Australia alone 3: In the national interest?

As a sovereign nation, Australia should follow its national interest. But how do we do that? And what is it anyway?

The concept of national interest changes with the nation. No two countries have quite the same interests. What, then are ours?

At its most fundamental, Australia’s national interest is to protect and promote the ability of its people to live the way that suits them: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It implies a liberal democracy, the rule of law, the self-determination of the individual and – above all – the right to live in peace and security.

It means the nation’s affairs must be determined by the people, not by a privileged cabal and certainly not by a foreign power. We must be able to trade without interference. We must be able to control our borders, but Australians must be free to travel and foreigners should not be denied access except in well-defined circumstances and after due process. The law should apply equally to everyone.

As a sovereign nation, we have both the right and the responsibility to defend the integrity of our landmass and to ensure our freedoms are protected. And our sovereignty must never be traded away to anyone and for any reason.

Generations of Australian leaders have taken that most basic duty – to safeguard our status as a sovereign nation – far too lightly, for far too long.

For all of the 124 years since federation, and for all of the 237 years since European settlement, Australia has subcontracted its core foreign and defence policies to other powers, first to Britain and then to the United States. First the British walked away from us; now the Americans are doing so. They are pursuing their national interest and have left Australia with no viable choice but, finally, to pursue our own. We have barely begun to think about what that might look like.

Other people’s wars

For the first century and a half after 1788, we saw ourselves as an inseparable part of the British Empire. We were British first, Australian second. It was not until 1942 that Australia even gained control over its own foreign policy: until then, it was run out of the Colonial Office in London.

We came to independence reluctantly. The British parliament passed the Statute of Westminster in 1931 that established the status of the overseas dominions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa. The Australian parliament did not ratify it until 1942. And even then, our foreign policy was still run from London, as the eminent former diplomat and academic Allan Gyngell explained in his book Fear of Abandonment:

“Australia has a Minister for External Affairs from the beginning of federation. The title ‘External Affairs’ was important. Foreign policy was still conceived of as the responsibility of Britain which was not, of course, foreign. As late as 1949, Richard Gardiner Casey, the Australian diplomat and future minister, would still be talking of Australia as ‘a member of a great cooperative society: the British race, of which the senior partner is our mother country’.”

Britain’s wars were automatically Australia’s wars too. And so, on 7 March 1885, an ill-prepared New South Wales contingent of 512 infantry, 24 officers and 212 artillery personnel embarked from Circular Quay in Sydney, bound for a colonial war in the Sudan. A public holiday was declared and there was great rejoicing. Fortunately, the Australians got there too late to see any real fighting and after four months they came home.

When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Australians set off for Africa again. By war’s end in 1902, some 16,000 Australians are thought to have served in South Africa. Of those, 282 died in combat, 286 from disease and 38 from accidents and other causes.

It was dirty, disreputable war. According to an account by the Australian War Memorial:

British concentration camp: starvation as a weapon

“Australian troops were deployed in sweeping the countryside and enforcing the British policy of cutting the Boer guerrillas off from the support of their farms and families. This meant the destruction of Boer farms, the confiscation of horses, cattle and wagons, and the rounding up of the inhabitants, usually women and children. These civilian captives were taken to concentration camps where, weakened by malnutrition, thousands died of contagious diseases.”

Another twelve years, another war. Over 330,000 Australians served overseas in World War 1. Of those about 60,000, or 18%, were killed either in action or from disease. Another 156,000, or 47%, were wounded or taken prisoner, though many of the wounded recovered and were returned to the front. Others did not, disabled or disfigured for life. Masks were made to cover the more appalling facial injuries.

Australia’s involvement in that war did almost nothing to enhance the nation’s own security. That was not the purpose, and going to war was another country’s decision, not ours.

When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Australia – not having ratified the Statute of Westminster -- joined automatically. There was no choice.

On the same day the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, broadcast to the nation: “Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.”

Menzies announces war

Until 1942, Australian troops were principally engaged far from home: north Africa, Greece and the Middle East. The RAAF fought in the Battle of Britain in 1940 and in the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines.

Another strong Australian force was stationed in Malaya and, with other troops, suffered from poor British leadership. were forced back by the Japanese advance to the allegedly invulnerable fortress island of Singapore. On 15 February 1942, seven days after the Japanese landed, some 85,000 British-led troops – including 14,972 Australians – surrendered to a Japanese force of 30,000. Their shocking treatment as prisoners of war is well documented.

