As a risk analyst who has spent the better part of a decade fighting Chinese Communist Party encroachments, I am today forced to make a concession. Just in case, every Australian should ready an escape route from the possibility of a future CCP-dominated Australia with a hollowed-out democracy, deep corruption and persecution of the divergent.
Two facts are obvious to me. The first is that Australia and its allies have the assets to defeat a Chinese expansion in the South Pacific and throughout the Indo-Pacific.
Second, our management of those assets is the worst I’ve ever seen owing to the broken nature of our politics. It is therefore unclear if we will prevail.
Why are we so bad at fighting for our freedoms? Three reasons.
First, whether it is corruption, cowardice, or greed, the Australian elite is horribly compromised. Our business ranks are dominated by resources firms. They are dependent upon China and have destroyed any political will to tax them properly. Hundreds of billions of dollars derived from China-derived revenues that should be used to defend the continent are instead pissed away to foreign shareholders.
Our political ranks are overrun with career psychopaths that would sell their mothers for power rather than stand up for Australian sovereignty. Over the past few years, they’ve been forced to push away Chinese bribery and fight a trade war. But neither party was either quick or willing to the task. Think Sam Dastayari and Gladys Liu. And both do little more than signal virtue in hard strategic terms. They have done nothing.
Second, our institutions of national management are badly degraded such that the polity is accustomed celebrating failure at every turn:
- Our economy has less complexity than Uganda and ranks around the same as Borat’s homeland of Kazakhstan. This is the widely acclaimed triumph of the services economy over the industrial base.
- Our universities are stupified by the lowest denominator candidates globally on behalf of the migration cartel. This is the widely acclaimed triumph of education exports.
- Our tax system is a world-beating scab grab that ensures rent-seeking is far more profitable than innovation. This is the widely acclaimed excellent economic management.
- Our wealth is tied up entirely in unproductive leveraged houses over productive equity. The ASX is worth a measly $2.5tr versus property $10tr for property. This bezzle is our widely acclaimed riches.
- Our national conversation is riven by brain-numbing culture wars and divisions that have dragged the anchor of basic dialectic and political history. This is our former civil society.
This crumbling heap of leadership is doing literally nothing as China encircles the country. Chris Joye:
Unable to control Australia after decades of unprecedented espionage and propaganda, and having had scant success forcing us to bend the knee following an equally unparalleled, economic, coercion campaign, China is trying to militarily encircle us.
The Chinese Communist Party has sought to lay the groundwork to establish bases, runways, naval ports and close military ties with most countries situated to our north and north-east, including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Tonga, Vanuatu and, farther afield, the tiny nation of Kiribati.
The dark, non-democratic shadow being cast over Australia by a one-party communist dictatorship desperate to cauterise all perceived threats to its existence calls into question the relatively modest “official” defence spending plans in this week’s federal budget.
While defence’s 2.1 per cent share of GDP is an improvement over the tiny 1.6 per cent Australia spent in 2012 – the lowest level since the 1930s – the truth is we need to radically increase our military investments if we are serious about protecting ourselves in the event of major power conflicts. The most pressing, near-term, existential risk is, of course, war over Taiwan.
The budget did not account for Australia’s $100 billion-plus commitment to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines under the new AUKUS alliance or any other game-changing acquisitions, such as the potential purchase of B-21 stealth bombers.
Australia desperately needs asymmetric capabilities that project themselves far beyond our borders to deter prospective foes, including larger fleets of weaponised drones, vast stores of long-range, ballistic missiles, advanced unmanned, undersea vehicles and the conversion of our amphibious assault ships into mini aircraft carriers via vertically launched F-35s (and drones) as the US and others are doing.
A responsible government that can make tough security decisions in the face of pressure from China and its proxies (and further circumvent the interminable procurement ineptitude of Australia’s defence department) would boost military spending by 50 per cent to 100 per cent.
