Is Australia ready for the war over Taiwan that Kevin Rudd has said has a one-in-three chance of happening within three years? The invasion that would almost certainly mean that all our exports to China stop, that all our imports from China stop, that our export income and our fuel supplies almost immediately dry up, and—quite possibly—that there are missile strikes on Australia itself against which we currently have almost no air defences whatsoever. And that’s before we’re called upon to join any American action in defence of Taiwan which could readily see combat losses on a scale unseen since World War Two.
Successive governments bear a great deal of blame for a decade of economic stagnation, societal fragmentation and strategic drift—underpinned by a deep loss of national self-confidence. A Taiwan crisis could turn national decline into an existential challenge if we turn out to lack the resilience to resist sustained economic and military pressure.
For at least five years now, Australian leaders have solemnly intoned that we face the worst strategic situation since the late 1930s, while taking almost no serious steps to deal with it. If anything, over the past five years, our military capability has been cannibalised for AUKUS submarines that will arrive long after the period of peak danger; our economic vulnerability to Chinese supply chains has increased; and our national torpor towards stirring ourselves for our own protection has deepened.
After a generation of brainwashing that Australia exists on stolen land, opinion polls show that about half of young Australians don’t believe our country is worth defending and would not fight for Australia should we be attacked. What’s perhaps even worse, after telling us that our strategic circumstances are alarming, our leaders then reassure us that there’s really nothing to worry about because war would be in no one’s interests—even though the real wars that are already taking place around the world, the shooting wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, plus the grey zone war already being waged against Taiwan, show that economic logic and rational calculation alone do not determine the fate of nations.
The alarm needs to be sounded now—repeatedly and vigorously—if at the eleventh hour we are to ready ourselves militarily, economically and, perhaps most importantly, psychologically, for a potential struggle ahead. Preferably to avoid it altogether but, if not, to survive it as a sovereign independent nation, in the same way our forebears endured and triumphed in the epic struggles of the past. After all, the best way to keep the peace is to be ready to resist, because weakness is provocative. It’s not wishful thinking that deters aggression but fear that the price of aggression is just too high.