High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems from the Australian army, the U.S. Army and the Singapore army fire multiple rockets during a combined joint live-fire exercise in Queensland, Australia, July 14, 2025. Photo Credit: Australian Cpl. Michael Rogers, Courtesy Australian Defense Force

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Australia’s defence posture remains anchored in a model forged during the Cold War and refined through decades of close alliance with the United States. Large, expensive platforms — advanced fighter jets, surface warships and heavy armoured formations — dominate the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Yet this configuration is increasingly mismatched with the realities of modern warfare, Australia’s geography as a vast island continent, and the need for genuine strategic independence.

Recent conflicts in Ukraine, along the Thai-Cambodian border, and involving Iran have shown that low-cost missiles and drones can neutralise far more expensive armed-systems. A new defence policy should pivot to a locally produced, layered missile and drone force capable of striking potential attackers long before they reach Australian shores.

This approach would deliver credible deterrence at a fraction of the cost of programs like AUKUS while assuming neither perpetual US dominance nor any single country as an inevitable enemy. The Australian Defence Forces (ADF) today fields approximately 59,000 active personnel and 33,000 reserves. Its navy relies on ageing Collins-class submarines, Hobart-class destroyers and a shrinking surface fleet. The air force is transitioning to F-35 Joint Strike Fighters after retiring the F/A-18 Hornets. The army maintains infantry brigades supported by limited armoured vehicles, with recent cuts to infantry fighting vehicle numbers.

These capabilities reflect decades of planning that prioritised interoperability with US forces for expeditionary operations rather than standalone defence of the continent.

A Half-Century of Shifting Priorities

Australian defence policy has oscillated for 50 years. In the 1960s and early 1970s, “forward defence” sent troops to Vietnam alongside American and allied forces. The 1976 Defence White Paper marked the first formal articulation of a “defence of Australia” doctrine after the Vietnam withdrawal and the British drawdown east of Suez. It emphasised self-reliance within an alliance framework but still assumed US support in major contingencies.

The then landmark 1987 Defence White Paper, underpinned by the Dibb Review, crystallised this shift. It called for a maritime strategy focused on northern approaches, rejection of large-scale land armies, and capabilities to operate independently in Australia’s immediate region.

The 1990s and 2000s saw a partial reversal. Interventions in East Timor (1999), the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and Iraq pulled the ADF back toward expeditionary roles. White Papers in 1994, 2000, 2009 and 2013 increasingly referenced the rise of China while maintaining the US alliance as the cornerstone.

The 2016 Defence White Paper and 2020 Strategic Update accelerated focus on the Indo-Pacific. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and 2024 National Defence Strategy introduced “National Defence” and “deterrence by denial.” Long-range strike and guided weapons gained priority. Yet implementation remained platform-heavy. Nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS dominated budgets, while other programs faced cuts.

The pattern is clear: every decade or so, policy rhetoric evolves, but the underlying force structure — expensive, alliance dependent platforms persisted.

Vulnerabilities of the Current Model Australia’s geography dictated that any serious threat must cross vast oceans or approach through northern chokepoints. A large standing army or heavy armour offers little adversary thousands of kilometres away.

Modern precision munitions render surface ships and air bases vulnerable. One lesson from the Black Sea was unmistakable: cheap unmanned surface vessels and drones have devastated a Russian fleet once considered formidable.

Australian jet fighters, while advanced, represent high-value targets. A single F-35 costs over $100 million; losing even a handful in the opening hours of conflict would be catastrophic. Surface warships face the same risk from anti-ship missiles. Coastal patrol and mine countermeasures vessels retain value, but blue-water power projection fleets are increasingly redundant for an island nation focused on denial.

AUKUS exemplifies the problems. The projected to cost up to A$368 billion over decades. The program locked Australia into nuclear submarines whose delivery timeline stretches into the 2040s. Delays in US Virginia-class transfers, industrial bottlenecks and opportunity costs have already forced reductions elsewhere: fewer Hunter-class frigates, cancelled MQ-9B drones, scaled-back infantry fighting vehicles.

Critics rightly note the deal assumes China as the primary threat and perpetual US reliability. With the United States facing domestic challenges, stretched global commitments and potential shifts in priorities, reliance on such a massive, single-platform bet undermines sovereignty. Defence spending sat at around A$59 billion (roughly 2% of GDP) in 2025-26 and is projected to rise.

Yet AUKUS and related naval programs consumed a disproportionate share, crowding out potential investment in affordable mass systems. The result was a force optimised for yesterday’s wars rather than tomorrow’s missile-dominated battlespace.

Lessons from Contemporary Conflicts

Ukraine’s experience is insightful. Low-cost drones and missiles have sunk or damaged dozens of Russian warships, neutralised expensive air defences and inflicted attrition on armoured columns at minimal expense to the defender. Fibre-optic guided FPV drones evade electronic jamming; loitering munitions turn commercial components into precision strike tools.

The Black Sea “drone war” showed that sea control can be contested without a traditional navy. Similar dynamics played out in the 2025 Thai-Cambodian border clashes. Both sides deployed kamikaze drones and FPV systems reminiscent of Ukrainian tactics. Cambodia used Chinese-supplied drones. Thailand responded with domestically developed models, including bomber and multi-copter systems. These low-cost assets disrupted conventional operations, targeted air bases and forced rapid adaptation. Iran’s missile and drone barrages against regional targets further illustrate how relatively inexpensive systems can saturate defences and project power across hundreds of kilometres.

The common thread is asymmetry. An attacker need not invade Australia’s shores; they can threaten sea lanes, northern bases or offshore assets from afar. Australia’s response must mirror this reality: massed, attractable systems that can strike first and sustain operations without bankrupting the nation.

