Australia confronts the new world disorder

It’s the cusp of election season in Australia. Amid cost-of-living pressures the Labor government of prime minister Anthony Albanese is busy rolling out promises in infrastructure, manufacturing and welfare.

A legacy-defining announcement by the embattled prime minister was a major expansion of free medical services. On a somewhat less health-conscious note, he’s also offering to keep beer prices down.

But a disrupted world is imposing starkly different priorities. Security, resilience and statecraft should be central issues for Australia’s looming political contest. And they are invading the agenda whether the government wants it or not.

It’s not as if Australians need to look far to notice.

China, Gaza, Donald Trump

For a start, there’s an unfamiliar display of China’s maritime power off the exposed vastness of their coastline.

Media and political opposition alike are giving great visibility to the awkward fact that a Chinese naval task group, including the PLA Navy’s most advanced warship, is doing an uninvited lap of their continent, pausing occasionally for shooting practice.

Meanwhile conflict in the Middle East is fast fraying Australia’s cherished multicultural society, with antisemitism now a prime concern for Canberra’s domestic security agency.

And even the most parochial of Australians are starting to realise that the historic rupture Donald Trump is wreaking between America and Europe will ultimately have something to do with them.

Australia, with just 27 million people yet massive territorial interests and an acute dependence on the global system, has long looked to alliance with the United States as a vital pillar of its defence. 

An alliance breakdown in the ugly trans-Atlantic fashion currently being witnessed has long been nigh on unimaginable for the Australian policy establishment – and would be correspondingly catastrophic.

Australia will do all it can to maintain alliance business as usual. This is understandably premised on the view that both sides of US politics remain committed to strategic competition with China, and this in turn requires a sustained American deterrent presence in the Indo-Pacific.

Even the most restrained US strategic posture globally would still gain irreplaceable benefit from access to Australia’s geography, a pivot between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a unique intelligence vantage point, a logistics hub and a bastion away from the frontline of potential war with China. 

But there should also be quiet awareness in Canberra that self-strengthening is the best way to head off the ally abuse that Canada and Europe have recently endured.

If Australia is going to meet the challenge of China’s assertive power getting ever closer, it won’t just need an ally but all the capability it can muster itself. 

Total defence

A more powerful Australia makes sense regardless of the vicissitudes of the White House. Such an Australia will be better at looking out for its own security, engaging with its Indo-Pacific region and attracting partners and allies.

To get there will require a more serious national security effort than anything Australia has attempted since the Second World War. This would involve all elements of national strength being brought to bear, including the private sector, subnational government and civil society.

It’s time for Canberra to pay serious study to smaller nations that quietly practise total defence, from Finland to Singapore.

But for Australia to move in this direction – of effectively being the sum of its parts - would require halting and reversing the damage to social cohesion the nation has experienced over recent years.

This problem ranges widely. It relates not only to Gaza and antisemitism but such issues as the poor handling of relations with Chinese Australians on foreign interference matters, not to mention the spread of conspiracy theories, disinformation and anti-government resentment during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Australia’s political and policy class has often prided itself on a mature bipartisanship on foreign and defence policy, but even that is now under strain. 

The issue is not strictly that a two-party system is eroding. To be sure, there is the emergence of a sizeable cross-bench of independents and third forces, in particular the very left-wing Greens party and a looser centrist grouping called the Teals, socially progressive while economically conservative. This reflects changing voter choices and the difficulties – some self-wrought – of the major parties to adapt.

The problem is more a failure by successive governments to build and follow through on a national security narrative that can inform and engage the broad community, and focus an increasingly diverse political class on those things where they can agree in the national interest. 

The current era of global anxiety offers precisely such an opportunity, even amid the noise and exaggerated rivalry of an election campaign where no side allows the other credit for a good idea.

What sane and sensible politician would oppose the need for national preparedness against strategic shocks?

To be fair to the Albanese government, some of its best work at readying for a future of risk and instability has been in terms of statecraft.

