Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On 27 December 1942, one of our greatest leaders, Prime Minister John Curtin, surveyed Australia's precarious strategic position in the face of Japanese advances during the Second World War and told the Australian people:

Without any inhibitions…I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.

Australia's conservatives reacted to this statement with horror, with the then Leader of the Opposition, Billy Hughes, declaring that it would be 'suicidal and a false and dangerous policy' for Australia to orientate itself away from the United Kingdom. Despite this instinctive conservative fear of change, Curtin's famous declaration became the foundation for a successful defence of Australia in the Second World War and 65 years of security partnership between Australia and the United States in the form of the ANZUS alliance.

ANZUS has endured because it is founded on shared values, interests and respect at multiple levels between the Australian and the American people, demonstrated by the fact that Australia is the only country in the world with a positive net migration flow from the United States; between our businesses, Australia's second-largest two-way trading relationship is with the United States; and our defence forces have served side by side in conflicts across the globe. The United States has been a champion of the rules based international order that has emerged since the Second World War, and this has been overwhelmingly in Australia's interests.

However, this relationship between Australia and the United States is receiving renewed scrutiny in this country in the wake of the election of the Trump administration. Indisputably, the Trump administration articulates a very different vision of the role of the United States in international affairs than any before it. I fully expect that there will be robust disagreements between Australia and the United States in the coming years. I have already spoken in this chamber about my disagreement with the administration's so-called Muslim ban—a ban that, in my view, is not in the security interests of Australia.

However, the great strength of the ANZUS alliance, as a mutual self-defence treaty, is the freedom it gives the participants to independently determine their own interests and commitments within the alliance. This has allowed the alliance to evolve within dramatically changed regional strategic circumstances. We can disagree without trashing a decades-long relationship that is far bigger than any individual. Just as Curtin stood up to Churchill to demand the 7th Division be used in the defence of Australia in engagements like Milne Bay and Kokoda, rather than in the prosecution of imperial aims in a futile campaign in Burma, so too can Australia exercise independence within ANZUS. The ALP exercised independence of this kind when it refused to support the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003—a position that has been vindicated many times over in the decade that has followed. We will need similar independence of thought in coming decades.

Australia is currently experiencing the greatest change in our strategic environment since the arrival of the First Fleet. The era of benign US hegemony in our region is waning and the Indo-Pacific is moving rapidly towards a multi-polar security environment. In recent years, China's economic growth has been accompanied by even more rapid growth in its military and it is now the second-largest defence spender in the world by some margin. Other nations in our region have responded in kind and, as a result, Asia has collectively outspent Europe on defence each year since 2012.

Neither reflexive anti-Americanism nor sinophobia offer Australia a path forward in this increasingly challenged security context. Instead, we will need to do the heavy lifting of forging a sophisticated strategic policy that leverages our alliance with the United States while also deepening our capacity to advance our own interests within our region. I have said before that this should mean that we pursue an international strategy that seeks to build expertise in South-East Asia as an urgent priority and as the basis for our future engagement with China, the United States and the broader region. Unfortunately, we are not well prepared for this new world. Australia currently has the thirteenth-largest military spend in the world, and the fifth-largest in Asia. But we are a small fish in a big pond. We have a large landmass and even larger strategic interests to defend. An adequately resourced Australian Defence Force is the price tag that we need to pay for an independent Australian foreign policy—the national asset that underwrites our ability to say 'no' to powerful allies and neighbours when we need to. It will only become more important in future years.

Similarly, Australia's diplomatic corps is small by international standards. It is the smallest in the G20. We are rapidly losing the South-East Asian capability that we established in the Public Service and academia in the 1990s. Asian language study, the foundation of understanding and engaging with our neighbours at the level of sophistication required to pursue complex strategic aims, is in freefall. To take just one example, there are currently fewer Australian high school students studying Bahasa Indonesia today than there were under the Whitlam government. There are just 588 in Victoria, 186 in New South Wales, 47 in Queensland and 48 in South Australia. More universities in Germany teach Bahasa Indonesia than in Australia.

Yet, in response to appeals that Australia focuses on building more security with Asia, we hear the reactionary cries from the conservatives that echo the change expressed by Billy Hughes in 1942.

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