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Australia's Place in the World

We shouldn't be too swept up in current events as to not realise that rapid changes is more or less a norm in international affairs. But one thing that never changes is geography... something that is immutable for Australia. And I think there's a tendency in the modern Australian defence debate to underplay geography.

Sam Roggeveen

In the wake of a shift in the global power balance, how can Australia best protect itself?

Two of Australia’s most interesting foreign policy thinkers take a fresh look at Australia’s place in the world and come to some surprising conclusions. Clinton Fernandes (Sub-Imperial Power) and Sam Roggeveen (The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace) tackle the big questions about the US alliance, the threat of China, and underneath it all, what kind of country Australia really is.  

Listen as Sam and Clinton reshape Australia’s understanding of itself in the international arena, in conversation with Verity Firth, Vice-President Societal Impact, Equity and Engagement at the University of New South Wales.

Presented by Sydney Writers' Festival and supported by UNSW Centre for Ideas.

Transcript

UNSW Centre for Ideas
UNSW Centre for Ideas

Verity Firth
Thank you, everybody for being here today. It's my real pleasure to introduce, our two speakers for today, but let me do some housekeeping first. Firstly, my name is Verity Firth. I'm the Vice President of Societal Impact, Equity and Engagement at UNSW. We are the university sponsor for the Sydney Writers Festival, which is something we really gladly do.

We love the discussion of knowledge, the creation of new knowledge through books, and then people actually getting a chance to listen from the authors themselves. We think it's a really important role for a university to play, and we're very happy to sponsor. So before I introduce our authors, I'd also, of course, like to acknowledge that we're on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.

I want to pay particular respect to elders, past and present, and extend that respect to any other Aboriginal people here in the room today. This land was, is and always will be Aboriginal land. So in terms of what we're here to discuss today, in light of shifting global powers and changing international dynamics, this session explores Australia's place in the world.

Where do we stand? What kind of country is Australia really, and how do we fit into the broader international arena? How can we best protect ourselves from looming threats? And I think you'll find today there's quite a range of opinions on exactly that. So it's my pleasure to now introduce you properly to our two speakers. They're both foremost foreign policy experts and have had interesting careers, both inside the intelligence services, the military, and of course, now in academia and think tank land.

Professor Clinton Fernandes is in the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW Canberra, where he analyses the operational environment facing military forces in the upcoming decade. He is the author of Sub Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena. In his writing, Clinton is focused on the relationship between science, diplomacy and international law, international operations in foreign policy, the political and regulatory implications of new technology, and Australia's external relations more generally.

Also joining us is Sam Roggeveen, and he's the director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program. Before joining the Lowy Institute, Sam was a strategic senior strategic analyst in Australia's peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace, which was published just last year. Sam also explored the hollowing of Western democracy and its implications for Australia in his 2019 book Our Very Own Brexit: Australia's Hollow Politics and Where It Could Lead Us.

So please join me now in welcoming both Sam and Clinton. So, Clinton, I'm going to start the session by asking you to tell us a bit about your book, Sub Imperial Power, elaborating on its main thesis, which is that far from being a middle power, Australia is in fact a sub imperial power, subject that is, to the imperial power of the United States.

Can you just talk us through that thesis?


Clinton Fernandes
Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I wrote the book as something to be read in a single weekend. So it's 30,000 words. I'll try and make it 100 words. Now in this thing. Well, Australia was born some imperial. Or you won't be born on the on the winning side, of the global confrontation between the British Empire and the lands that colonised.

And the organising principle of our foreign policy is to stay on the winning side. an empire is usually thought of as direct rule by an imperial centre over a colony. But the essence of empire is actually control of sovereignty of another state. You can control that sovereignty through direct rule, as in traditional empires, the France, the French in Indochina, and so on.

But you can control it through intelligence operations, through trade agreements, through military threats to through military violence. So controlling sovereignty is the essence of empire. And I argue that the United States sits at the apex of a hierarchically structured imperial system. And Australia is not a victim of it. Australia is a beneficiary of it.

We are, in fact, a junior partner of the United States Imperial Order, or called it the 'rules based international order'. That's a euphemism. And, our goal is to stay on the winning side, and we have benefited from it. And I haven't argued what we ought to do in an era of American decline. That's... my very good colleague here has done that. So, I mean, I'll throw it on to you now.

Verity Firth
So, Sam, your book caused quite a stir when it was released last year, as it argues that Australia should expect a diminishment or disappearance of American strategic interest in East Asia, and that we should prepare for that by adopting a defensive defensive defence policy that does not require a close military alliance with the US, or, in fact, interoperability with its forces.

So you're talking about an Australian centred set of defence ambitions. So speaking... And that was a rather beautifully put to there Clinton in terms of the lead into Sam, can you elaborate on your book and the 'echidna strategy'?