A Sovereign Missile and Drone Force

Australia already possesses the industrial foundations for a new model. The Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise, launched in recent years, partners with Lockheed Martin (GMLRS assembly starting 2025), Raytheon, Kongsberg (Naval Strike Missile and Joint Strike Missile production) and others. Domestic companies such as DefendTex produce low-cost loitering munitions and UAVs like the Drone40 and Drone81, already selected for ADF trials. The Australian developed AI driven autonomous underwater vehicle (XL-AUV) designed for stealthy, long-endurance surveillance, reconnaissance and attack missions by Anduril Industries shows what the nation can produce indigenously.

A restructured policy could prioritise three layers:

Short-range systems (under 100 km): Coastal defence drones, loitering munitions and portable anti-ship/anti-air missiles for northern bases and maritime approaches. These would be cheap, attritable and produced in volume.

Medium-range systems (100-1,000 km): Ground- and sea-launched cruise and ballistic missiles (extensions of existing PrSM and HIMARS capabilities) plus ship-launched Naval Strike Missiles. Mobile launchers dispersed across the north would create a “porcupine” effect.

Long-range systems (1,000+ km): Hypersonic or high-supersonic missiles, potentially air- or ground-launched, capable of reaching adversary staging areas or fleets well before they approach Australian waters. These would form the strategic deterrent.

Production would leverage Australian innovation supplemented by selective overseas technology transfers — exactly the model already underway in GWEO. Local assembly and eventual full manufacture would create jobs, reduce supply-chain risks and enable rapid scaling in crisis.

Costs per unit are orders of magnitude lower than a submarine or fighter jet. A swarm of 100 drones might equal the price of one F-35 yet achieve comparable or superior effects through saturation. The ADF would retain minimal high-end platforms for specific roles: coastal patrol vessels, limited fighter cover for sovereignty tasks, and light mobile forces for domestic security. Heavy-armour and large surface fleets could be de-emphasised. Command-and-control, sensors and electronic warfare would integrate everything into a networked “kill web.”

Northern bases (Darwin, Tindal, Curtin) would host mobile missile batteries rather than vulnerable fixed assets. This posture aligns with “deterrence by denial.” Potential adversaries would face prohibitive risk attempting operations in Australia’s approaches. The force would be sustainable, expandable in wartime and genuinely produced and controlled in Australia without reliance on foreign political approval for key munitions.

Beyond Alliances: Strategic Independence

The assumption that the United States will always underwrite Australian security is no longer prudent. America confronts internal divisions, fiscal pressures and competing global demands. AUKUS itself illustrates the risks of over-dependence. Policy must plan for scenarios where US support is delayed, conditional or unavailable. Independence does not mean isolation; bilateral and multilateral partnerships remain valuable for intelligence, training and technology. But core strike capability must rest on Australian soil and Australian industry.

Nor should planning fixate on any single adversary. A flexible, missile-centric force deters aggression from any quarter while preserving diplomatic flexibility. It avoids the trap of self-fulfilling threat inflation. Implementation would require political courage: reallocating funds from AUKUS overruns and legacy platforms, accelerating GWEO with dedicated ministerial oversight, and investing in workforce and testing ranges.

The 2023 DSR and 2024 National Defence Strategy already point toward long-range strike; the next step is to make missiles and drones the centrepiece, not an add-on.

A Force Fit for Australia’s Future

For half a century Australian defence policy has chased relevance through alliance and high-tech platforms. The result is a force expensive to maintain, vulnerable to modern threats and dependent on external powers. The wars of the 2020s and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence have rewritten the rules.

Victory belongs to those who can field mass, precision and adaptability at sustainable cost. A missile and drone-based deterrent offers Australia precisely that. Locally built, layered across ranges, capable of striking before threats materialize. It would provide genuine independence and credible deterrence. This can be affordable, scalable and aligned with geography. By moving beyond Cold War relics and alliance assumptions, Australia can secure its future on its own terms — sovereign, resilient and ready for the missile age.

Breaking Free from Cold War Legacies

Australia must move toward an Independent, missile-centric deterrent. Australia’s defence policy and force structure remains heavily shaped by Cold War-era thinking and deep integration with United States military planning. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) emphasizes high-end, expensive platforms—advanced fighter jets, large surface combatants, and nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS—designed primarily for coalition operations far from home rather than standalone defence of the continent.

As an island nation with vast maritime approaches, Australia faces limited utility in maintaining a large conventional army with heavy armour or blue-water fleets vulnerable to modern precision strikes. Recent conflicts demonstrate that affordable, mass-produced missiles and drones can achieve disproportionate effects against superior conventional forces.

A pivot to a sovereign, layered missile and drone capability built locally with selective international inputs offers credible deterrence by enabling strikes on approaching threats long before they reach Australian shores, at sustainable cost. The historical Evolution of Australian Defence Posture from the 1970s to present needs to move into the new era of war and conflict as seen in Ukraine, and Iran.

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Prabowo far left

For the past decade the most geo-strategic country in Southeast Asia and the world’s third largest democracy has been wooed by Washington and Beijing. Now China has won an engagement. No pre-nup because treaties are banned under the Indonesian Constitution, though everything bar a US divorce decree.

Commented former Minister for Foreign Affairs Bob Carr: “(Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto) is delivering a savvy Javanese judgment on the slide in America’s credibility and the very idea of a unipolar world marshalled from Washington.”

The implications for us are profound while we’re determinedly married to the US believing wise Dad is always our lover and protector even though far away in another hemisphere.

Politicians are ambitious -it’s an essential quality. Another commonality is to be revered, and here Prabowo is an exemplar.

He wants statesman status, a worthy chief of the world’s fourth largest nation winning respect for running a ramping economy (above five per cent GDP) and - till now - maintaining social harmony in a Muslim-majority multi-faith secular democratic state.

Reasonable if keeping to the moral high ground and the rule of law. Prabowo’s goals don’t climb that far.

