Criticism of Australia’s alliance with the United States is not a surprising feature of public debate. What is surprising is to hear it from a Liberal member of parliament.
Opposition defence spokesperson Andrew Hastie’s call this week for greater transparency from the government regarding the status of US personnel stationed in Australia is therefore worth pausing on. “When America conducts combat operations, we want to know what our level of involvement will be,” Hastie said, calling for a “parties of government committee dedicated to defence so that we can have these debates”.
The Liberal party has, historically, been a party of full-throated support for the alliance. Debate about risks to national sovereignty stemming from Canberra’s 70-plus-year partnership with Washington have been more normally associated with the joint facilities such as Pine Gap or today with criticisms of AUKUS.
But from whatever perspective one arrives at this question, it is vital to discuss it.
Social licence is critical for any government to enact policies. To enact a set of policies as complex and significant as those involved in managing the alliance with America should require an enormous amount of this license. It is curious, then, that historically it has not.
Lowy Institute polling has consistently shown that while a majority of Australians consider the alliance with the United States to be important to Australia’s security, those numbers have only been vaguely equal with those who trust America to act responsibly in the world twice – in 2009 and 2011.
Australia’s defence and foreign policy discussions, particularly in relation to the United States, are unusually opaque and arcane. The United States itself has robust public mechanisms to discuss such issues, from Congressional Committees and Subcommittees on Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence to its myriad network of foreign policy and defence think tanks and institutes. The interested American citizen has much greater access to a broader range of foreign policy analysis than their Australian counterpart.
Greater transparency would not harm national security – it does not do so in the United States.
The prime minister John Howard’s invocation of ANZUS after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Australia’s subsequent commitments to America’s military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, featured debates questioning the Australian commitment, objections that were largely pushed aside by an assumption of American primacy. But younger Australians today will recall the post-9/11 era rather than the “unipolar moment” that followed the end of the Cold War. They will have grown up seeing an America that, to paraphrase George Kennan, in its “prehistoric monster” form thrashes its tail about and tramples its surroundings. These are the people who will manage Canberra’s relationship with the United States in the future and must be convinced of the social licence underpinning the alliance if it is to continue in its current form.
So, Hastie is right. Greater transparency would not harm national security – it does not do so in the United States. It would build trust in the Australian public, and produce a more robust discussion about the successes and shortcomings of current Australian policies. Why, for instance, has the Albanese government not released an unclassified version of its urgent climate risk assessment?
It is a strange quirk of Australia that successive governments have preferred to have surface-level discussions about foreign affairs and defence. This does not square with the oft-repeated assessment of the present that Australia faces its most challenging strategic circumstances since the Second World War. Nor does it chime with the fact that Australia’s most important security partner continues to act in ways which increasingly do not align with its values.
Australia’s wartime prime minister John Curtin explained more challenging circumstances to the Australian people. It is not unreasonable to expect that same kind of leadership now. Transparency is an asset to national security. Opacity is a risk to national sovereignty.
