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Foreign editor for The Australian Greg Sheridan addressed the National Civic Council’s 2024 Democratic Conference held on the weekend of February 2-4 on the state of geopolitics and how Australia is responding to a dynamic situation.

Greg was in conversation with the NCC’s Senior Advisory Council members Patrick J. Byrne and Peter Westmore.

In this second and final part of his address, Greg emphasises the gap between the Defence Department and the Government’s apparent lack of appreciation of present dangers to Australia’s security and what the Government should be doing to beef up the country’s defences.

Peter Westmore: Greg, from my observation, China is effectively employing chequebook diplomacy; they basically buy influence in these places. To counter that, Australia needs to be willing to spend more or invest more in those countries. But we don’t approach it that way. Even in terms of our aid program. A lot of that is done through NGOs. Well, Australia actually gets almost no benefit from the expenditures that our Government puts into NGOs for health and other things. I just wonder whether the focus of our attention is not on the central problem.

Greg Sheridan: That’s right, but I think it is getting better on that score. We are more ruthless now in labelling our aid as our aid. We can’t quite directly compete with the Chinese in straightforward bribes. The Chinese go into a country and put money in the account of a politician. We can’t quite do that, but we get very close; we give scholarships, we can offer exposure tourism trips to Australia.

We do have one huge advantage over China: South Pacific Islanders would like to live in Australia; none of them would like to live in China. And we have a big diaspora population of South Pacific Islanders, terrific people, hard workers, much more religious than the native Australian population. In fact, all of our churches now are filled only with migrants. and we really need to be developing those connections.

Certainly I don’t see why we’re giving any aid to corrupt United Nations bodies in Palestine which engage in anti-Semitic terrorism and propaganda. We should be focusing our aid budget on the South Pacific.

Patrick J. Byrne: Australia more likely faces blackmail than direct military attack. We know the vulnerabilities of our supply chains for pharmaceuticals and problems with cyber security and communications. Would you like to make any comment from your experience with governments and ministers over the issue of fuel security?

Greg Sheridan: No Australian government takes fuel security seriously. The great preponderance of our fuel reserves are in the United States. Now, it would be difficult to find any geostrategic analyst in the whole world to admire the United States more than I do, but to embrace complete absolute abject dependence on the United States for everything is profoundly dangerous.

I said to a minister in the last Coalition government that you’ve got to build three months’ fuel reserves in Australia; three months with rationing gives you six months. And he said to me, yeah, but you can’t hold out forever; six months isn’t much. But six months gives you breathing space, time for your allies to help you if you are being isolated.

Then, you know, an enemy wouldn’t have to blockade us completely; they’d just have to make the choke points impassable. Then we might get 50 per cent or 20 per cent or 10 per cent of what we normally get. At the moment, if that happened, we’d be on our knees in two weeks as we’ve never got more than two or three weeks’ fuel actually in the country.

Of course, probably that won’t happen because the Americans will prevent it from happening. Everything that we regard as an element of our own security will probably be OK because the Americans will look after it for us. But if the Americans ever decide that they have something else to do with their treasure and blood than provide for Australian security, we are in a world of hurt.

We have no fuel security, we continually shut our oil refineries, we’ve hollowed out our industry, we’ve got no manufacturing. We have this fantasy that we are going to make nuclear submarines in a minute but we can’t make chairs and tables, or even motor cars.

So, we are about as vulnerable as anybody could be, because we’re so far away from everybody. Ukraine is tremendously vulnerable to attack by Russia because Russia is next door, but it had one advantage over us: Russia was next door on its east, but it had a whole lot of friends and allies on its West. It has been supplied through Poland predominantly, and Poland’s a big strong country, and the Russians can’t intimidate Poland – at least until the change of government – and we don’t have any contiguous neighbour like that, and we could be isolated.

Safe from Attack?

And the only other quibble I make is that we can’t rule out that we will never be militarily attacked. You know the most depressing “strategic documents” you could ever read are the short stories of Anton Chekhov, writing about Russia in the 1890s and the early 1900s. They are wonderful short stories – great literature – about the Russian landed class, not the aristocracy, but the landed class, stories full of adultery and property disputes and neighbourly problems, family troubles and so on.

In this vast corpus of Chekhov’s stories, not one single character says, you know, what I should do is sell all my possessions and lands and take my money and migrate to America. And one minute later the whole of their society is gone in the Bolshevik revolution. But not one single character in this wonderful literary panoply ever thought their whole world would be just swept aside like that. But history is absolutely full of that. and we certainly would be able to make very little effort on our own behalf.

Peter Westmore: Greg, we have had defence white papers now going back 20 years saying that Australia faces no strategic threats for 15 years. Where are we now?