Sam Roggeveen
Sure. And thank you. And thank you to Clinton for sharing the stage today. and to all of you, for being here. Look at the the centrepiece of my argument is geography. I mean, you talked in your introduction about how rapidly, you know, world events are changing around us. And yes, that's absolutely true. and, they always do.

We shouldn't be too swept up in current events as to not realise that rapid changes is more or less a norm in international affairs. One thing that never changes is geography. Geography; something that, is immutable for Australia. And that's why I've made geography really the centre piece of my argument about Australian defence policy. And I think there's a tendency in the modern Australian defence debate to underplay geography.

In fact, I wanted to quote a line that I'd written down here from the National Defence Strategy, which we released, the government released last, month, which says, quote, "Technology has already overturned one of Australia's long standing advantages. Geography." Now, I put it to you that that's a substantial overstatement. Geography still a major determinant of Australian security.

In fact, the argument in the book is that Australia's single biggest defence asset is distance. Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney. it is. This is an often overlooked fact, and in fact, if you if you look at a book such as the one that, this former Senator Jim Molan wrote a few years ago about the threat of Chinese military power to Australia.

He called a 'danger on our doorstep'. Well, that's a bloody big doorstep. China's a long way away. And actually, physical distance makes it much harder to project military power against Australia. And so what I centre my argument on is this idea that rather than trying to, compress the distance between Australia and China, what we should be doing is exploiting it.

And of course, AUKUS gets a lot of treatment in my book and also in Clinton's book. And I think really at the heart of the AUKUS agreement, the, the idea of us needing nuclear powered submarines is this insistence that we need to compress this distance between us and China, because, after all, what nuclear submarines are good for is long range and long endurance, right?

Now, what do you need long range and long endurance for? Well, only if you want to operate thousands of kilometres to Australia's north for long periods of time to, you know, basically hem the Chinese navy in along its coastline in pursuit of, a sort of the US led regional strategy. I argue that that's all unnecessary. Australia can much more easily and more affordably defend itself close to its borders.

And, you know, to use the metaphor of the echidna to be benign and friendly but also spiky. So, you know, we we're no threat to you. But if you choose to harm us, you will get hurt.

Verity Firth
Yeah. So it's really interesting because you also both write about the bipartisan consensus around the US alliance. You know, Labor, Liberal. They all support the US alliance, and do so quite robustly talking of the shared values of our nations. And of course there's even the cultural links between the nations and and the ubiquitous, I would argue, of American cultural affinities in particular.

So we also find through the Lowy Institute that the alliance tends to be pretty popular with Australians as well. So but both of you, you know, I don't know if skeptical is the right word, but you're both challenging how it necessarily the alliances. Can we take that out a bit? Maybe starting this time first with you, Sam.

Sam Roggeveen
Yeah, sure. And you're absolutely right. But the Lowy Institute poll has been running for, I think, 18 years now. The next one is due out next month. And I can tell you already there'll be no surprises here. But support for the US Alliance is very, very strong in Australia. It dips a little bit now and again depending on what's happening in the US and depending on who's president, that won't shock you.

But overall the levels of support are extremely high. And I am... I don't argue that Australia ought to leave the US alliance. I think it's been very useful to us. We've made a very successful bet. We've wanted to be on the winning side in the Cold War and that's worked extremely well for Australia. What I am very skeptical about and very worried about is the unprecedented deepening of the alliance over the last few years.

It's really a phase that started, I think, after 911, when John Howard invoked the ANZUS alliance, but has been accelerated enormously again under AUKUS. And by the way, not just AUKUS, but also, AUKUS is a lot of things. Of course, at the centre of it is the submarines. But there is also an agreement for the United States to base its submarines in Western Australia.

That's the so-called Submarine Rotational Force West - and separately outside of AUKUS. A couple of years ago, we announced that we were going to expand our military facilities at RAAF Tyndall, which is the airbase just south of Darwin, so that there are going to be operational US strategic bombers operating from there. So for the first time, Australia is going to be for the first time since the Second World War, if there is a war, then the United States will be conducting wartime missions from Australian soil. 

Now that makes Australia target. That's, I think, totally uncontroversial. Although when I said that in an article last year, that did cause a few ructions, but that seems to me perfectly uncontroversial that that will make us a target. So the bet we're making is that even though we are more of a target and we will be more involved with the US, that by strengthening American power and by strengthening joint deterrence, we can we can dissuade China from making any moves in the region that are against our interests.

That's a big bet, because China is so huge and because I think Chinese resolve to shift the regional order in its favour is going to be bigger. It's going to be greater than American resolve, because, after all, America is not in this region. China is a regional power. It's the biggest economy in the region. And it's not going to indefinitely stand for a regional order in which it basically plays a subordinate role to the United States, that no great power will ever stand for that indefinitely.

It's going to want to push the US out. And basically what we're betting is that while the United States is going to be strong enough and have enough political will to withstand that challenge from China, I think actually probably the United States won't have that kind of resolve and will.

