Opinion
Security is like oxygen, observed a guru of foreign affairs, the late Joseph Nye: “You tend not to notice it until you begin to lose it, but once that occurs, there is nothing else that you will think about.”
Australia now is getting a foretaste of that phenomenon. The complacency of governments Liberal and Labor has made Australia vulnerable. A few weeks of war in a faraway place and suddenly Australian food supply is in doubt. Not because we lack food; Australia produces enough to feed itself plus Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates combined, on a calorific basis, as an illustration.
Our food supply is in doubt because we can’t be sure of the fuel to grow it and deliver it. Australian nonchalance is so entrenched that even the hard lessons of the past few years have not been hard enough.
In six years, we’ve suffered three major trade and supply chain interruptions – the COVID cut-off, Chinese government trade coercion and irrational US tariff attacks – and learnt nothing. Rory Medcalf of the Australian National University’s National Security College calls it “preparedness amnesia”.
National security is not merely a defence force and a spy service. It’s a nation that makes itself secure. There is no national security without energy security, food security, economic resilience and preparedness for everything from terrorism to pandemic and cyberwar. People’s definition of successful national security? “The continuity of normal life,” says Medcalf.
Australia sailed gormlessly into today’s global crisis with fewer days’ fuel supply than any of the 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency. Australian oil stocks at the end of last year were enough for 49 days, according to IEA statistics. Second least prepared was New Zealand with 88. More realistic island nations’ reserves range from Britain’s 124 days to Japan’s 208.
Japan’s last ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, is a fan of our country but he nominates Australian complacency as our single greatest weakness. “In Australia,” he told me this week, “you have to get out of the inertia of the lucky country.”
The government’s explanation for feeble fuel stocks? It would cost about $20 billion to increase liquid fuel reserves from one month’s supply to three months, the level required by the IEA.
This is pathetic. If Australians have to stay home and go hungry, will the government really tell us to be thankful for the $20 billion we’ve saved from a federal budget of $800 billion, even if it inflicts major damage to our $2 trillion economic output? This is the definition of penny wise, pound foolish.
If the government is culpable, the opposition is worse. When Liberal leader Angus Taylor was energy minister, he put Australia’s fuel reserves in the US. The Coalition allowed four of the country’s six petrol refineries to close down, as the Albanese government likes to remind us.
Australia’s political leaders will be surprised to learn that the people are keenly conscious of the country’s precariousness. Indeed, they were expecting just the sort of crisis we face today. Remarkable survey work by Medcalf’s National Security College, sampling 2000 Australians in every corner of the country over two years, found that “the population has been anticipating precisely the kind of convergence of crises that we are seeing now”, as he puts it.
“The public anticipated this threat as well as any intelligence agency could.” The people observed the rising level of lawless warfare and unpredictability in the world and they worried accordingly.
Over the 15 months to February, the percentage of Australians who reported being anxious about national security rose from 42 to 64. “And since February, I think it’s safe to assume it’s risen further,” says Medcalf.
On specifics. In July last year, 87 per cent of respondents said a critical supply disruption was likely or certain in the next five years. At the same time, 85 per cent expected a severe economic crisis in the same time span. And 65 per cent anticipated that Australia would be involved in a military conflict.
“The population anticipated multiple, concurrent, cascading crises, not just one,” Medcalf tells me. “People showed a sophisticated understanding of the nexus between economics and security. And most of the population thinks we are underprepared for these shocks.” They got that right, too.
“We are looking at [US President Donald] Trump’s war of choice, plus economic shock, and involvement in a military conflict, for example a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Unfortunately, the government needs to be thinking about all these things at once.”
The survey work, which included eight focus groups, about 100 submissions from the community and 500 conversations, also turned up an appetite for governments to talk to the public openly about security and preparedness.
“I think we have discovered,” says Medcalf, “a positive foundation for a public conversation about preparedness that the government hasn’t yet been prepared to harness at the political level.”
In a perverse way, today’s global crises are useful for Australia. For two reasons. First, the new era of brutal lawlessness is manifesting far from our shores. To date, Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s assault on Iran and Israel’s occupation of Lebanon are shocking evidence that war is real, present and unsparing. And that there is no rules-based order to protect us or anyone else.
We have been warned. The Lowy Institute’s head, Michael Fullilove, says Australia should draw two immediate conclusions. First is that we should resist the urge to act on our revulsion at Trump by rejecting or reducing the US alliance.
“Donald Trump is unappealing,” he says. “Luckily, we don’t have an alliance with Trump. We have an alliance with the US. Given that we are a country of fewer than 30 million people occupying a whole continent, far from our sources of prosperity and security, there is no alternative to the US alliance that wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive and highly risky. As we enter the fifth year of Russia’s brutal and unlawful invasion of Ukraine, the advantage of being an ally of the most powerful country in the world is clear.”
For all its difficulties, the alliance is an asset for Australia. It would be reckless to discard an asset in such an era. The Australian public has no trouble in distinguishing between Trump and the country he currently leads. Only 36 per cent trust the US, yet 80 per cent say the alliance is important to our security, according to Lowy Institute polling.
“The history of Australia’s engagement with the world says that withdrawing from the alliance is implausible,” says Fullilove. “Public opinion tells us it is unwanted. The strategic realities of Asia indicate it is ill-advised.”
Fullilove’s second conclusion – Australia needs to do much more for itself. He cites a former head of Britain’s MI6 spy agency, Alex Younger, remarking that the US alliance “infantalised” Britain.
Applying this to Australia, too, Fullilove says that “it’s time to put away childish things” and move urgently to build Australian capability. “I would like to see the same sense of urgency in building our defence forces as we see in Europe.”
The second perverse reason that the multilayered global crises are useful for Australia? The moment presents our political parties with an opportunity to redeem themselves.
The Labor and Liberal parties, which pride themselves on being “parties of government”, can act the part. If they confront crisis constructively, they can recover purpose. They can marginalise One Nation by solving problems. One Nation is a protest party, useless in a serious crisis of national proportions. But Albanese’s careful incrementalism and the Liberals’ self-involved aimlessness are out of place in an urgent crisis.
Albanese brings to the table some crucial elements for addressing the problems of the time. For instance, his Future Made in Australia program can build national sovereignty and self-reliance, provided it can accelerate out of its current desultory pace. And he gave glimpses of a new resilience agenda in his speech to the National Press Club on Thursday, including an intention to build up fuel reserves. But his government has much work to do.
Angus Taylor, so far, has nothing to offer beyond an obsolete neoliberalism where everything is structured for maximum efficiency in a clockwork world. If he remains empty-handed in the new era of great-power aggression, his party will turn to Andrew Hastie, who has spent years speaking and writing about a resilience agenda.
The veteran of the Afghanistan war draws his preoccupation from his experience. “It’s seeing what war can do to your country,” he tells me. “What would it be like to have foreign commandos kicking in our doors at night the way we were kicking in the doors of Pashtun families?”
It doesn’t require invasion for Australia to be broken, he says. “We can be completely subjugated through naval and economic means, with no agency for our country. I’m pushing for industrialisation to give us agency and freedom of action.”
By this, Hastie means Australia must have the capacity to manufacture its own defence, energy and transport requirements.
The oxygen flow is at risk. The people are ready to talk about it. We are about to learn which politician can lead for our times.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.