Last week’s Indonesia-wide riots were driven by anger over MPs greed in awarding themselves housing bonuses, rising cost-of-living issues and cutbacks on government services.

Reports claim at least ten have died and more than 1,000 injured as private and public properties were trashed and mobs ran amuck. Police and military say about 1,240 were arrested.

The UN High Commission for Human Rights wants an investigation into "alleged violations of international human rights law.

"The authorities must uphold the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression while maintaining order … All security forces, including the military when deployed in a law enforcement capacity, must comply with the basic principles on the use of force and firearms."

Indonesians fear their country could become ungovernable. That won’t happen as there enough altruistic savants and diplomats with influence. The danger is that authorities can muster only around a million cops and soldiers while a well-organised protest would swamp security in a nation of 285 million.

Much is the fault of Prabowo, 74 next month.

At first, he judged the riots too serious to be out of the country so cancelled a trip to China’s 80^th anniversary of the end of WWII. Later he realised his absence showed distrust of the competence of VP Gibran Rakabuming, 37.

The former small-town businessman and mayor got the Palace keys through nepotism. He’s the firstborn of Prabowo’s predecessor, Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo and was supposed to draw the youth vote. That skill requires charisma.

When Prabowo made his TV address six days after the riots started, he was flanked by the leaders of Indonesia’s ten political parties. Nine are in the government coalition.

He said protestors were traitors and could face bullets if continuing; a decade ago they would have been condemned as Communists – a slur no longer heard as Prabowo cozies with the PRC. A public holiday celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad also helped cool the demonstrations.

Scuttlebutt claims Gibran – absent from his boss’s big announcement - has been “exiled” to West Papua to put down the province’s independence movement led by the indigenous residents.

Till now oppression has been left to the military; the press has been banned, ensuring conflict rarely escapes into the mainstream media.

Gibran has never marched a metre in combat boots, so his VP clout may be minimal particularly as army veterans have been demanding his impeachment.

His “special assignment” is with the euphemistic Autonomy Acceleration Board based in Papua. The South China Morning Post commented that Gibran:

“Will have his hands full in trying to bring about lasting peace in Papua, as he has to build trust with tribal communities, including separatist factions, while obeying directives from the capital.”

In the 1960s Indonesia grabbed the resource-rich province (Grasberg is one of the world's largest gold and copper mines) from its former Dutch coloniser. Some claim half a million local citizens have died in the years since from displacement, disease and violence.

Back to the present. Prabowo eventually flew to Beijing just in time to squeeze onto the edge of official photos and admire the muscle and might on show, though probably not the talk of seeking immortality which is haram (forbidden) in Islam.

Good for his ego to be among the 25 foreign leaders, particularly the nuclear-powered autocrats like China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s supremo, prophetically mislabeled ‘King’ Jong-un’ by the ABC.

These are men who do what they like, how they like, unbothered by consultations with citizens who think they should have a say.

Democracy and human rights remain in Indonesia, though quivering on a steep slope, according to Australian academics charting its slippage.

Prabowo finds Western-style democracy unsuitable and has complained that it’s “tiring and messy”. His dislike has not been confined to words.

In the 1998 riots that led to President Soeharto’ downfall, Prabowo was a senior army general. He was dismissed after being allegedly implicated in the disappearance of 13 democracy activists.

More nepotism: He was also Soeharto’s son-in-law, but divorced that year and hasn’t remarried.

The Gerindra party that Prabowo founded and leads wants to go back to the 1945 Constitution. It was amended four times at the turn of this century to restore democracy. Melbourne University’s Professor Tim Lindsey commented:

“This is the authoritarian original version of the Constitution that Soeharto relied on to rule. It did not guarantee human rights or a separation of powers, and it gave huge power to the president, who was not elected and had no term limit.”

Indonesia will survive as it has through longer and more tangled crises, like 42 months of Japanese occupation during WWII and maybe four million deaths. Later came the 1965 genocide when an estimated 500,000 real or imagined Communist supporters were slaughtered.

The biggest archipelago in the world with more than 300 distinct ethnic groups has resilience. Prabowo’s hoodwinking of the electorate will be widely exposed, so others can repair the damage caused by militarizing a nation that’s not under threat and allowing the social situation to degenerate.

How should Australia react to these changes? The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says:

“Australia’s security, prosperity, and economic future are linked to Southeast Asia. Our connections to the region go beyond geography, with enduring family, business, education and tourism ties. We share a vision for a region that is peaceful, stable and prosperous, where sovereignty is respected and international law is upheld.

“Deepening Australia’s engagement with Southeast Asia is a priority for the Australian Government.”

Indonesia moving away from the US opens opportunities for Canberra to get serious about the engagement and promote people-to-people closeness. Till now the emphasis has been on security, trade and defence.

Should we offer Indonesian tourists visa-free travel, open more scholarships to study at our unis? Less engagement with their military and more with their work-and-holiday young wanting to explore and see what’s possible?

Perhaps a familiarity tour of our democracy for Gibran? Seek and nurture potential leaders from academia and NGOs - or just wait and watch lest we be accused of neo-colonial manipulation?

Our decisions today will shape future relations with our neighbour and the region.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 10 September 2025:

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/xi-beds-prabowo-flicks-off-trump/?utm_source=Pearls+%26+Irritations&utm_campaign=4b48633b49-Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0c6b037ecb-4b48633b49-583181979

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Former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews appearance at the 80^th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression on September 3, was a clear indication of a major Australian foreign policy change.

Dan Andrews, now citizen Dan is still very controversial in his home state of Victoria after his Covid era authoritarianism. Dan Andrews surprised many when he was seen in Beijing in the company of leaders like Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, Kim Jung Un, leader of North Korea, Masoud Pezeshkian, President of Iran, Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar Junta leader, Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia, and the host President Xi Jinping of China.