The most depressing strategic setback for Australia came in the defence budget, part of the overall federal budget delivered by Josh Frydenberg on Tuesday.
We got a complacent, lazy, negligent, mainly hollow defence budget which delivered just one new relevant capability, funding over 10 years of $10bn for new cyber capabilities in the Australian Signals Directorate.
…Consider what it really means if the Chinese establish a naval base in the Solomons. They may not succeed, because every sinew of Australia diplomacy will be working to stop them, as will the Americans, Kiwis and other South Pacific friends. But any prudent Australian government would have to consider there is a real chance the Chinese will get a South Pacific base eventually. They are very determined, they have a lot of money, they are all over the South Pacific, they are very skilled at this sort of stuff, and they are very opportunistic.
What could we do, militarily, that would be relevant to such a development? In 1996, Beijing decided it would work to strip the US of its ability to enforce its will near the Chinese mainland, in what Beijing calls “the first island chain”. The US was vastly more powerful than China, economically and militarily. So Beijing didn’t try to match this power head-on. Instead, it pursued asymmetric capabilities that would impose a disproportionate cost on the US. It began with land-based missiles. It acquired dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of missiles. In due course it added missiles on planes and missiles on ships. This produced what the boffins call an A2AD effect: anti-access/area denial.
The Chinese couldn’t prevent the Americans from hurting them militarily, even in China’s own space, but they could make the cost to the US of operating ships or planes in China’s area extremely high, and impose a huge risk on the US.
Australia is well placed to embark on its own strategy of maritime denial of its sea approaches, out perhaps to 2000km. We do this a bit already with our missile-carrying fast jets – F35s, Super Hornets and Growlers. But we only ever plan to have 100 of these, and at the moment we only have a little over 80. That is way too small a force. We could also put anti-ship missiles on our big Offshore Patrol Vessels.
But the main thing would be ground-based missiles. The US is getting back to making ground-based Tomahawks with a range of about 2400km. Imagine if we had hundreds of such ground-based missiles in diverse locations around the northern Australian coast. Any potential adversary would find their planning massively complicated.
The Australian Army is planning to acquire long-range missiles, but we have no idea when. There is no urgency, you understand. But given the paltry amount of money allocated for it, even in planning documents, you can deduce that the army plans to get them as small-quantity artillery supplements to be used within existing brigade structures, designed for land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We aren’t planning to project power to prevent Chinese encirclement (which is my favoured strategy) or to defend our homeland from it as the noose closes.
Third, the Australian people are soft. The frontier toughness of previous generations is transformed by the culture of the globalist feminine. This is a deep shift in identity that will not reverse for the inculcated:
Most young people would flee rather than stay and fight if Australia was in the same situation as Ukraine, new polling shows.
One veteran says the troubling finding shows a lack of “higher purpose” holding the country together.
“I think this shows that our younger generations don’t feel emotionally invested enough in our country — in our plan for the future and their part of that plan,” retired Army officer Heston Russell told news.com.au.
“Military planning 101, involve as many people in the planning process so they establish an emotional connection to the plan, take ownership of it and are willing to fight for it.”
The survey of 1000 Australians, commissioned by conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs and undertaken by research firm Dynata late last month, asked respondents, “If Australia was in the same position as Ukraine is now, would you stay and fight, or leave the country?”
Overall 46 per cent said they would stay and fight and 28 per cent said they would leave the country, but younger respondents were more likely to say they would leave.
Only 32 per cent of those aged 18-24 said they would stay and 40 per cent said they would leave, and 35 per cent of those aged 25-34 said they would stay while 38 per cent said they would leave.
It’s not cringing that’s the issue. We’ve always had that. Rather, we now live in a culture of victimhood that champions losing, thus running away makes sense.
Or, maybe the young just see what I do. A lazy, stupid and gaslit nation that has shat upon them their entire lives and is now so bloated with entitlement that it is nigh on defenseless.
