Political Managerialism Weakens Australia

Everything is about political management, nothing is about national security.

From an Australian perspective, the most significant thing about the US attack on Iran is that we have not been involved in the slightest. This stands in stark contrast with the fact that Australia is the only country that’s been with the United States in every major conflict, ever since American troops first went into action in the Great War at the Battle of Le Hamel under John Monash’s overall command.

Australia was always there for America – in Korea, in Vietnam, in the first and second Gulf wars, and in Afghanistan. We are not America’s most important ally but we have been its most dependable one, because successive Australian governments realised that the leader of the free world had to be supported if freedom were to flourish.

Australia was there when Islamic State burst out of the Syrian desert in mid-2014 and reached the gates of Baghdad: air-dropping supplies to the Yazidis besieged on Mt Sinjar, running guns to the Kurds in Erbil, helping to coordinate the liberation of Mosul, rebuilding the Iraqi army at Taji, and flying strike missions across the Middle Eastern war zone. More recently, following America’s lead, Australia has made modest contributions to arming Ukraine.

Yet in all probability, a few tepid words will be Australia’s sole part in the current action against a regime so evil that it routinely slaughters tens of thousands of its own citizens, has manically sought the nuclear weapons needed to annihilate both Israel and America, and has even funded terrorist attacks on our own soil. The Albanese government’s first response to the joint Israeli-American preemptive strike was the Foreign Minister’s call for “de-escalation”; as if decapitating the Islamist tyranny and severely weakening its ability to export terrorism (even if full regime change might not be achieved) was not unambiguously good for the wider world.

Eventually, the Prime Minister said that Australia “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” but stressed that Australia had no notice of the attack and that “Washington has not requested Australian assistance” nor did he “anticipate such a request”. Compared to its studied even-handedness between the liberal democratic government of Israel and the Hamas death cult this was at least belated moral clarity; but it’s typical of the Albanese government that, while it eventually favours the right thing, it won’t lift a finger to bring it about.

It’s hardly surprising that Washington failed to consult Australia given the Albanese government’s ostentatious refusal to use our armed forces for anything other than disaster relief and its reluctance to call out Islamist extremism. In December 2023, the government’s refusal to send a frigate to help enforce freedom of navigation in the Red Sea was the first time since the ANZUS alliance was forged in 1951 that Australia has turned down an American request for military help. At the time, there were five frigates and destroyers docked at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base. Either they could not safely be deployed, lacked crew, or – more likely – the government did not want to upset the Islamist lobby here in Australia by deploying them against Iran’s Houthi allies.

That we were neither asked for help nor advised of what was coming speaks volumes for Australia’s shrinking stature in the wider world. This of the country that sent 330,000 men overseas in the Great War and then put almost a million into uniform 25 years on, in order to help preserve democratic freedoms.

Our government had enough inkling of what was about to happen to remove non-essential staff from our Middle Eastern embassies and to issue travel warnings – but not enough gumption to call the Americans to offer the assistance that a decent ally should have been ready to provide. The same command and control aircraft, aerial refuellers, and strike fighters that did so much to defeat Islamic State should have been volunteered again. Quite apart from the fact that they would have been engaged in making the world safer for free peoples everywhere, they would have been acquiring priceless operational experience, and cementing Australia’s value as a friend and ally.

Albanese at the AUKUS meeting in San Diego 13 March 2023. Via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump’s scornful jibe at Britain’s PM that “he’s no Winston Churchill”, so far, might equally be deployed against our own, who’s no Billy Hughes. Let’s hope he might yet emulate John Curtin, the World War I pacifist who eventually mobilised the whole country to fight against Germany and Japan. And while Keir Starmer has shamefully run down Britain’s armed forces, at least Royal Air Force jets have now engaged Iranian drones in the Gulf, a RN ship is being deployed to the Mediterranean, and British bases are finally being made available to US forces.

John Curtin

Meanwhile, our contribution to global freedom is deploying consular officials to the Middle East to organise an exodus of frightened expats; plus reassuring assumed-to-be-terminally-timid voters that an Iranian strike on Dubai’s al-Minhad airbase caused no casualties among the Australian personnel there.

The Albanese government is fond of flagging defence initiatives but almost all of them are spending money in the far distant future or supposedly creating jobs in Australia rather than actually boosting our fighting strength now. Other than three air warfare destroyers we have neither any serious anti-missile defences nor any real drone or counter-drone capability, even though the Ukraine conflict has made it obvious how central this is to modern war-fighting. Everything is about political management rather than real national security.

It’s crystal clear where this is leading. When the US eventually asks us – as it inevitably will – to join in contingency planning against a communist Chinese assault on democratic Taiwan, the Albanese government wants to be able to say that we’d like to help but can’t. Or that we could and would but only in a decade’s time when, or if, we finally get the AUKUS subs. It’s pacifism disguised as forward planning. Even though becoming an economic colony of Beijing would be the ultimate fate of an Australia without solid alliances. Perhaps that’s what some in the Albanese government would actually prefer to any readiness to fight for ourselves and our like-minded partners.

Rendering of SSN-AUKUS submarine. By BAE Systems - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=129617601

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s talk of “middle power diplomacy”, reiterated in our own parliament yesterday, is no more than a rhetorical cop out to cover the green left’s phobia against having, and if needs be, using the force that’s vital to support our national values and interests.

After all, any rule of law worthy of the name requires a democratic parliament to make it, impartial judges to administer it, and – most importantly – honest police to enforce it. The so-called “global rules-based order” only exists to the extent that America and its allies have successfully intimidated predator nations from challenging it. Notwithstanding his mockery of Canada as the 51^st state, and verbal bullying of Denmark over Greenland, Trump is actually doing far more to uphold it than any recent president. In an imperfect world, better a flawed man doing good things than better ones doing nothing.

The current attempt to destroy forever the Iranian theocracy’s nuclear cravings will make the world safer, fairer and better – yet the shameful, humiliating reality is that Australia is doing nothing practical to bring it about.