Still, Winston Churchill wanted to keep Australian forces in north Africa and the Mediterranean, to protect the approaches to India. The Japanese were by now in New Guinea and the new Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, fearing invasion, insisted on their return. On the day after Singapore’s surrender, he said: “The protection of this country is no longer that of a contribution to a world at war but the resistance to an enemy threatening to invade our own shore ... It is now work or fight as we have never worked or fought before ... On what we do now depends everything we may like to do when this bloody test has been survived.”

Curtin, Churchill

Despite air raids on Darwin, and the still-entrenched Australian belief to the contrary, the Japanese had no intention of invading. When Japanese records were examined decades after the war’s end, researchers found that the suggestion of an invasion was quickly quashed by the army leadership.

A paper in 2002 by Peter Stanley, the Australian War Memorial’s principal historian, was controversial at the time but was on solid historical footings.

“In the euphoria of victory early in 1942 some visionary middle-ranking naval staff officers in Tokyo … proposed that Australia should be invaded, in order to forestall it being used as a base for an Allied counteroffensive (which of course it became),” Stanley wrote.

“The plans got no further than some acrimonious discussions. The Army dismissed the idea as “gibberish” …  the Navy General Staff also deprecated it, unable to spare the million tons of shipping the invasion would have consumed.”

The plan, instead, was to isolate Australia by controlling the islands to our north. That would have disrupted or destroyed Australia’s trade with the rest of the world; our economy, still struggling after the twin blows of depression and war, would have collapsed. But the Japanese leaders had already signed their own death warrant by attacking Pearl Harbour and bringing a reluctant America into the war.

The war in New Guinea was arguably in Australia’s core interests. In that, it is alone among all the significant armed conflicts in which this country has been involved.

The popular idea is that Australia’s dependency and allegiance switched suddenly and neatly in 1942 from Britain to America. The truth is more complicated.

As Allan Gyngell points out in Fear of Abandonment, Australian policy was forcefully geared to keeping both involved in Asia and the Pacific. The Menzies government, particularly, tailored foreign policy principally towards this overarching goal. Australia’s commitment of ground troops in Malaysia during the Konfrontasi period with Indonesia between 1963 and 1966 was an example.

“It was both a way of reinforcing a British commitment to Asia and a signal to the United States that Australia was prepared to carry some of the burden of its own defence, Gyngell wrote. “The government’s argument for ‘forward defence’, a concept that would dominate Australian military planning for the next fifteen years, was simple: as Menzies explained it in April 1955, ‘if there is to be a war for our existence, it should be carried on by us as far from our own soil as possible’.”

Both of those ideas – keeping Britain and Australia engaged in the region, and  “forward defence” idea, which has come to dominate security planning again in our own time – were simple, easy to sell and disastrously wrong. They both led to our engagement in a series of wars which had little or no direct impact on Australia’s core security interests: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

By the late 1960s, Britain was consumed by an economic crisis. It could no longer afford to maintain the pretence of being a global power and, in 1967, announced the withdrawal of its forces “east of Suez”.

But the idée fixe that Australia was incapable of defending itself from the Asian threat has persisted until today. The Albanese Labor government in 2025 is following essentially the same security script that the Menzies Liberal government adopted in the 1950s.

Australia: a sovereign state at last?

For two centuries following the Reformation, Europe was consumed by religious war, much as the Middle East is today. The Eighty Years War, the Thirty Years War, the War of the Mantuan Succession, the Dutch-Portuguese War, the Franco-Spanish War, and the War of the Portuguese Restoration killed many millions of people, devastated and depopulated large areas and destroyed economies and societies.

Eventually, they had all had enough. Two treaties were signed in 1648, known together as the Peace of Westphalia. They provided not only an end to one of the most destructive periods in human history but led to the development of a set of principles which have guided international relations ever since.

Those ideas of state sovereignty – that each nation should be left to conduct its own internal affairs – mirror those laid down later for personal conduct by John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and others. The deceptively simple idea is that each person or country should have as much freedom as it likes, up to the point at which it interferes with the freedom of others.

Kissinger, Nixon

After the Peace of Westphalia, a form of international relations – the balance of power – naturally followed. “In the West,” wrote Henry Kissinger, the only examples of balance-of-power systems were among the city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, and the European state system which arose out of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The distinguishing feature of these systems was to elevate a fact of life – the existence of a number of states of substantially equal strength – into a guiding principle of world order.”

For the next century and a half, wars were mostly limited and fought to prevent the emergence and dominance of one great power, rather than to create that power. The system was disrupted but not destroyed by the chaos that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Between 1815 and 1914, Europe was mostly at peace.

That peace was not disrupted by the rise of the British Empire, which sought its territorial gains outside of Europe. But the emergence of two rival empires (Soviet and American) and the attempts to create a third (German) ended any possibility of a balance of power in Europe or in the world during the 20^th century.

