As has been observed of the 2025 Australian election campaign, we seem in grave danger of sleepwalking into another three years of what’s already disastrously failed for the last three. If, as it’s often said, people don’t vote oppositions in, they chuck governments out, it has to be wondered just how high is our tolerance for political pain. The Albanese government is widely acknowledged as one of the worst in living memory. Certainly, living standards have rarely plummeted so terribly since the Great Depression (and another Labor government, as it happened). So, how much more badly do they have to screw the country before we stop being gluttons for punishment?
When it comes to the nation’s defence, it’s hard to imagine just when we’ve ever had a more dangerously incompetent lot in charge, at such a dangerous turn in world affairs. At a time when a third world war is widely feared, rather than building up our defence it has been pushed into a state of catastrophic decline.
In fact, says historian Geoffrey Blainey, Australia is more defenceless than at any time in its history. Even in the run-up to WWI, a war nobody seriously anticipated (if anything, the opposite), Australia was far better prepared than it is now.
In 1914 a mass of Australian boys and young men had already received some military training: such training was compulsory. In contrast our armed forces today have trouble in recruiting volunteers. The percentage of the male population with any kind of military training is tiny compared with the situation in 1914. At that time most citizens and the major political parties emphasised the need for a strong army and navy.
Contrary to the determined campaign against even new submarines, our wiser leaders of 1914 were willing to pace for the most expensive weapon of the times, the dreadnought-class battleship.
Australia even placed an order for a fast dreadnought: built in Scotland, it was christened HMAS Australia. Most maritime nations could not afford even one such ship.
My calculation is that Australia had invested, in proportion to population, more money in buying a major warship than did most of the world’s naval powers. We were more adventurous than France, Russia, Italy and Austria-Hungary. What excitement when HMAS Australia – the most powerfulship in the Southern Hemisphere – steamed into Sydney Harbour on October 6, 1913.
A year later it led a force that captured the German harbour and wireless station at Rabaul in the present Papua New Guinea.
At the same time, the fundamental industrial capability of modern warfare – iron and steel making – is in grave danger of vanishing from our shores.
Even more astonishing, successive federal governments have done nothing while a third-order branch of government signed away our most strategically critical port to our looming enemy. It’s as if, in the 1930s, Canberra allowed a local council to sell a key strategic airfield to Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.
Darwin is the star harbour on our northern coast and potentially crucial for our armed forces and perhaps one day for America’s too. A leading Chinese commercial and logistics organisation must have been amazed that it acquired the right in 2015 to operate there for 99 years. What a prize!
Beijing surely would not dream of allowing the US, Australia or Japan to gain control of a strategic harbour on a vital stretch of China’s coast.
The decision was made by the Northern Territory government in return for a lump sum of money. But should a minor branch of the nation’s political system – not even a state – be allowed to make such a strategic decision?
Just how critical Darwin is can be gauged by the fact that China has been more than happy to run the port at a loss. To gain such a beachhead in a potential enemy’s territory is cheap at any price.
Our comically clueless defence department refuses to even see the problem. This, despite having a more top-heavy defence hierarchy than at any time in our history, and far more than any of our allies. Our overstaffed brass are paid, for all their Keystone Cops incompetence, roughly three times the salary of their American or British counterparts. We can’t, apparently, afford more fighter planes or subs, but we can afford overpaid clowns who decorate themselves with more bling than a 1970s African dictator.
Are our ever-changing political leaders or the heads of our armed forces or the platoons of Canberra bureaucrats mostly to blame for our military weaknesses? Australia is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world, and therefore we as citizens and voters have also to share the blame.
If we re-elect the Albanese government, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
But Albanese does not accord even a middling priority to what should be the leader’s first duty – defending the nation in turbulent times. He trusts that defence will not be a major election topic.
For at least seven years, however, China has been provocative on sea and land, and one of its countless gestures of defiance was to send, early in 2025, war vessels far into Australian territorial seas without even notifying Canberra.
Worse, without Canberra even noticing. It took a commercial airline pilot to spot what our money-grubbing generals could not: that an entire fleet was steaming with impunity around our undefended coasts. Compounding the government’s incompetence, it clearly had no idea that Russia is also intent on strong-arming its way onto our doorstep.
Maybe we should just surrender to Beijing and have done with it. Surely even they couldn’t fuck up as badly as the clowns we insist on electing?
