PM’s AUKUS call was about an election, not war and peace

And it has been ever thus with Keating: careering wildly down the fast slope of politics, knocking out bystanders and those who get in his way as he goes.

Where he has led our national debate in the process though has been, and should always be, more important than the roadkill incurred along the way.

Profoundly important questions

This week the former prime minister was still doing it: sinking holes below the waterline in the too-comfortable bipartisan consensus around AUKUS that has seen us embrace a huge change in our strategic, defence, political and economic environment with an alarming lack of real discussion.

His savage mouth thrills some and appals others. Often its worst victim is Keating himself because it can both distract from, and diminish, the power of his arguments.

But you don’t even have to agree with his assessment to realise he is posing profoundly important questions that have just slipped us by in this debate.

Most significant of these, as another former cabinet minister said this week, is that “the China ‘threat’ is now a given and never questioned”.

Critics of Keating say he is out of touch and has too soft a view of China.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was making this argument this week in trying to defend himself and his foreign and defence ministers from Keating’s caustic assessment.

The problem for the government – and the China hawks – is that they haven’t alternatively defined what they think the China threat really is.

They might pooh-pooh the former PM’s argument that the only type of threat China can pose is if it plans to invade Australia.

But what is it we are actually trying to achieve here?

The Chinese military build-up is, without doubt, alarming. The ruthless approach of “president for life’ and strongman President Xi Jinping has changed the way we think about China. Talk of war over Taiwan has gone quickly in a few years from hypothetical to seeming very real.

But that doesn’t explain why we have moved from a strategic position based on the idea of ‘Defence of Australia’ to, in the next twenty years, a Forward Defence position built around a fleet of second-hand nuclear-powered submarines that sit in the South China Sea.

What are they supposed to be doing?

Keating says they are there to take out Chinese submarines before they get far out of port.

If we discount the prospect of an imminent Chinese invasion and consider lower-level conflict in the region between China and its neighbours, are those submarines just there as a deterrent for the Chinese to get too many big ideas?

Or is Keating right in saying we are locking ourselves in to support continued United States hegemony over the Pacific?

Taiwan question

What is Australia’s position on conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan?

The now opposition leader and then defence minister Peter Dutton declared in late 2021 that it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action [over Taiwan] if the US chose to take that action”. Last year he stepped back somewhat from that position.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong – who unfairly copped a savaging from Keating this week – has been at pains for months to dial right back the rhetoric on Taiwan.

But the government’s thinking about whether we would become involved in a dispute over Taiwan is surely a threshold test for understanding our strategic environment.

Unfortunately, bipartisanship has robbed us of any serious debate. There is hardly a mention of China in the government’s rationale for what it has done, even if everyone knows that is what is at issue.

We have got to this point because in 2021 Scott Morrison announced the AUKUS deal in a similarly contrived media event to the one we saw in San Diego.

The then Labor opposition leadership was briefed on the “top secret” plan the afternoon before it is announced, and Anthony Albanese declared Labor’s full support the next day, without a proper or measured cabinet consideration of the proposal or the intelligence on which it was based.

This was about politics and ensuring Labor was not vulnerable to a national security “wedge” in the looming federal election. And Labor clearly now thinks it has the scope to do a reverse “wedgie” on the Coalition, entrenching itself with this announcement as the national security party.

But a national government cannot make such a huge strategic commitment, let alone a financial one, without explaining itself to the country, just because there is a cosy silence between the parties on the matter.

Peter Varghese, a former head of the Office of National Assessments and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, wrote in The Australian Financial Review this week that “decisions of this magnitude can easily emerge in an echo chamber”.

“But I would have thought that before we took decisions as momentous as the AUKUS submarines here would be a proper and forensic public discussion about other options and their underlying rationale,” he says.

Varghese observes that there are “strategic costs to weakening the discipline behind the Defence of Australia doctrine if that is where we are heading”.

It ties our fate more closely to “the mistaken view that we can always rely on the United States to come to our defence”.

“Mistaken, not because the US is unreliable or feckless, not because the alliance is no longer central to our security, not even because Donald Trump or his ilk might return to the White House. It is mistaken because countries always act in their own interests and great powers even more so.

“To anchor policy on any other assumption is to ignore history.”

Before this week, “sovereignty” was a word bandied about quite a lot in relation to AUKUS: the argument was we needed a sovereign capability to build maintain and operate whatever submarine fleet we got; there were questions about who would actually be in charge of US-built boats that our sailors (actually we don’t have enough) were not trained to run; how these boats would be deployed – and by who; and what it would mean to have a growing number of US troops and assets being rotated through Australia.

That conversation, too, seems to have gone a little quiet, unlike the 79-year-old former prime minister.