Verity Firth
That's really interesting. What do you think?

Clinton Fernandes
Well, I'm in large agreement in the sense that, the alliance is very popular. It's only ever dropped around 73% during the Iraq invasion time. Usually it's in the in the mid 80s. That's how popular the United States alliance is. And that popularity is also a function of, cultural and media ecosystem that protects the alliance and, and promotes it.

But the alliance is there and it goes back a while. I mean, the... it was in our interests, for the whole of the 19th century, in the most first part of the 20th century, to prefer the British Empire over any other and to have solidarity with the Empire rather than with the lands that colonised, and, or other European empires in the region.

And so support for an imperial power is well within the tradition of Australian foreign policy and domestic policy. I'm just talking more about self-determination and sovereignty for Australia within the alliance structure. So, for example, ensuring that our Parliament decides when we go into a war of choice as opposed to war of necessity or of necessity, self-defence.

Right? But a war of choice, like, did you know, for example, that the, the Royal Australian Navy and the, Poseidon's, the maritime patrol aircraft, operating out of Kadena Air Base in Japan, you know, Parliament never had any say in that. It's just a decision made by the Defence Department to go and send them there.

Also, the costs of being on the on the winning side have not been felt by us for quite a while, actually. Ever.

Verity Firth
Yeah.

Clinton Fernandes
And so when we send in the Australian Secret Intelligence Service to help the CIA overthrow the government of Chile, a democratic government in 73, firstly, the support for that is protected by a secrecy provision that prevents anybody knowing about it except with great, great, legal effort. But secondly, the costs are actually borne by the people of Chile or the people of Iraq or whoever else.

Well, now things are changing. as Sam said, China is very big. And, everything he says I agree with. And my book actually says, well, and therefore, given that Australia is defendable at pretty much any realistic level of threat, given that, AUKUS and patrolling all the way up into the Taiwan Strait on the South China Sea and having, you know, a rotational force of submarines and bombers makes us a target.

Why is policy...  why are we pursuing this policy? And that's because the goal and I say this without caricature or irony, the operative goal currently of Australian defence policy is not to defend Australia, okay? It is uphold the American imperial system. And that means, that means putting in place a system whereby the seabed in the South China Sea and the exit points from the Taiwan Strait into the deeper waters of the Pacific Ocean, their sensors laid on it.

And we send our aircraft, our helicopters and our aircraft to drop sonar buoys, microphones, on a flotation device to track the acoustic signatures of Chinese vessels, submarines and ships. We want to acquire targets. We want to recognise them in order to destroy them inside of a conflict. We want to keep China a land power and not allow to have unfettered access to the sea.

So in a time of crisis we can choke off, its food supplies and its energy supplies. Okay. We ask, we tell other countries we mean nothing against you. We plan for your capabilities because your intentions can change from benign to malevolent. So we plan for your capabilities. But China, you should plan for our intentions, which we assure you are benign.

Don't plan for our capabilities, what we're actually doing. So all I've called for, what I've said twice in the book is some 'strategic empathy', not empathy with their political system, a one party state, but strategic empathy. See the strategic problem from the perspective of a Chinese government strategist. They don't like the idea of having a potential, choking off of their food, their oil, and so on.

And that's exactly what we're doing. We're doing precisely that. And the goal of our defence policy is to keep doing that and exclude our Parliament from having any say in it. We have no parliamentary oversight of our intelligence agencies. So these are the things that I think we should try and remedy rather than just leave the alliance or anything like that.

Verity Firth
Yeah. Interesting. And on your strategic empathy point, that was where I was wanting to work to next, because what I found really interesting about Sub Imperial Power was that you talked about China's history and the role Xi Jinping has played in rebuilding that new sense of Chinese greatness. And according to you, and I got corrected backstage, it wasn't actually according to you, as according to the Wikileaks documents that were leaked out of the American Intelligence Services, what they concluded is that Xi doesn't care about money and is not corrupt. He believes that rule by a dedicated and committed Communist Party leadership is a key to enduring social stability and national strength. So I'd like to now explore a bit about what you think Chinese thinking is at the moment about its rise and what it means for Australia.

Clinton Fernmandes
Well, XI Jinping, I mean, I don't know the guy personally. Of course. I don't know what I, I don't know what money is in his bank accounts or what other investments he might have or anything like that. But the United States Embassy, did, in fact, try and work out who this guy was back in, in the, in the 2000, in the early, the first decade because he thought he was going to be an up and comer.

And, what they found was people were saying this guy - the people have known him since childhood, that he is not corrupt. He's politically very focused, and he believes in Chinese greatness. And he has a story to tell. He is ultimately a narrative storyteller to try and mobilise Chinese public opinion along certain lines.