Dan Andrews has been criticized for this in the Australian social mediascape over the last few days. Andrews was not just on holiday in Beijing catching up with old friends. To be present in the photo line-ups on the day carries a great significance. There is no way Andrews would have been in such a picture and walking with this group of world leaders by coincidence.

It appears both Australia and New Zealand sent unofficial emissaries to the commemoration ceremony and parade. There was Helen Clark former prime minister of New Zealand and Dan Andrews from Australia.

There is a long and close personal and professional relationship between Anthony Albanese, prime minister of Australia and Andrews. They were together in their rise through the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Both were flat mates in Canberra and staunch members of the Socialist Left (SL) faction in the ALP. Andrews was the perfect ‘unofficial emissary’ to Beijing for the September 3 event.

Most important ‘unofficial’ visit to China since 1971

Looking through the paradigm of ‘symbolism’, Andrews visit to China is the most important visit since Gough Whitlam visited China in July 1971 as the federal opposition leader. This led to Australia formally recognizing China very soon after his election as prime minister in December 1972.

Gough Whitlam sitting with Zhou En Lai in 1971

For various reasons, A current Australian leader could not make an official appearance at the ceremony and military parade. Things are very complicated with much of Australian public opinion believing China is the enemy, and firmly part of the ANZUS alliance.

Andrews’ appearance sent the message to the Chinese leadership that Australia recognizes China’s place in the multi-polar world today and wishes to engage accordingly.

Can the visit be viewed as an Australian pivot to China?

Since AUKUS was created under the Scott Morrison government, when China was painted as an enemy on September 15, 2021, a lot has happened. AUKUS was Morrison’s way of showing Australians his government could fight back after being diplomatically ‘ignored by China’, and levied some crippling tariffs on some of the nation’s key export products.

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel changed the nature of geopolitics. Israel with US support went into Gaza and punished Gazans to the point the IDF operations have been widely described as genocide. This has continued from the Biden into the Trump administration without tacit support.

The Australian government has announced it will support the recognition of a Palestinian State at the United Nations when it is voted upon later this month. This runs contrary to US policy and can be seen as a major drift away from the alliance. Australia traditionally has been closely aligned with the US in the United Nations, but there is great difference on Palestine, which has led Australia to vote differently on a number of occasions.

Moreover, Australia felt militarily vulnerable when a Chinese naval taskforce circumnavigated Australia, conducting live fore exercises without any interdiction assistance by the US earlier this year. This was a clear illustration of the uselessness of any alliance if an attack came upon the Australian mainland. The way the US handled the tariff issues with Australia, a good and loyal ally left a lot to be desired.

India’s pivot towards China rips apart The QUAD strategic alliance between Australia, India, Japan and South Korea. It appears to be a totally useless alliance now. Modi just recently declined US President Donald Trump’s invitation to the White House.

Putin, Modi & Xi last week.

The September 3 military parade showed off some of China’s latest weapons for the first time, which totally destroy the strategic logic of AUKUS once and for all. Australian nuclear-powered submarines will not be able to defend Australia against Dongfeng-5C and Dongfeng-61 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching Australia, Julang-3 ICBM missile carrying submarines, and wide range of drone aircraft and submarines.

New weapons even the US doesn;t have.

This requires a total foreign and defence policy rethink on the part of Australia. AUKUS may still exist on paper, but the spirit of AUKUS is now gone. This is why Dan Andrews visit to Beijing and symbolically standing up beside China was so symbolically important. The future of the Australian-US alliance is clouded in uncertainty, created in a time long passed by.

The ALP Socialist Left policy on China goes back to Gough Whitlam. Whitlam preferred engagement rather than the isolation of China, and at the same time was suspicious of the Australian-US alliance. China is seen as a critical partner for Australia’s economic and regional interests. The Socialist Left is dismissive of alarmist narratives about China, still holding some of the Jim Cairns naïve sympathy he had during his time as a politician in the 60s and 70s, although the activities of the Chinese United Front Work Department have made things much more complex today.

Anthony Albanese has come under criticism for Andrews’ trip to China, although he has deflected some of this through stating Andrews was on a private trip. The truth is more likely that Andrews was there to consolidate clear channels for future discussions. Andrews’ visit was by no means an accident, but rather subdued diplomacy without announcing future intentions and gaining attention from the United States State Department. Australia is far from ready for a diplomatic spat with the Trump administration.

From that point of view, Andrews was one of the few people Albanese could send. Bob Carr may have attracted too much attention. Paul Keating would have alerted the media to what is going on. This is all going on outside the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT), with only a few people in a very close circle in the know.

It looks like there will be a major pivot in Australian foreign policy in progress. However, for the reasons stated above it must be undertaken in a ‘softly softly’ manner, due to the current political and institutional realities of Australia. However, this may playout to be the largest policy change Australia has ever made. Back in 1971, Whitlam visited China and in the next year the Australian government formally recognized China. In 2025, Andrews visited China, signifying Australia’s recognition of its central place in the emerging multi-polar world.

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Where are the protests for Sudan?

Where are the protests for the Druze?

Where are the protests for the Congo?

Where are the protests for Myanmar?

Where are the protests for the Christians

That are being persecuted and massacred?

Your moral outrage is selective,

Do you feel better now?

Did the public martyrdom

Of your own moral outrage

Leave a warm feeling inside?

###

You have achieved nothing

But hypocrisy and ignored

The suffering of the unheralded

Hungry, destitute and poor

Of the world and used

As a scapegoat an age-old

Antisemitism that seemed

Convenient to satiate the

New religious desires of

Postmodernism and

Meta-Marxism.

###

Where are the moral warriors?

Where are the armies of champions

That will protest and fight for all

The besmirched and sullied women

Labouring under the yoke of a slavery

Imposed by the primitive codes

And beliefs of an archaic patriarchy

That belongs in another Millenia?

###

Where are the moral champions

That will march in the streets for

All those impoverished and hungry

Children around the world that

Are too poor eat?