Greg Sheridan: We’re in a very, very bad situation. The Albanese Government is absolutely right to say these are the most difficult and challenging strategic circumstances Australia has confronted since the end of World War II; worse than the Vietnam War, worse than anything we confronted during the Cold War.

Yes, there were moments of nuclear tension between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War that could have obliterated all mankind. But in terms of specific threats to Australia, this is the most acute we’ve ever had because we are defenceless, and we essentially have no allies except the United States.

It used to be that we had New Zealand – and that augmented our capacity by 20 per cent – but New Zealand bugged out of strategic reality a long time ago. Everything that we regard as our birthright and our security depends on the American security guarantee.

I think the Americans will get through their current difficulties, and whether they elect Donald Trump or re-elect Joe Biden – I wouldn’t buy either of them a cup of tea; I think they’re both hopeless: one’s too old, and one’s too crazy – but nonetheless I think the American system will sustain its alliances. But, whereas once there was a 1 per cent possibility that they might not, now there is maybe a 35 or 40 per cent possibility that they might not.

And if the American security guarantee disappears from our region, well, there is no constraint on Chinese behaviour, no constraint at all, and we have no idea what the limit of Chinese strategic ambition is.

China is engaged in the greatest military build-up in peacetime that we’ve ever seen, and in all human history, no military build-up like this has not resulted in the military being used. If you spend all your wealth and energy building a hammer, you will eventually find a nail.

Every year, China produces new naval platforms greater than our entire Navy. Now, what could we do about it? We could do a lot. We are the 12th or 13th richest country in the world, and we spend already more than $50 billion a year on our defence. But there is surely no nation in the world that spends its defence dollars worse than we do, and our ability to pour all that money down the toilet and get nothing for it is astounding.

The Worst Bipartisanship

This is a bipartisan failure. The current Government is not a speck better than the Coalition government before it. What did we get from 10 years of the Coalition government? Tony Abbott had the Japanese submarines. Malcolm Turnbull assassinated Tony Abbott then assassinated the Japanese subs. Malcolm Turnbull had the French subs. Scott Morrison assassinated Malcolm Turnbull and then assassinated the French subs.

Now we’ve got the AUKUS subs, but they’re coming in a sort of Star Wars time frame: you know, one day in a distant galaxy, hundreds of years in the future, we may or may not get some nuclear submarines.

In the meantime, what have we actually got? In our service fleet, we have eight aged, decrepit ANZAC frigates, some of the most lightly armed warships in the modern world. We can’t even send one to the Red Sea and at least one is permanently out of the water because we can’t even crew eight vessels. this is an unbelievably feeble surface fleet.

We’ve got three air warfare destroyers, which are the nearest thing we’ve got to a modern warship. They ‘re not very formidable compared to the Lindberg destroyers that the Americans have or the new destroyers that China and the South Koreans are building, but they’re not bad. But we’ve only got three of them; we learned how to build and then we stopped building them.

We alone among nations of our size and budget have no armed drones. Yet the lesson from Ukraine and from the Red Sea is the power of drones. They are cheap: you can send a drone in against a ship for $10,000 and the ship has to use a half-million dollar missile to knock the drone down. The ship fires 20 missiles to kill 20 drones, and it’s exhausted. But the makers of drones will give you hundreds or thousands of drones. There are anti-drone systems; we have none of them.

We have 100 fast jets; we are never going to have any more. We don’t have the pilots to fly the fast jets. The idea that you can defend the whole of continental Australia with 100 fast jets is absurd. Even so, the Air Force is certainly the best of our services.

The Army is in a profound recruitment crisis; the Defence Force is losing 12 per cent of its personnel every year and it’s not recruiting. Its advertisements are ridiculous: they’re all about woke social policy and gender equality. Why would you join a service where you could go to war if the whole purpose is to affirm gender diversity or something?

It is completely insane. Any young person can see that we don’t have any ships, the Army has no equipment, we have no role. The military doesn’t do anything. The result is that we have no capacity to defend ourselves.

What is interesting about this Red Sea decision is that either we can’t send an ANZAC frigate or we don’t want to; so we’re not even doing what we normally do, which is send a tiny niche capability to show the Americans that they’ve got our active support.

The only thing of consequence we give to the Americans is our geography – so they can disperse their forces here a bit – and our flag, our political support. But we could not be more vulnerable.

Not Ready, and We Know It

I’ll leave you with a final thought. After the Japanese bombed Darwin, there was a Royal Commission into the bad performance of our air defences and the panic that ensured. It was damning, and it said we knew this was a possibility; we never prepared our defences, and governments are culpable for the destruction which occurred.

Well. if we survive a military attack today, there will be a Royal Commission that will come to the same conclusion: we knew what was coming, so we had all of our 100 modern fighters there, all lined up as perfect targets in undefended airbases, all beautifully parked, neatly awaiting a Chinese missile on day one of the war.