And the coercion comes in only if that if that fails. Right. So they want to restore China to being a great country again. But this I don't see any, any history of, Chinese empire building and force projection and acquisition of colonies, except in its periphery, where it wants some strategic space. So it's always had a tension with Vietnam.

You know, dating back to the time it was expelled, you know, 939 AD. And, it's got these other kinds of border conflicts. But it's settled on the land border. It had about 16 land border conflicts, disputes. It settled 14 of them on terms that are more favourable to the other side than to its own position. The ones that are not resolved to India, of course there's [indecipherable]

Sam Roggeveen
Well, I would just respond by returning to your earlier point of your definition of imperialism. And I think if imperialism is, you know, less thought of less physically and more about the ability to diminish national sovereignty and to practice leadership and dominance above that national sovereign level, then I think that that kind of definition applies to Chinese ambitions as well.

So I'm not at all benign about what China wants. So I don't, in my book, go out of my way to say that none of us should mistake Chinese ambitions, and none of us should be in any way, you know, romanticise what the Chinese want here. It's directly contrary to Australian interests. And we should take serious measures to try and frustrate Chinese ambitions where we can.

Because I do think ultimately, what China is looking for is a region where it can push the United States out and then it can it can practice a kind of dominance itself so that it is not a physically or militarily expansionist power, as Clinton says. I agree with that. But it does very much want to build a sphere of influence in Asia, and that that can take on many different forms.

So, for instance, the Soviet Union had a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe, and that was truly, I think, an imperial project where the Soviet Union was actually able to lay claim to the physical assets of all those other countries and direct them to the foreign policy goals that the Soviet Union had. So that's a very highly controlled form of sphere of influence.

The United States, on the other hand, I think, can fairly be said to have a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. And yet those countries, you know, Canada, Mexico, all the way down to South America, are independent in almost every respect except the fact that the United States will always intervene if another great power threatens to get involved in those affairs.

So somewhere in between those two extremes is, I think, the future that China wants in Asia and our job and alongside of our friends and allies in the region, including the United States, is to check China's ambitions in that regard, where we can we can't stop China becoming the leading power in Asia. I think that's too big a task and actually would mean, well, it would be too difficult. And I think, too risky in terms of risking war. But we can stop China from being the dominant power in Asia, and that's the job that's before us. And that's the kind of strategy I have described in the book.

Verity Firth
Is there any scenario where you think the US would go to war with China?

Sam Roggeveen
Yes, absolutely. Because what I argue in the book is that America's interests in Asia are not so big that that would demand making the kind of sacrifices involved in a war with China. Now, while I think that's true on a logical and reasonable and rational level, we can't rely on national leaders to behave that way.

And of course, leaders make colossal mistakes all the time. Historically, we know that in China they've made, you know, disastrous policy errors. And, of course, the United States invaded Iraq not so long ago, which turned out to be a massive misuse of American resources, and very much to, you know, to the cost of the Iraqis.

So there's no accounting for what leaders will do. But all I'm arguing is that actually, when you when you coldly examine America's core security interests, then it's not worth it for the United States, particularly, because the risk of such a conflict escalating to the use of nuclear weapons is so high. So for a war like that to be worth it, the stakes have to be existential. And I don't think the United States has an existential stake in the Asian security order. And inevitably, that means that when push comes to shove, the Americans will probably give way. And we have to do things more for ourselves.

Verity Firth
Interesting. So another thing I was very keen to, explore is the fact that you've both actually worked in the military and intelligence agencies and in some ways somewhat concerningly, you also both write about the elite consensus that exists in this policy space and how there isn't, you know, often people lock behind a position in a sort of almost corralled, you know, mentality sense of that.

Right? Which is a little bit worrying for those of us who'd like to think there was a little bit more examination going on. I'm going to quote you, Clinton first, and then I'm going to... and I'll come to you, and then I'm want to talk to Sam. Clinton, in an interview with the Melbourne University Press, you talked about how you used to be, quote, 'surprised by how reflexively intelligence analysts accepted and internalised the claims of policymakers and believed that they needed to believe.. they believed what they needed to believe to justify their policies, specifically, the assumption that our actions are invariably defensive and our tensions are our intentions are invariably benign.'

And I just thought it would be interesting, particularly given the fact that you used to work, in the military. Yes. to unpack that a bit more.

Clinton Fernandes
Sure. I wasn't in intelligence. I actually started as an infantryman in the Army and I went into Signals and then basically about a decade or more in Intelligence. Not as much analysis as Sam. I was involved in combat intelligence, counterintelligence, working with some of our agencies in Australia, and, and analysis. And, yes, they tend to believe the they tend to believe the policy parameters, they accept the policy parameters, and then they make the analysis within those parameters.

This would not make sense except in the context of actual empirical evidence, you know, a textual analysis. But they don't seem to have any, well, strategic empathy once again, they don't seem to see how the other side would see us as threatening. They would say, well, 'Can't you understand that we are benign? Our intentions are benign.'