###

You have achieved

Nothing but feed

An age-old hatred

And stroked egos

In a west that

Has abdicated any

Right to a moral

Authority all on the

###

Alter of new religions and

Selective moral outrage

And headline stories

That make the daily news,

Fed into living rooms

Watched by fat,

Tired and lazy

Westerners

Too tired

To care.

###

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No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia - Paul Keating

PUTTING THE BOOTS IN

Duncan Graham

GIVING NAYSAYERS THE BOOT

Photo: Erlinawati Graham

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s pleas to his nation’s investors to back Indonesian commerce made Greg Johnson yawn – the businessman had heard it all before from a parade of politicians.

But the West Australian and his mates have never followed the NATO (No Action, Talk Only) response; they’ve been putting their money into the country since 1995 by making specialised safety footwear.

“We’ve been developing our technology in Perth and then getting the boots made in Indonesia," he said ahead of another overseas marketing tour.

“We found that Indonesian workers want new skills; they have the right outlook. Employing them and transferring knowledge is most satisfying – to them and us.

“Indonesia is a growth zone; the middle classes are expanding and the opportunities are impressive. What the urgers are saying is right. What’s wrong is that few are being adventurous.”

Steel Blue, the company which makes and exports heavy-duty men’s and women’s work boots mainly with steel toe-caps for the construction industry, now has three factories in West Java and about 1,500 employees – most of them women.

“We are deeply involved with our workers and the community sponsoring sport (mainly soccer) and cancer research. In this environment personal relationships are critical."

In May, PM Albanese made Jakarta the destination for his first overseas trip after winning a national election and a second three-year term for his Australian Labor Party.

After being lavishly hosted by President Prabowo Subianto - who is seeking overseas backers to help development - his guest pleased the Indonesian leader by stressing that Australian businesses should get involved in the Republic:

“The deepening of our trade with Indonesia and the strengthening of investment … is natural and vital - but it is not inevitable.

"To convert extraordinary potential into concrete progress, then all of us — government, business, civil society — need to demonstrate greater engagement and ambition."

In 2020 a free-trade deal - the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement was signed after a decade of negotiations. However, it remains largely stuck with Australia exporting grains and meats.

Some progress has been made with healthcare, renewable energy, agriculture, infrastructure, mining and education where Melbourne’s Monash University has a campus in Bumi Serpong Damai, Southwest Jakarta.

This offers fee-paying post-graduate courses. In Surabaya, Western Sydney University opened a branch last year.

Mt Johnson agreed that 'ambition' was a keyword: "So is resilience and adaptability, and for sure there’ll be difficulties.

“I was in Jakarta when there were anti-Japanese protests in 1974 - but these issues have to be overcome. You need to be serious and stay the distance.”

(The Malari incident of violent anti-Japanese protests started during a visit by PM Kakuei Tanaka against corruption and unequal foreign investments. Since then, new laws have helped native Indonesians get involved in overseas-powered ventures.)

The relationship recovered. Japan is now Indonesia’s fourth largest investor, mainly in making vehicle parts, while Australia lags around 14^th place, far behind the biggies like Singapore, China, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the US.

A deterrent to those concerned about global warming is that Indonesia relies heavily on generating electricity by burning coal; Australia is switching to natural energy, particularly solar and wind power.

The Steel Blue director, now in his “early 70s”, has had a few health scares – some of them treated in Indonesian hospitals. He rejected tabloid media reports that medical care is sub-standard: “I’ve been impressed by the professionalism and services.

“Some of my problems have come from stress which is a bit of a Western disease. Indonesian culture is more relaxed and that’s beneficial.

“Indonesians’ attitudes are far more gracious. Put up a proposal in Australia and the answer is often a list of rules – in effect, saying ‘no’. We've become litigious and arrogant.

“In Indonesia, the welcome is likely to be: How can we help you?

“Finding a trusted partner in Indonesia is essential – completely and totally. I’ve been around the world and know that person-to-person contacts are critical. That’s why I’m so annoyed with the Australian government’s approach to visas.”

Mr Johnson is also a director of the Perth-based Indonesia Institute that has been campaigning for a better deal for Indonesians wanting to visit Down Under. In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, he and his colleagues highlighted the discrimination against Indonesians compared with applicants from Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.

“They get free Electronic Travel Authority visas online – a facility not available to Indonesians who have to pay $195 a person and lodge a printed form with 16 pages of questions, some inappropriate, culturally insensitive or outdated.

“The future of the Indonesia-Australia trade, tourism and business relationship is highly dependent on the ease of travel. We need to change our mindset.

“This will only be achieved if Australians and Indonesians get to know each other better and more deeply. A transactional approach may work for some countries, but not with Indonesia.”

PM Albanese left Jakarta with promises to fund research programmes and green energy. He gave President Prabowo’s cat Bobby a scarf with the slogan: Australia loves Indonesia.

But no easing of visa rules.

“Indonesia has been good to me and our company,” said Greg Johnson. “I hope we’ve been good to Indonesia – and I want others to follow.”

##

First published in Indonesia Expat, August 2025: https://online.fliphtml5.com/qinqh/qhpt/#p=16

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Photo: ADF

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In late July Indonesians would have woken to a story like this: "Our close southern neighbour Australia has just test-fired a new long-range missile from a nearby base. The US-made weapon reached its target 300 km distant in four minutes. Its current range is 500 km. This can be doubled.”

Were listeners and readers fearful, seeing this armed streaker as a threat? Tariffs, Gaza and Ukraine have elbowed other news aside so reaction has been limited. The Indonesian media has yet to make a fuss.

Topping the current gossip charts is the Coldplay concert kiss-cam exposure of a naughty couple. Prurient Indonesians are more into marital affairs than foreign affairs.

