Ideas & Society Program: How to Defend Australia: Some Alternative Visions

Almost everyone acknowledges that with the rise of China as a great military power, Australia faces a new and potentially very dangerous security situation.

As we await the report into the defence of Australia of Air Chief Marshall, Angus Houston, and former Minister of Defence, Stephen Smith, we already know that the Albanese government has accepted the fundamental decisions of its predecessor.

Our defence will rely on even closer ties to Australia’s traditional “great and powerful friends” not only the United States but also the United Kingdom, formalised in the new tripartite arrangement, AUKUS.

Australia’s most important weapon will be several nuclear-powered submarines, built in Adelaide under the close supervision principally of American but also British experts.

It will take several decades before these submarines are in service. When they are, they will be capable of action at a great distance from the Australian continent.

Emeritus Professor Robert Manne AO, the Convenor of La Trobe University’s Ideas and Society Program, argues:

“Australia’s defence now relies on a single geo-political gamble, namely that in the long-term the United States will remain both fully engaged and dominant in the Indo-Pacific region, despite the growing challenge of China.

“As a result of the recent decisions of the Morrison and Albanese governments, Australian defence relations with the United States will for several decades be so intertwined, at so many levels, that if the United States is involved in war with China, Australia will have no alternative but to follow.

“This involves, in effect, a voluntary cession of Australia’s sovereignty.”

For the past decade, mainstream Australian defence policy and its underlying assumptions have been challenged, with both courage and originality, by Professor Hugh White, one of Australia’s pre-eminent defence thinkers.

In this Ideas and Society event he will be in conversation about an alternative defence policy with two of Australia’s most respected younger defence analysts, Associate Professor Bec Strating of La Trobe Asia and Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute.

For those concerned about Australia’s future, this is an event not to be missed.