But now, with the decline of the American Empire and the death of the Russian, the world is faced with another period in which power must be kept in balance. Four centres of power are now emerging: The US, China, Europe and India. The challenge now for smaller, less powerful nations like Australia is how to live in peace and security in this new multipolar world, in which it is no longer possible to outsource our defence. For the first time in its history, Australia must find its own way.

The folly of strategic offence

The Australian Defence Force is not designed to defend Australia. It is designed to take part in American wars.

The most obvious example is the AUKUS project. Under that plan, Australia is to buy a between three and five huge nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines. Later still, there will be a new fleet of even larger nuclear submarines built in England, and a transfer of various advanced technologies from the US to Australia. That second “pillar” is unlikely to be in place before the late 2040s and probably later.

A general rule-of-thumb is that for every three submarines, two will be on shore for refitting, training and maintenance, and one will be in the water. So – if AUKUS goes ahead – Australia will have one or (at most) two Virginia-class boats to secure the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The plan has been condemned by a succession of senior political figures, including former prime ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull and former foreign ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans.

“The submarines in question will be, for all practical purposes, an extension of the American fleet,” said Evans recently, “available at the click of a presidential finger to support the US in any military enterprise, however misguided or against our own national interests, in which it may choose to engage.”

These submarines are too few and too big to operate successfully in the shallow waters around Australia. They only make sense as part of the American Pacific Fleet.

Evans, who was the most effective foreign minister Australia has ever had, went on:

“There is the Stirling submarine port, and Henderson dry-dock facility, both near Perth, and a possible further east coast submarine base, all now freely available for US use. There is the Darwin marine base, and the critically important B-52 base at Tindal. All of this in addition to the Pine Gap facility, crucial for missile early warning and targeting as well as general intelligence collection, and long understood to be a likely early target if we were ever drawn into conflict alongside the US.

“So we now have targets on our back right across the continent, all painted on the assumption that these American bases are an insurance policy price worth paying for the protection we would be buying from the US under the ANZUS alliance, and as a return for ‘a hundred years of mateship’. And all on the assumption that we face a real threat of military attack in the foreseeable future – maybe as early as 2027 – from a formidable regional foe, the People’s Republic of China.

“It is my view that neither of these assumptions is well-founded, and that Australian defence and security policy needs to be refocused accordingly.”

We are paying a lot of money to make ourselves part of America’s armed forces. Already, $5.29 billion has been spent on the aborted French contract and the downpayments to the United States and Britain. The government has been particularly opaque about the British payments but the recipients, Rolls Royce Submarines, have been more forthcoming. Australia is contracted to give them $4.7 billion by 2034. On the basis of that schedule, about $460 million is likely to have already been paid.

The official estimate (in 2021) was that the cost of AUKUS to Australia would amount to between $268 and $368 billion over 30 years. But that was in 2021 dollars, and it does not take into account the likely cost blowouts in such an exceptionally complex project as this. By the end of 30 years, the real cost could be double the budgeted amount. There is also no ceiling on those outlays. Once Australia is irrevocably committed, it will have to bear those unforeseen costs.

An ADF that’s fit for purpose

In a new world, Australia needs – finally – to look after itself. We are eminently capable of doing so, but only if we change our historical posture from offence to defence. By doing so, we will make ourselves much safer and we will be spending much less.

This continent lends itself to defence. China would have to traverse 4,000 kilometres of ocean before reaching Australia with a vast armada that would be vulnerable to attack. It’s impossible see why they would rationally do such a thing but, if they did, a defence-oriented ADF would render it too risky to try. That strategy – showing any would-be aggressor that attack would be too costly to contemplate – is what has kept Switzerland safe for centuries.

A long-standing rule-of-thumb is that an attacker needs at least three times  a defender’s strength and firepower to succeed. Put simply, it is easier to defend an established position than to successfully attack it.

“If there is rough parity in the size and quality of opposing forces, the attacker will collapse first because the attacker takes heavier losses,” wrote US strategist John Mearsheimer.

The examples Mearsheimer uses are all for land-based operations. When a large body of water intervenes, an is likely to need a ratio of strength much higher than three-to-one. In the unlikely event of an attack on Australia taking place, we would be at a clear advantage – assuming that our defence forces were appropriately designed, trained and equipped. At the moment, they are not.

An ADF conceived to defend the continent would be very different to the one we have. In a recent eponymous book, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen calls it the Echidna Strategy.