The original news came from the ABC, apparently fed by the army along with photos of toughies in fatigues looking pleased with their achievement.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy was quoted as saying the new weapon marked the day the "Australian Army enters the missile age.

"It's all about extending deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, all about signaling to any potential adversary that pain can be inflicted — all about deterring war through strength."

Another "all about" painless way is through developing close friendships and understanding differences. "Jaw jaw is better than war war" Churchill allegedly said, but the proverb and its intent have rusted this century.

Did Indonesians know we planned to test the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) before the red button was pressed? We asked Defence. They replied: “Your email is not considered a valid Freedom of Information request”.

We wanted to know because in February the Chinese Navy "held two live-fire military exercises near Australia and NZ, sparking concern in both countries." The splash spot was in the Tasman Sea 640 km off the NSW town of Eden, 480 km south of Sydney – international waters.

Canberra lodged a diplomatic protest with Beijing; a firestorm followed from the right-wing press, and commentators suggested it was a test run for a Taiwan invasion.

Using this reasoning makes PrSM's launch a rehearsal for invading Indonesia.

Nonsense – or is it? Borrowing the Trump xenophobia template, President Prabowo Subianto regularly stokes fears of foreign takeovers, never naming names, but blaming the sinister 'they':

"For hundreds of years, they've been dissuading us, even now, with money. They fund NGOs to divide us. They claim to be upholders of democracy, human rights, and press freedom. But that's their own version of events."

Your correspondent occasionally visits these divisive NGOs in their suburban termite palace rentals. It's been a painful experience from using chairs unable to take a foreigner's weight. There's an omen here somewhere.

If they do have George Soros as their financier (as Prabowo regularly alleges), the agencies need sturdier seats ahead of any meetings with the portly US investor/philanthropist.

Even more rickety is the expectation that the Republic will soon be no more, as predicted by "researchers from other countries that have made studies that Indonesia will be gone by 2030."

Worrying indeed until the source of this dread is revealed as US sci-fi: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. Through Prabowo's promotion, it has become Indonesia's 1984.

He calls the writers Peter Singer and August Cole "strategic intelligence experts." They're academics specialising in "fictional intelligence."

The plot has Indonesia as a failed state after a world war. "Pirates roam its waters without fear and criminals carve up huge swaths of the country … a sex scene has a woman with cybernetic breasts (implantable, neuroprosthetic medical devices)."

Prabowo laps up the dystopia and the sleaze: "This is a real phenomenon, so if you don't want to believe me, you don't want to hear me, that's OK. It's my obligation as a citizen; I have to speak up when I see danger."

Thinking Indonesians don't fear Australia, but many do distrust. There's been a tangible shift this century from admiration for our role in supporting independence in the late 1940s, to suspicion decades later.

“The wariness cuts both ways,” says the Lowy Institute Poll. “Australian attitudes towards Indonesia have been – at best – lukewarm. And at worst, they betray a lurking suspicion.”

Professor Tim Lindsey, probably the most insightful of Australia's few experts on Indonesia, writes of "lingering concerns about the AUKUS deal … and Australia's role in the independence of Timor-Leste in 1999.

"This resulted in Indonesia famously tearing up the sweeping security treaty Keating negotiated with (second President) Soeharto in 1995.

"The loss of Timor-Leste still rankles some senior Indonesian military figures. Australia and Indonesia have signed new security arrangements since then … enabling more complex training exercises between the two militaries. However, none match the scale of the 1995 agreement."

One of the training exercises is already banging away in Queensland. About 35,000 troops from 19 nations – including Indonesia and the US, though not China - have been playing war games dubbed Talisman Sabre.

As the show-stopper, the PrSM was fired from the Mount Bundey Training Area, south-east of Darwin, flying at more than three times the speed of sound.

The ABC’s threadbare yarn did not report the direction, where it hit or the cost. Like commercial aircraft, missiles are supposed to respect a nation’s airspace – a zone 100 km above sea level called the Karman Line, the imagined boundary with deep space

The Indonesian Island of Flores (pop two million) is 830 km north of Darwin.

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wasn't equivocal about PrSM's purpose: "President Trump, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Pentagon team have been very clear that our pacing threat is China. We are actively designing our army so that we are capable of responding to any threat from China."

Is that how Indonesians see the situation?

The PRC may be Washington's incubus, but it's not Jakarta's. Indonesia and China have just celebrated 75 years of diplomatic relations and continue with "trade, infrastructure development, energy, and socio-culture," according to the Jakarta-based Institute for Essential Services Reform:

"Until 2022, China has been Indonesia's largest trading partner for ten consecutive years. The trade volume between the two countries increased from AUD 76 billion in 2013 to more than double in 2022.

"Indonesia is the main recipient of investment for Belt and Road projects, around AUD 14.2 billion … This shows that Indonesia has a role as a strategic partner in China's political and economic agenda in Southeast Asia."

This year Indonesia joined the BRICS trade bloc commanded by China, a rival to the Western dominated G7. Critics claim it shows the world’s fourth largest nation is getting closer (the usual term is ‘pivot’ implying a swing away from the West) to Russia and China.

Officially Indonesia’s foreign policy “is independent and active… Indonesia does not side with world powers …, so doing would be incompatible with the country’s national philosophy and identity.

“The best policy to adopt is one which does not make us the object of an international conflict”.

That philosophy was embedded before Australia entered the missile age, Donald Trump started calling the shots and Ghost Fleet haunted all.

##

First published in Michael West Media, 7 August 2025: https://michaelwest.com.au/indo-relations-nothing-like-a-missile-test-to-show-we-care/

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Happy birthday, monster neighbour. Er, do we know you? We’re strangers here – our proper place is mid Atlantic, ‘twixt the Old World and the New. However, we're trying hard to cope by promoting trade and investment, while ignoring endemic corruption and avoiding deep involvement.

The unofficial protocol has a fresh PM making his first overseas visit to the Republic because, as Paul Keating said last century, "No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia.”