And so, that's what's missing. It's...Yes, there is a lot of work being done, technical analysis of this or that capability. But the ability to step back and actually question from first principles whether the policy itself might be causing problems, is not there. Ok. Intelligence is knowledge of the target that is acquired without the consent of the target, that's a, you know... in the sense that you're trying to get an intelligence analysis is about writing, a very small newspaper for a very select audience.

You know. At 7:30 in the morning, the admirals or the, you know, the minister of defence, whoever's going to be there. And, every morning someone's got to give a brief. So the briefer presents the brief, which has been written the previous 24 hours by the watch keepers and the analysts the day before. And you're supposed to write a very short newspaper, for a very short audience.

You can't bring in technical stuff. You give a non-technical explanation, in order that a decision maker can make a decision. so all of that is done well. But the idea that what we are doing may somehow be regarded as hostile if it does not come into their minds.

Sam Roggeveen
Yes. Clinton's right. I worked in the intelligence world firstly at the beginning of my career, first of all, in the defence Intelligence Organisation in Canberra and then at the Office of National Assessments. It's now called the Office of National Intelligence and particularly in that first job in the defence Department. I mean, it's not that different to being a kind of journalist, except you don't you don't go out looking for story so much, but you are trying to bring sources together and then make sense of them.

But as Clinton says, for a very small audience. It's worth maybe just, pausing to, dispense with some of the mystery that surrounds the intelligence world, because what you would find if you ever went to any of those workplaces is how mundane and ordinary they are. They always lanyards. And I will walk into the office, and any of you who have been in a modern, sort of white collar, open plan office space, will will recognise immediately what ASIO looks like or what DIO looks like, or what the Office of National Intelligence looks like.

They're all the same. They are open plan offices. There are offices dotted around the walls. For the more senior people. There's a kitchenette where someone's heating up last night's spaghetti. you know, there's charity chocolates for the kids. There's all of that stuff. It's very ordinary. The the main difference is really how, how hard it is to get in and out of the building.

There are lots of security checks, and there are these filing cabinets all around which have little spin spin locks on them. And you also, it's maybe slightly neater than a normal office because they, they have what they call a 'clean desk policy', which means you never leave classified documents lying on your desk when you walk away from it.

You always have to put them away somewhere nice and safe. But anyway, yeah, it's not that different to the kind of work that a journalist would do. What you're describing Verity, the kind of I think really what you're describing is groupthink, which is a problem in that all of us suffer from. And, one of a number of sort of cognitive, errors that people make and that intelligence agencies are subject to, we saw it in Iraq, right? 

Iraq was ultimately a failure of the Iraq WMD issue, that is, was a failure of intelligence analysis. So we had the information before us, but we made it fit certain preconceived notions about what we thought about Iraq. One thing that seemed never to enter into the minds of intelligence analysts at the time, and I was one, I wasn't working directly on this issue, but, I was in that world at the time.

One thing that never entered any of our minds was to say that actually, Saddam doesn't have chemical and biological weapons, but he's pretending to because he needs to deter the Iranians. That never occurred to anybody. And that turned out to be the truth. So, yeah, so that's kind of cognitive errors are incredibly common. We're all subject to them.

Actually if I... I'm slightly more optimistic maybe than Clinton because I do see the intelligence agencies wrestling with these problems. They take it seriously. And actually I think our own cognitive, shortcomings and errors, are becoming more widely known even beyond the intelligence world. Like I've seen, you know, I've participated in training courses inside the intelligence world to help with -overcome those kind of errors.

But actually, my daughter's in high school, she's in year 12, and she's learning about behavioural economics. Now, I don't know if any of you have come across Daniel Kahneman, who wrote a great book called Thinking Fast and Slow. I mean, that's a that's a nice... that's a book and that's a name that's becoming known in high schools now around Australia because he teaches people about the kind of errors that we're all subject to in the everyday decisions that we make, including things like, recency bias.

Right? So when we're when we're trying to figure out what we think about a given topic we pluck out of the evidence that is most, at the top of our list of the things that we remember, most vividly. Right? And generally, that tends to be stuff that's happened just in the last week or month or something we just read.

Right. So we make this elementary mistake all the time of recency bias. Anchoring bias is another one. So when you're looking at a menu, for instance, if you see one item, you see a lot of posh restaurants will deliberately put one item that completely out of your reach right at a price point that's completely out of your reach, so that you're more conditioned to buy the one that's just below that level, right?

There is a common human errors and we all make. I guess the one point of optimism is I'd say we're much more aware of those errors now in the intelligence world.

Verity Firth
That makes me that does make me feel better. I'm glad that's the case because what made me giggle - and I'm going to read it back to you - when I was reading your book, was that, the quote you said, which was, quote 'before AUKUS was announced, support for nuclear powered submarines, submarines amongst Australian defence analysts and commentators was actually very small.'

