The battle is on to see which side of politics can boast of siphoning the most profits to the weapons industry – at the expense of health, education, climate and environmental action, and everything else we need – and of bowing more obsequiously before the US and its war machine.

Serious examination of AUKUS and other “defence and security” matters by our parliamentarians is in a parlous state. If it were left to our two biggest political parties, there would be none. There are simply platitudes aplenty, which our mainstream media (with some notable exceptions) fail to challenge.

A recent example was a Canberra Times article published on December 4 in one of its regular defence supplements: “Five hard truths defence must face as Trump returns to power (paywall), by opposition defence spokesperson Andrew Hastie. It was a selection of fear-mongering claims masquerading as facts.

Perhaps the most startling claim was Hastie’s assertion that “We won’t build confidence with the Trump administration if we allow this drift and dereliction in defence policy [under Labor, he says] to continue”. Many would question why on earth we should align ourselves with an incoming president who bears many of the hallmarks of fascist leadership, and where that will lead us.

The following are among the many other aspects of AUKUS that Hastie’s article gives rise to, although they don’t even scratch the surface of why the agreement with our allies is such a disaster:

Vying to see who can better cripple our budget

Despite Labor backing every bit of AUKUS’s eye-watering budgetary costs – $368 billion plus blowouts for the submarines alone, and the unknown cost of a vast array of other new attack weaponry – Hastie says it’s not enough. He says that we must “fire up the foundries of freedom” as we did during World War 2, implying, with no evidence, analogous circumstances.

In responding to Hastie several days later, Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy was at pains to set out how Labor is in fact spending ”$50 billion [over the next decade] more than Peter Dutton plans to invest in defence”.

Thus the battle is on to see which side of politics can boast of siphoning the most profits to the weapons industry – at the expense of health, education, climate and environmental action, and everything else we need – and of bowing more obsequiously before the US and its war machine.

Our security hinging on a deeply flawed strategy

In the absence of any better pretext for exorbitant spending on war preparations, both major parties espouse the notion of “deterrence”. In Hastie’s words, we must “haunt the mind of [our] opponent” and “instil fear and anxiety in them”, the assumption being that any opponent will dutifully become fearful, anxious and submissive in accordance with our strategy. There is no hint of the possibility of things turning out differently.

Astonishingly, Hastie cited World War 1 – a war that arose in the context of a huge arms race – as an example of “deterrence” saving Australia. The great European powers had roughly doubled spending on armies between 1904 and 1914, in addition to engaging in a naval arms race.

David Herrmann, in his book, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War, writes that “when the July crisis of 1914 developed, the atmosphere of military competition made war a far more likely outcome than it would have been a decade earlier”.

Deterrence has failed multiple times since World War 1, and its unreliability is rarely disputed. See, for example, references to deterrence failing here, here, here and here. This raises critical questions. For example, what would happen to the Australian people, cities, economy, trade and everything else if deterrence fails and war were to break out between the US and China? And if it were a nuclear war?

Kellie Tranter stated in a recent Pearls and Irritations article, that, at the time of an FOI request she made in 2022, the Defence Minister had no estimates of the number of Australian casualties in the event of a war between the US and China.

AUKUS is being sold to us on the basis of a strategy that is known to fail, and yet none of our leaders have any apparent interest in how such failure would affect us.

A perpetual war economy?

A recent report from the Stimson Centre in the US, “The ugly truth about the permanent war economy” examined the potential consequences of increasing US national security spending. It stated “There are grave economic, strategic, and social implications of a military build-up, of which an informed public should be aware”.

One of the problems identified was that of de-mobilising military industries in the future. It stated “There are no clear off ramps to increased weapon production and little discussion about the long-term economic consequences of increasing national security spending, particularly if a great power conflict does not occur”.

AUKUS is clearly a long-term project, but we have been given no end-point or criteria for its success. The potential for an endless war economy is very real.

So, where does all this leave Australians, as our country becomes simply a launching pad for US attacks against China and, in return, a target of Chinese attacks in the event of war?

There are multiple questions relating to AUKUS that we must demand answers to. With a federal election looming in coming months, we must ensure that candidates are aware of the serious concerns within the community that AUKUS is putting us on the path to war.

Community sentiment is clearly not the deciding factor as to whether AUKUS survives (if it were, there would have been consultation on it rather than secrecy and obfuscation), but nevertheless the withholding of “social licence” is a very important step in undermining this most dangerous and provocative agreement.

https://johnmenadue.com/fear-mongering-claims-masquerading-as-facts-protect-aukus-from-parliaments-scrutiny/

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