agreeing to let them keep performing all their core roles in our region. One key role is to follow Chinese nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines to be in a position to sink them if a US president wants to launch a nuclear Continue reading »
The kind of strategic study Australia needs, to preside over this kind of defence staff college scribble, is one which gives a sense of our civil society’s capacities, needs, aspirations — and our neighbourhood. The Flippingbook is an entirely inappropriate, narrow minded, chauvinistic, militaristic thing that belongs in a country practising for fascism, the submergence Continue reading »
The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted. Sydney Morning Herald’s Matthew Knott, most well-known for being told by former prime minister Paul Keating to “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism” over his role in Nine Continue reading »
‘I’m proud of what we did in less than 24 hours.’ That was Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s 4 March comment this year on the time he took back in 2021 to decide on supporting the then Liberal government’s startling AUKUS agreement. ‘Incompetent’, exclaimed former Prime Minister Paul Keating at the National Press Club the Continue reading »
Australia has several very viable options for not buying AUKUS nuclear submarines. All of them are much cheaper in the medium to short term and vastly cheaper and much less political in the long term. I have written before about alternatives to buying and operating nuclear submarines by Australia. The main disadvantages of nuclear submarines Continue reading »
Despite all the determined, and well-funded, efforts of Greg Sheridan, his mates at ASPI and in the media to beat the war drums and the legal shenanigans around the role of the Governor General in declaring war, it is by no means inevitable that Australia will go to war against China. There is opposition at Continue reading »
Promising to double its “defence” expenditure over the coming five-year period and placing huge orders for US military equipment to help it to do so, the sometime “peace state” of Japan is moving into high gear on militarisation. The transformation is plainest in the case of its Southwestern islands that stretch over 1,300 kms from Continue reading »