It put you on the fringe of the debate all of a sudden, seemingly within days of the announcement, it became the conventional wisdom. Can we talk through that? Because, you know, I do feel better that people are more aware of this now. But that's a prime example.

Sam Roggeveen
Thank you for that. Everyone loves to be quoted back. And yes, it's probably one of the most surprising and actually depressing aspects of the AUKUS debate. Is that it, I think it reflected poorly on the sort of community of commentators and scholars from which I come in that sense, that a position that the did put the did make you kind of weird and kind of unusual in Australia within 24 hours.

That was the mainstream view, and it was almost like, you know, as George Orwell said, we've always been at war with Eurasia. You know, we've always been at war with East Asia. So that, and I still haven't come to a definitive kind of conclusion about how that happened or why it happened. One way to think about it is to say that... and in here, I'll go back to the Iraq war again for for a group of analysts, whether they're in the intelligence world or their public commentators, making forecasts and making arguments is always risky, because you could be proved wrong afterwards. But the safest way to be wrong, is to be wrong in the majority. Right? So if you... as long as you put a position that lots of other eminent and estimable people also put, then even if that position turns out to be wrong, you can say, yeah, but then too, don't just look at me' But being wrong and being in the minority is the riskiest position you can be in as a public commentator. 

And you do get punished for that. So, there was yeah, I think there was a little bit of groupthink involved, and there was a little bit of that tendency. Well, this is where we're going now. So, but best to be on the safe side.

Verity Firth
Yeah. I think that's very true. in context of your thesis around some imperial power, is that the way you analyse the sort of signing up with AUKUS almost immediately overnight, or do you have a different.

Clinton Fernandes
Well, actually, AUKUS is an Australian. it was an Australian led initiative. It was not imposed on us by the United States. We I've always been an eager supporter of, of an offer of a benign empire. Benign for us. and AUKUS was it was never imposed on us. We wanted it - as in the policymakers wanted it.

And it is the goal of a policy is to try to make us more relevant to the United States, because it doesn't think about us that much. Our economy is about, well, we are essentially a that... the relationship with the United States is essentially a transactional relationship between unequal partners, despite all the talk about mate, ship and the state of the other, it is actually very, very unsentimental.

And policymakers don't need to be told that the United States has a cynical, unsentimental view of power. They already know that. And so the goal of the policy is to show our relevance to it. And the more the United States, establishes facilities here, the more from the policy perspective it is a success, even though the danger might rise.

But it is a success in terms of policy. This is the reason why, for example, we are expanding space facilities, you know, space surveillance tests, and so on. And that's because as a result of what we now know with Ukraine, many of the functions of imagery and other spy satellites, which used to be performed at Pine Gap, can now be performed on board the satellites themselves.

Right? Image processing, elimination of cloud cover, selecting the bank, all of those things, tuning the antenna in order to get the best possible, reception. and so we, we now know that, we have to find some other way to be relevant to the United States, which is why we're expanding space.

And it is only from the Southern Hemisphere that you can do set of things in space. It's all because of the Earth's tilt. You can you can see deep into the solar system only from the southern hemisphere. There are certain things you can't really do from the United States. And so the expansion of space and more targeted Submarine Rotation Force West bombers and all that is the goal of policy.

It is not something that that they know that it's increasing the danger, but they think, well, that's not the goal is to show relevance to the United States.

Sam Roggeveen
I would just offer a mild partial counter to that, which is that if if Clinton's framing is correct, then it does raise the question, why haven't we done more and why didn't we do it sooner? So if if the point of policy is purely to make ourselves more relevant to the United States, why did it take until 2021 to, for us to offer basing to the United States and for us to buy their nuclear powered submarines?

Arguably, we could have done it much earlier than that. And in fact, one thing that's that's typically underplayed in Australia, in amongst that sort of, the narrative about Australia being beholden to the United States, is how modest some of our contributions have been in the past. So in the Iraq war, for instance, we took very few risks.

I mean, the arguably the Howard government got away with murder. I mean, this was a John Howard built a personal relationship with President Bush at that time of unprecedented intimacy. Maybe only matched by Tony Blair at the time. And yet we did it with very little skin in the game, like our military contribution to the Iraq War was pretty modest.

So that was if you're being a bit cynical about it. And I think as Clinton would agree, we should be realist about it, then. That was a very successful piece of statecraft by the Howard government.

Clinton Fernandes
I've actually said that Australia won the Iraq War.

Verity Firth
Yeah. 

Clinton Fernandes
You know, a great power doesn't actually get defeated in the field. It wins or loses based on whether it can achieve its objectives, namely, to establish permanent military bases and to take over the Iraqi oil industry. It couldn't do that. So it didn't get its objectives. the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein did not obviously win the Iraq War, but we our goal was to demonstrate our relevance.

