If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding: in an imperfectly governed world, spheres of influence in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. This gap is to Continue reading »
Defence and Security
Subordination of the military to the civil power in a democracy is non-negotiable, but is often taken for granted. More democracies falter because of a breakdown of civil-military relations than through external subversion or foreign aggression. The near monopoly over the use of lethal force that military organisations hold imposes an obligation on governments to Continue reading »
Penny Wong has inherited huge challenges in her role as Foreign Minister. She is surrounded by alpha males controlling the defence and security debate, convinced that only deadly military weapons can secure a safe future for Australia. She heads a department historically seen as weak and irrelevant by too many men in power. They dismiss Continue reading »
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 »
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 »