The US question

A diplomatic campaign towards ‘strategic equilibrium’ has been a mainstay of the past three years under Foreign Minister Penny Wong. This has involved deepening dialogue with a wide array of Asian and Pacific partners, backed up development assistance and security links.

At the same time, the Labor government has largely maintained the strengthened ties with Japan and India delivered by conservative predecessors, and wrapped up in the Quad with the United States – now an accepted part of regional diplomatic architecture.   

Yet all of this scaffolding is premised on assumptions about the staying power and reliability of the United States in the Indo-Pacific – as a formidable deterrent force if not always as a leader. 

Those assumptions extend to the AUKUS technology-sharing arrangement, under which Australia will gain nuclear-powered submarines with the United States and the United Kingdom.

Australia’s pursuit of equilibrium is about seeking deterrence against China’s push for regional dominance, while managing the risks of destabilisation, including from America.

President Donald Trump’s grotesque indifference to Ukraine in the face of Russia’s continued war of aggression has stunningly immediate consequences for Europe.

For Australia and by extension its region, the timing is troubling, with China’s southward naval foray reminding Canberra how much it relies on Washington at the precise moment NATO allies are wondering if ever they can again.

Naturally, we should be careful not to overstate the parallels. Australia is not facing immediate military threat from China, although the risk of warlike confrontation in the wider region – especially across the Taiwan Strait – is profoundly serious and engages every nation one way or another.

The Albanese government deserves some credit for its diplomacy of ‘stabilisation’ with China following years of Beijing’s economic coercion.

But the act and manner of China’s naval expedition is proof positive that stabilisation was always a fragile enterprise, and one that can go no further without unacceptable concessions of interests and values.

The main characteristic of the new normal is a permanent contest for influence, as Penny Wong has acknowledged.

The threat from China

What lessons should Australia’s regional partners draw from recent events and the way it is handling them?

The main one is that Australians are suddenly getting a close-up sense of the assertive and reckless posturing by Chinese maritime forces that has become a daily occurrence in Asian waters over the past decade.

This will boost those voices calling for greater Australian defence spending and faster renewal of the nation’s struggling fleet – and this won’t be restricted to one side of politics.   

Consider the facts of the PLA Navy’s voyage south. A Renhai-class cruiser – one of the most formidable warships afloat – with an accompanying frigate and at-sea replenishment ship has spent weeks now, rounding Australia’s northern, eastern and southern coasts.

It has become a topic of alarm and controversy that Canberra seems to have been given little or no notice of the deployment, whereas media reports suggest that even Papua New Guinea was given some level of courtesy forewarning.

This is doubly disappointing for the stabilisation agenda, given that a much-touted strategic dialogue was held between the Australian and Chinese defence organisations in Beijing on Feb 17.

The political debate in Australia has been preoccupied for more than a week now with the question of live-fire exercises reportedly conducted by the task group in the Tasman Sea.

The political opposition and media have called out the prime minister for not being forthcoming about the details of notification and for giving the mistaken impression that there had been courteous prior warning from China.

The picture that has emerged instead is either of unprofessionalism or provocative disregard on the part of the Chinese Navy. There was none of the usual practice of a one- or two-day advance warning, but instead a short-range radio announcement to overflying civilian aircraft only after the exercise had begun. 

This, in turn, has raised questions as to why the Australian government seemed, eventually, to find out only from civilian aviation authorities and the New Zealand military.

So expect also an Australia that now steps up efforts to develop and demonstrate its ability to monitor its maritime approaches.

Australia’s top defence official has described the PLA Navy’s venture as a ‘rehearsal’, while the nation’s intelligence chief has even more candidly described it as ‘provocative’.

In the confronting new world disorder we are rapidly entering, the many middle players in the Indo-Pacific will only stand a chance of protecting their interests if they strengthen and coordinate their maritime capabilities.

Sea power matters profoundly in our region so reliant on maritime connectivity. China’s regional powerplay hardly stops being a source of risk just because the tectonic plates are shifting in the Euro-Atlantic.

Whoever wins the upcoming elections in Australia will have all the more reason to seek security: not from Asia or in Asia, but with it.