And John Howard's policy was a very canny conservative policy whereby the invasion occurred. But then most of the defence force that was sent to Iraq wound up in the Saddam Hussein International Airport, surrounded by 40,000 American troops and army corps. And so, no casualty for one casualty misadventure. No casualties.. no combat casualties. and showing relevance.

I mean, during the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson begged, the American, the British prime minister to send us even, even a platoon of bagpipers, you know, into Vietnam. We need to show we got international support for this. So we did that. but as for the, well, the bases and so on, I think we were first getting ready to recapitalise our surface fleet with the Canberra helicopter landing dock ships. You know, these can take, 18 helicopters, which can take off from from, six landing points, and take off points. We bought, the frigates, we bought Poseidon aircraft. So we recapitalising the fleet and the base, I think. I don't know the answer to why we waited so long. But I do know that, our policymakers strive at all times to show our relevance to the United States.

Sam Roggeveen
I think one related point here is to say that I think we routinely overestimate the cost of saying no to the United States. And again, recent history, I think, illustrates that it's possible to have disagreements with the U.S and the Union over the long term, that the course of the relationship, remains on track. So, if if the argument is that, you know, we needed to do AUKUS in order to stay on the good side of the United States, then I would argue, well, you know, the alliance was in rude health even before that point.

So it was as if it was as if like.. if you if you liken it to an auction, you know, the hammer had already come down and the auctioneer said, 'Sold to Australia'. And then we put our hand up and say, well, actually, we'd like to make another bid. Oh yeah. And the auctioneer says, 'Well, that's, that's very irregular, but, just out of interest, what would you like to bid?'

And we say, 'Well, $350 billion' and, and the auctioneer says, 'Well, that seems like an awful lot'. And of course, at that point the Americans are saying to the auctioneer, 'Quiet, let them talk'. You know.

Verity Firth
I think there's a I do think there's a political balance. Like, I think this when I was reading Clinton's book, I did feel there was something about Australians that have almost been or Australia has almost been, culturally steeped in being a sub imperial power for so long. We're not really used to not having one. Right. But there is still a political balance because I think of the as the as the English Empire, as the British Empire fell, there was push back around Gallipoli, right, for example.

So yes, we're all in behind the British Empire. But there was also that other mythologising of the brave ANZAC and the British who betrayed us as they drank tea. And, you know, as the brave troops went over the hill. So it's getting the political balance between being a good, sub imperial power, but also being able to show, at least to the Australian population, that there's a bit of self-determination in the scope that we're saying, would you agree?

Clinton Fernandes 
I agree, in fact, my my view is that, the more we stick up for ourselves, it'll simply just require the United States to respect our own, preferences more if we're willing to be assertive. take a take a country that none of us has a particular emotional commitment. And and you just see this, India, for example, in the 1990s, late 1990s, insisted that it was going to develop closer relations with the United States, recognise Israel and develop nuclear weapons.

And commentators said, 'Well, that's not possible. If you got nuclear, are you going to be a pariah state'. But they had a, realpolitik, understanding of power. They said, well, the United States only recognise only respects power. So yes, we'll go nuclear. there'll be some sanctions, which we'll whether we'll recognise Israel. The United States will come in, will, will, will support us.

And guess what? We know from the Wikileaks cables that the United States told Stephen Smith, the then foreign minister, make sure you can you sell India uranium.

Sam Roggeveen
Just on your point about, about the way the alliance is embedded in Australian political culture, I think don't underestimate the fact that the alliance is so in some respects, it's kind of a... it lives and breathes in the world of officials and to military personnel and bureaucrats. However the core of that really is a political settlement that is found in both of our major political parties.

And in fact, so deeply embedded is the alliance in the mythology of the two major parties that they both claim it as their progeny. Right. So the Americans, we first switched our allegiance in the middle of the Second World War under a labor government. But the alliance itself was, of course, the Menzies government initiative. So it's important to both of them.

But one thing that I think is worth watching over the sort of medium term now, and you referred briefly, thank you to my to my first book about Australian politics and the hollowing out of Australian politics. And what that book was about was really the fact that the duopoly in Australian politics is eroding very quickly.

So we no longer have a two party system. We have a two party system, plus the independence of minor parties. In federal politics, the primary vote is now basically split three ways, right. So one thing I'm watching for in the medium term is how deeply embedded is that mythology in that third grouping. And what happens to it when the political system moves from being a duopoly to something else?

Verity Firth
Yeah. Do you have any views on that?

Sam Roggeveen
Well, look, I think probably it's not, not as. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry... Go ahead. 

Clinton Fernandes 
I think, there might be some pressure, from them for the minor parties, for representation on, certain committees at the moment, the parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, by its own charter, cannot examine the intelligence operations that we've conducted past, present or future. it's not allowed to have any real oversight. I can only examine the administration and financing.