Anthony Albanese upheld the tradition a dozen days after his election in May with a one-day dash to Jakarta. President Prabowo Subianto, who was inaugurated last October, has yet to reciprocate.

This month, Indonesia celebrates its 80^th anniversary of Proklamasi (the proclamation of independence) after more than three centuries as the Dutch East Indies, colloquially Tujuhbelasan (the 17th).

Australian workers helped with the liberation. It's a great yarn, though now little known.

In 1943 about 500 Indonesian political prisoners were secretly shipped to Australia to be re-interned; Canberra supported the Dutch colonialists.

A note from a prisoner tossed from a train reached a rail worker at Liverpool who could read Indonesian. Activists traced the men to nearby POW camps. Unions campaigned for their release and blocked ships trying to service the return of the colonialists.

Former Australian Ambassador to Indonesia Gary Quinlan once told foreign journalists:

“When the first military offensive against the independent Republic (by the Dutch who ignored the proclamation) was launched in July 1947, Australia complained to the new UN Security Council…

“President Soekarno chose Australia to represent Indonesia in these UN discussions, which ultimately led to independence on 27 December 1949. Australia formally recognised Indonesian independent statehood that day and formally sponsored Indonesian membership of the UN.”

The nation that’s remembering its guerrilla-action triumphs (Australian historian Dr Frank Palmos called the Battle of Surabaya “Indonesia’s Gallipoli”) has forgotten its antipodean diplomatic roots.

To wander the world’s largest archipelago last century was to collect handshakes by declaring: “I’m Australian,” as opposed to being Belanda (Dutch).

Now rare. Apart from toddlers staring at white skin, funny clothes and fat guts, our presence draws little reaction apart from shopkeepers doubling the price. Curiosity has yielded to coolness. Hello has become ho-hum, yet the deep differences remain.

Melbourne Uni academics Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae have put it well:

“There are no two neighbouring countries anywhere in the world that are more different than Indonesia and Australia. They differ hugely in religion, language, culture, history, geography, race, economics, worldview and population (Indonesia, 285 million, Australia less than 10 per cent of that).

“Indonesia and Australia have almost nothing in common other than the accident of geographic proximity. This makes their relationship turbulent, volatile and often unpredictable.”

Particularly now that Prabowo is trying to emulate tough-guy Trump, which he can do with clout as a disgraced former general militarising his nation’s civil agencies.

Leading to 17 August, the Republic is going bananas with bunting and banners, flags and ribbons, red and white, draping everything upright, even smothering the fag ads that dominate the streetscape. Like it or not, we all fly a flag at the gatepost.

No worries that speed limits and other road signs get covered – even when clear, they’re ignored.

All verses of Indonesia Merdeka (freedom) are known, so no subtle coughing when the national anthem is played, often masking calls to prayers from mosque towers and the roar of motorbikes.

Then it seems secular patriotism trumps religious fervour in the world’s most populous Islamic nation – though not a theocracy.

We send almost 1.5 million tourists every year to Indonesia, mainly Hindu Bali. They return with melanoma spots, tattoos, braids and a couple of words – Bintang (star and a beer brand), bagus (good) and a booking for next year.

Few venture into Muslim Java, though it's just a 30-minute ferry ride and a different universe.

Most visitors know the names of US politicians and what they’re doing, though not their Indonesian counterparts. Why should they? The Australian media rarely reports on the world's third-largest democracy, even though the principle is under threat.

The exception is when a volcano blows or an uninsured Okker prangs a rental.

Some of the Oz teens flaunting their new bodies on Kuta beach may have briefly encountered junior high classes in Indonesian language and culture, but failed to follow into uni because courses have closed.

If only slogans about importance were taken seriously.

Indonesian public schools teach a little English, but concentrate on grammar. There are more pressing responsibilities; students in well-ironed uniforms are rehearsing for parades and flag raisings – all spectacularly choreographed though the goose-steps worry pacifists.

Equally sinister is the still-coming revision of history that has been discussed in this column and could become divisive, though the claimed intent is to unify. To be discovered.

The fun starts after noon when the atmosphere becomes more country carnival with greasy-pole climbing, horse rides and roadside snacks.

Curiously, little attention is given to preserving the era. The house where Soekarno proclaimed independence from the veranda has been demolished. Other historical landmarks have vanished.

The best account of Indonesia’s idiosyncrasies is in Indonesia Etc – exploring the improbable nation by former Reuters journo turned epidemiologist Dr Elizabeth Pisani. The US / English adventurer travelled 20,000 km across the archipelago, usually alone:

“I only had one rule: ‘Just say yes’. Because Indonesians are among the most hospitable people on earth.”

Her book’s title comes from the hurriedly shaped Declaration of Independence that’ll never challenge the prose of Thomas Jefferson:

We, the People of Indonesia, declare the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. The details of the transfer of power, etc., will be worked out as soon as possible.

Eighty years later, that’s still a work in progress. Maybe all will be fixed by the Centenary.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 7 August 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/once-australia-was-important-to-indonesia/?utm_source=Pearls+%26+Irritations&utm_campaign=fa29882c5a-Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0c6b037ecb-fa29882c5a-583181979

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With Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese failing to meet with US president Donald Trump on his last visit to the United States and G7 meeting in Canada, Australia is heading into a time of isolation.

The recent Ukrainian missile and drone attack on Russia and Israeli attack on Iran signal a radical change in the nature of warfare. An aggressor can now attack another country, separated by other countries or vast land or sea distances, through applying medium and long-range missiles. This signals an urgent need for Australian defence planners to drastically alter the nation’s defence strategy, in the light of changing technologies and new battle tactics.

Australia’s commitment to AUKUS with the United Kingdom and United States requires a review for several reasons.

