Labor veterans rise to the cause of sovereignty

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Lead Editorial

18 September 2024
Vol. 26 No. 38

Four years ago, in the middle of the firestorm over Australia-China relations inflamed by the political response to the COVID pandemic, the Australian Citizens Party (ACP) seemingly stood alone to combat the deliberate anti-China disinformation coming through the paid agents of the US and UK governments at outfits such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Their “approved” disinformation led to a collapse in relations with our biggest trading partner; loss of Australian export markets in China (that America quickly took over—“loyalty” only going one way); the 2021 announcement of the enormously expensive AUKUS partnership and submarine deal; and then Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s ominous ANZAC Day 2022 proclamation that “we must prepare for war”.

Since that low point in 2020, although Australia has further locked itself into the Anglo-American war machine’s agenda against China, the ACP no longer feels it stands alone in combating it. And our efforts have contributed to a shift in rhetoric, including from Peter Dutton, who is now on a charm offensive to win votes back from the Australian Chinese community. Dutton told the Australia China Business Council on 12 September that a “constructive relationship is paramount in our minds” and he wants trade to grow “exponentially”; back on June 11 he said: “I’m pro-China and the relationship that we have with them. I want that trading relationship to increase.”

While welcome—and it wouldn’t have happened without the ACP standing up to the extreme McCarthyism that gripped Australia completely under Scott Morrison—nevertheless it’s only rhetoric. The reality is still the increasingly dangerous hand-over of Australia’s military, resources, and territory to the USA’s war plans. That’s why it’s so important that statesmen of significant standing are increasingly speaking out not just against war, but more fundamentally against Australia giving up its national sovereignty to the AUKUS war operation.

The latest is former ALP Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, who has joined fellow Labor senior statesman Paul Keating and Bob Carr to denounce AUKUS, in a scathing column  in The Australian newspaper under the headline “Independence too big a price for AUKUS fantasy”. Predicting AUKUS “will prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions Australia has ever made”, Evans gave five reasons why: 

1. “Zero certainty” of the timely delivery of the eight AUKUS boats.
2. Not actually useful for Australia’s defence, with only two of the eight “deployable across our vast maritime environment at any one time”.
3. The “eye-watering” cost will make it much harder to acquire other capabilities such as state-of-the-art missiles, aircraft and drones that would be more important for selfreliant defence against invasion.
4. The price now being demanded by the USA has become indefensibly high.
5. The exorbitant price will never guarantee absolute protection by our AUKUS partners.

“It is hard to conceive of Australia ever being a target of any kind of Chinese military attack short of our being sucked into fighting alongside the US in a war not of our making, and manifestly not in our national interest”, Evans wrote. “But that prospect is now very real.”

Evans emphasised the fundamental issue that AUKUS strips Australia of its sovereignty: “The issue that most troubles me, Keating and Carr in all of this—and which most seems to enrage AUKUS defenders—is what we see as the loss of Australian sovereign independence that’s necessarily involved. … Are we all just meant to ignore [US Under-Secretary of State] Kurt Campbell’s indiscreet observation at the time of the AUKUS announcement that ‘we have them locked in now for the next 40 years’? I have had personal ministerial experience of being a junior allied partner of the US in a hot conflict situation—the first Gulf War in 1991—and my recollections are not pretty. … All this is not just depressing, but sickening….”

A powerful intervention that’s now part of a chorus of voices defending sovereignty.

In this week's issue: 
•    Email the Attorney-General: Reject Dan Duggan’s extradition!
•    Labor’s reasons for a disinformation law are based on … disinformation!
•    Former governors call BS on RBA board changes
•    It’s a bust! Bipartisan deal on RBA reforms falls apart
•    Aussie regulator junks ‘bail-in’ bonds as strategies fall apart
•    Implementing bail-in requires rolling back democracy: JPMorgan
•    AUKUS: defending the indefensible
•    Five rings and one onion
•    This is not what Albo planned—you forced him!
•    Senator: ‘Break up the banking cartel’!
•    ALMANAC: To end wars and austerity, defeat the oligarchy! Part 1

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