The Chinese, with their vast naval resources, would mine our ports, and we have very little demining capability. Our six Collins-class submarines are still quite useful, although the Government is not putting Tomahawk missiles on them as it said it would before the election. But, if our submarines are in Stirling base, China just has to mine Stirling base, and our submarines are no longer a factor.

And everybody in the defence community knows all this, but, in the end, there are fewer votes in defence than there are in social programs; so the Government talks the talk, and it uses the symbolism of AUKUS but doesn’t actually do anything. But neither did the previous government; both sides of politics are 100 per cent culpable.

I cannot fathom our decision-making in defence; it’s unbelievable. Maybe one day, we’ll find that the whole Defence Department has been taken over by the Chinese intelligence services. It’s almost impossible to work out.

For example, we are now building 12 offshore patrol vessels that are the biggest police vessels in the history of the world – they are as big as corvettes or small frigates – but they have no weapons and no combat skin. For the same amount of money and really using the same design, you could build warships.

Another example. Modern missile systems are virtually modular – you can put lots and lots of missiles on a platform; you want missile trucks. But we are spending money to produce vessels that have no military application at all because they are for illegal fishing enforcement.

This is taking billions of dollars of money and a huge chunk of our minuscule shipbuilding capability. The company doing it, Luerssen, would be quite happy to switch to corvettes. It makes corvettes for a lot of other navies around the world. It uses the same design.

We have just finished building the Navantia air warfare destroyers with the Spanish; we could use the Navantia hull to build more air warfare destroyers or to build slightly bigger destroyers and put 100 missile cells on them instead of 50. If you’ve got 100 missile cells on your back, you’re a formidable warship because you can have a mix of long-range missiles and short-range missiles, and you can keep your enemy at a long distance because your strike capability is a long way away.

The Government promised before the last election that it would put Tomahawk missiles on the Collins; it requires a little bit of technical adjustment, and the Americans would have to start making submarine-based Tomahawks again, but they would do that for us. But we just decided we’re not going to do it. Maybe it would be offensive to the Chinese.

We were going to buy another squadron of F-35 aircraft; we could do that. Our own companies make offensive drones which the Ukrainians use. Our Government buys them and donates them to Ukraine, or the Americans buy them and donate them to Ukraine. We have not one in the Australian Defence Force, not one! So, we could acquire a few 100 drones.

We are talking about building missiles in this country, but we’re going to start by building the shortest-range artillery rockets that we can. They’re called GMLRS. They have a range of 70 to 90 kilometres.

At the moment, our artillery has a range of 40 kilometres; so if the enemy is in Bungendore, the Canberra-based artillery can do it some harm. When we have completed this fabulous elaborate missile-building program, if the enemy is in Goulburn. the Australian Army will be able to do it some harm.

We should be asking the Americans right now if we can build Tomahawks in Australia. Now that’s quite a process; you’d have to get into Congress to get approval. But, here’s the trick: it will never happen if you don’t start.

We could do all that. And, in a sense, that was all promised to us when Stephen Smith and Angus Houston undertook the Defence Strategic Review. This was all in the air; this was the discussion we were having. So, all I can conclude is that the Defence establishment doesn’t want Australia to have a war-fighting capability because, God knows, the Government might use it; and the Government itself has decided that it is not going to spend a single extra dollar on defence.

The Government is providing no effective leadership or supervision of Defence. Defence Minister Richard Marles is busy being Deputy Prime Minister and Defence has got him going off doing defence diplomacy everywhere, so he’s not supervising his department properly.

And Pat Conroy, a competent guy as Defence Industry Minister but he is simultaneously the Pacific Minister, and he is a junior minister, which means he has only a very small staff allocation; which means he’s not leading the Defence Department either.

High-Tech Waste

So, our Duke of Plaza-Toro Defence leadership, which is always leading from the rear-o, is embarking on its normal bizarre high-tech money-wasting enterprises.

We’re purchasing for $350 million the fifth Skyborne surveillance drone when the first one hasn’t come into service yet, they are obsolete – the U.S. has stopped producing them – and all they give you is surveillance. They don’t give you any weapons. You could do the same job much better with low Earth-orbit satellites.

Now, the previous government had a program to build low Earth-orbit satellites in Australia. But, in another stroke of genius, this Government cancelled that program. It talks all this baloney about all the high-tech it is going to do in AUKUS yet it won’t build satellites in Australia.

So, we embark on really high-tech stuff which is not relevant to us but gives Defence personnel wonderful careers and lovely opportunities to spend time in the United States. We are like a company that needs 500 utes and we start to build one Maserati in 25 years’ time.

Why are we doing this is a mystery. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin is child’s play compared to working out any rationale behind Australian Defence policy.

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Originally published in News Weekly. Photo by Lara Jameson.