And the Prime Minister signature is needed for anybody who get to get on that committee. The only time somebody who is not from the major parties got on was Andrew Wilkie, and that's when Julia Gillard needed his support for the, you know, the my for the minority government in 2010. And he was kicked off very soon after that.

So if there is, if there is trading and political trading involved, there might be it might be in some of that. Yeah.

Sam Roggeveen
Well I agree with that. But I go even further. It's to me, the future for Australian federal politics is either, majority government with very slim majorities. Or minority governments with, with a coalition partner. And in future, it's not impossible at all to imagine one of the minor parties with there independents joining a cabinet. Like that happens routinely in New Zealand, for instance, or in, in Western European countries. In fact the Germans have a foreign minister who's in the Greens party.

Clinton Fernandes 
So let's just add to this, the other thing that's the case at the parliamentary level. Yes, at the societal level. And we were once the second most English country in the world, even and even up to 2001. Right. The second most English country in the world. We are now a multi origin society. and the stock of social cohesion that we've seen about the Gaza and so on.

Well, what happens if a vessel, an Australian vessel gets sunk, could lose 75 people in an afternoon. And then what happens to people who are Chinese or look like they might be Chinese? You know, will they be abused on public transport? Will there be attacks? Will there be calls to have them interred in some, concentration or some prison camp somewhere if it's a real shooting war as an internal fifth column.

So that societal fracture has not been contemplated by our policy planners. The potential for a societal tensions to really burst out. I'll stop there, I talk too much.

Verity Firth
So we've only got two minutes left. So I'm just going to ask my final question, which is do you think there's any trigger or circumstance that would actually see Australia breaking from the US alliance?

Sam Roggeveen
Well, I said earlier that I thought we overestimate the risk of disagreeing with the Americans. And so I think the, the kind of breaking point that you're referring to, the one that comes immediately to mind is, a war over Taiwan. And if Australia said no, we refuse... we refused to participate, which I think we should. I don't think it's in our I don't think Taiwan's security is important enough to Australia to risk a war with China.

Verity Firth
And do you think that a government could get Australian public support for that? Probably. y

Sam Roggeveen
Yes. I mean, the yes, the I don't trust a lot of the polling on this question. Well, trust is the wrong word, but I just I tend to think that, on issues where the public don't have a lot of, influence and where they don't have a lot of knowledge, they tend to look to their leaders for what they think.

And so it's not unusual to see the views of leaders or, political leaders reflected in the views of the public. But what I was going to go on to say is that even if we said no to the Americans in the event of a Taiwan war, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the alliance. I mean, the Turks said no to a northern front in the Iraq war, and they're still in NATO, you know, the French and the Germans for actively fought against the Iraq war, diplomatically. They're still in NATO. Yeah. So, you know, the alliance can withstand a lot of damage.

Clinton Fernandes 
Yeah. I feel that the, such a thing, I agree, it'll spillover. Right now, you might not know this, but one of the contingency plans for the Australian Army is for our battalions to wind up in South Korea, because a Taiwan Strait war may embolden North Korea to put pressure on South Korea and force the United States to defend its treaty ally across a very long logistics trail.

In that case, the role of the Australian Army is going to be in South Korea. And the parliament's never been never even discussed any of this. So I would call for greater sovereignty in our own sense of when we go to war.

Verity Firth
Well that's fantastic. Give our speakers a round of applause.

UNSW Centre for Ideas 
Thanks for listening. This event was presented by the UNSW Centre for Ideas  and the Sydney Writer's Festival. For more information, visit unswcentreforideas.com.

Speakers
Clinton Fernandes

Clinton Fernandes

Professor Clinton Fernandes is in the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW Canberra, which analyses the operational environment that military forces will face in the next decade. He has published on the relationship between science, diplomacy and international law, intelligence operations in foreign policy, the political and regulatory implications of new technology and Australia's external relations more generally. He is the author of Subimperial Power: Australia in the International Arena.

Verity Firth

Verity Firth

Verity Firth is the inaugural Vice-President Societal Impact, Equity and Engagement at the University of New South Wales. She has over twenty years’ experience at the very highest levels of government and education sectors in Australia. Prior to her role at UNSW, Verity was the Pro Vice-Chancellor Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS (2015-2022), the CEO of the Public Education Foundation (2011-2014) and the NSW Minister for Education and Training (2008-2011). Verity is a member of the Commonwealth Government’s Implementation Advisory Committee for the Universities Accord.  

Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen is Director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace, published by La Trobe University Press in 2023. In 2019 he wrote Our Very Own Brexit: Australia's Hollow Politics and Where it Could Lead Us about the hollowing out of Western democracy and its implications for Australia. Before joining the Lowy Institute, Sam was a senior strategic analyst in Australia's peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments. Sam is a regular commentator on the Lowy Institute's digital magazine, The Interpreter, of which he was the founding editor from 2007 to 2014.

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