“An echidna is no threat to anything other than ants and termites, so it cannot induce fear among larger creatures,” he explains. “But by its sharp quills, it does warn them to keep their distance. It does signal to them that, should they decide to attack, the costs are likely to exceed the benefits.”

A defensive strategy would require a major redesign of the ADF and its equipment. That by itself would send an important signal to other countries, Roggeveen said: “Training, doctrine and declared policy can combine with our arms purchases to signal defensive intent. If we never train to do it, if our doctrine doesn’t prepare us for it and if our politicians repudiate it, then chances are we won’t do it in wartime.”

Rapidly evolving technology also compels us to change the way we equip our armed forces. Surface ships are becoming more vulnerable to remote missile attack. Submarines, once invisible when submerged, are now becoming more visible. Within a decade or two, the oceans may become essentially transparent, leaving submariners with nowhere to hide.

Platforms which until now have had missiles numbered in the tens are now getting them in the hundreds. Before long, it will be in thousands. In this new era of missiles and drones, the air force will be better served by platforms that can stand well back from their targets and launch huge numbers of missiles and drones at once. Sophisticated, expensive fighter aircraft cannot do that.

Albert Palazzo, a former longtime director of war studies for the Australian army, and who is now a professor at UNSW Canberra, has taken the first comprehensive look at what the ADF needs in this new era. It’s summarised in his new book, The Big Fix: Rebuilding Australia’s National Security.

What Roggeveen calls “the echidna strategy’, Palazzo calls “the strategic defensive”. It’s a radical departure from what we now have.

The navy of the future, Palazzo writes, should not be principally equipped with manned surface ships or submarines. They are too vulnerable to be of use, putting their sailors at unacceptable risk. Instead, surface vessels would be restricted to supply and mine-sweeping ships.

“The RAN’s future does not lie with crewed platforms,” he writes. “The government should cancel all the acquisitions it has recently announced. Otherwise, they will be rendered useless by the shift in the character of maritime war … To become a Strategic Defensive-minded maritime state no longer requires a fleet of large crewed warships.

Australia’s naval shipyards would maintain their relevance: “The coming end of the crewed fleet does not mean these workers have to end up on the scrap heap. Instead, they can build the needed uncrewed vessels, as well as drones, and not in ones and twos, but in the thousands.”

The air force, too, needs transformation. “Instead of embracing divergent thinking, Palazzo writes, “the RAAF hamstrings itself by continuing to limit its definition of air combat capability to fast jets, while ignoring the ability of other aircraft it flies to carry missiles. The government is similarly culpable in allowing this to happen. A big change for the future of air power is that it is now possible to use the RAAF’s transport fleet of C-17A Globemaster III and C130J-30 Hercules aircraft as missile launchers … They are actually more suitable than the F-35 to carry out an air strike mission against a distant target …

“The idea is that when a transport aircraft reaches its launch point, the crew opens the cargo ramp, palletised missiles roll out the back, the missiles separate, ignite and head to their targets.”

For the army, he notes that there are already plans for “littoral manoeuvre” –  operations in shallow coastal waters and on land nearby.

“Not since the Second World War have the coastal waters to Australia’s north been perceived as a highway through which to facilitate manoeuvre … This new tasking also means that the army will have to turn the page on two decades of low-intensity fighting against terrorists and insurgents, and again focus on how to fight a powerful state-based adversary …

“All of the recent defence policy documents contain a glaring gap that defies explanation, especially in light of the wars that are currently being waged. The [Integrated Investment Program] contains a trivial amount of money for the army to accelerate and expand its ownership of drones.”

There is no sign, either from the armed forces themselves or from the government, that there is any significant shift in thinking about defence policy. Continuing as we are has immense dangers and immense costs. Cleaving too closely to the United States will do the opposite of protecting us. It threatens to drag us into a war with China that the Americans, and we, would be likely to lose. We are safer alone.

Hunter-class frigates ... expensive duds

We will also save a lot of money. Cancelling AUKUS – a first priority for Australia becoming an independent sovereign state – would save hundreds of billions of dollars. Ending expensive, inadequate purchases would free up money for other things. Cancelling one project alone – the much-criticised Hunter-class frigates –  would save around $30 billion.

Every dollar spent on defence is money that cannot be spent on other national priorities. The massive waste incurred in almost every significant defence purchase represents a kind of theft from the nation’s health and education systems, its capacity to support the vulnerable and to create a better society.

It is the first duty of any national government to protect the integrity of its territory and its way of life. That not only involves the armed forces but diplomacy and trade. The concept of security is not limited to armed force but must include other ways of protecting our people and our interests: health and housing are security issues too.

We are not doing any of these things adequately or even intelligently. For the foreseeable future, that seems unlikely to change.