First, strike platforms like submarines now play only a secondary role in strategic warfare. A submarine just doesn’t carry enough missiles and/or drones to make a difference. Land bases with instant supply lines are most important. In conventional war, based upon Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Iran rely on heavy volume missile and drone attacks to overwhelm an adversary’s air defences. Strategic nuclear- powered submarines with non-nuclear arms just don’t carry enough for battle. Submarines can only play a limited role in such wars.

Second, the cost of Australia building/purchasing nuclear-powered submarines is just too expensive for the utility they can provide. This money could be channelled into much more effective defence initiatives. The cost of the AUKUS commitment is something Australia cannot afford. It’s a luxury for Australian defence, not a staple need.

Too expensive and unecessary for Australia

Thirdly, both the UK and US have policies focused on containment and confrontation in their geo-defence stances. This is too aggressive for a small nation like Australia. Australia should just focus on coexistence with its near neighbours and the rest iof the world. The world is very quickly becoming a very different place than it was just 2 years ago.

Australia is now in isolation

Australia is no longer important to the US strategic world view. With another PLA ship convoy ready to circumnavigate Australia once again, arguably prompted by Australian military air operations with the Philippines in the South China Sea, the US will not be there to interdict any Chinese vessels.

Australia might be a dialogue partner with ASEAN from 1974, but the Australian-ASEAN partnership has not developed much since. ASEAN is now Australia’s third largest trading partner (14.3 percent of Australia’s total trade), higher than Japan or the US. But Australia’s attention to the region has/is being neglected. Today there are less schools than ever before teaching Bahasa Indonesia in their curricula.

Australian bilaterial relations with its closest ASEAN neighbour Indonesia has not gone much beyond a transactional nature, where Australia’s importance to Indonesia is slowly drifting away. In January, Indonesia became a full member of BRICS. Australia isn’t much of a priority for Indonesia anymore as it sees a much larger place in the world for itself. Australia missed the boat with Indonesia.

Australia is being isolated to the point where it even has competition in the South Pacific, an area it took for granted. No nation will come to the assistance of Australia if needed. For far too long, Australians have been duped about China being the ‘big bad boogey man of the north’. Remember the old domino theory and that there were WMDs in Iraq. Realistic analysis is required about what are the real threats to Australia. No one is assessing the threat of liberalised immigration that may have allowed ‘sleeper cells’ of military age people into the country. This exists within the United States today, there is no reason the same doesn’t exist within Australia.

Australia needs a relook at its current defence plans

Facing the realities, Australia has no army, navy, or air force to speak about. Even Australia’s neighbours have larger armed forces today. The wars that are going on now suggest a need to re-evaluate Australia’s current defence planning.

Fighter aircraft are now too slow, drones are a tactical weapon, useful in tactical situations and surveillance. War is now fought by missiles. Countries need plenty of them, as they play a major role in weakening air defences of adversaries.

Australia needs to invest in more research on missiles

Short-range missiles are used to takedown aircraft and shipping. Medium to long range ballistic missiles are the important strategic weapons of today. The new generation of hypersonic missiles with potent non-nuclear payloads are almost as damaging as small nuclear bombs, but without the radiation fallout. The Russian Oreshnik missile has become a massive deterrent in Europe.

That what Australia needs and can afford, indigenously developed and supported by surveillance and tactical drones. Australia’s navy and air force should be concerned with coastal issues and the continental shelf around Australia.

Such an approach would benefit Australia more than the AUKUS commitment.

Australia has a background in rocket research since the 1960s and there is a private Australian company about to launch an orbital rocket in the near future. Based upon today’s changes in geo-political-techno environment, its time for Australia to review where it must go with defence. Australia may need to make a radical departure from its existing track.

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It's spooky out there, so can we hold your hand Uncle Sam for a bit longer, pretty please?

Cartoon from Chinese state media. Should have had us riding a roo.

VALE PAX AMERICANA – VIVERE PAX INDONESIA

The world America made for us is passing away. Its place is being taken by a new and harder post-American world, and we are at a loss to know what to make of it...

In another publication, Hugh White states what others have been writing in Pearls & Irritations since the assaults on democracy and the rule of law were launched last year by Trump Two.

ANU’s Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies’ wisdoms are weighty enough to withstand the storms of simplistic slurs like ‘anti-American hatred’ or ‘left-wing wokes’ that battered earlier prophets.

White’s views might amass enough energy in Canberra to move policy forward – powered in part by his forecast of change:

“A lot more of us may be starting to understand … the truth of Paul Keating’s mantra that Australia must look for its security in Asia, not from Asia.”

Embedded in the then PM’s 1994 Sydney speech that White quotes is the almost hallowed but now hollow line that “no country is more important to Australia than Indonesia”.

This was followed by a 1996 overseas address, elbowing Australians to become Asia-literate and embrace trade and friendship. Both nations had to “recognise the reality that neither Australia nor Indonesia threatens the other and that we have common interests in the stability and security of the region around us.”

Most of these hopes crumpled when dictator and Keating admirer President Soeharto quit in 1998. Successive Federal Governments since have been frightened into inaction by Indonesia’s turbulence.

Cooperation was also sent to the tip by Jakarta discovering a supposed puppet was prepared to take a moral stand against the Republic’s vicious reaction to the 1999 East Timor Referendum. The 80 per cent ‘Yes’ vote yanked the tiny country out of the ‘Unitary State’, a term as holy in Indonesia as Gallipoli is in Australia.

Another reason for the slump in Australian concern is domestic - the waning interest in Indonesian matters since its people installed democracy at the turn of the century. Australian applause turned to horror with the 2002 Bali Bombing and the assault on the Jakarta Embassy two years later.

The tolerant and progressive Indonesians in Keating’s last-century vision had been deposed by radical killers. It was time for a less benign approach to our neighbour and move away from the polytheistic and politically complex states of Southeast Asia;

Easier to refresh ties with the Anglo-Saxons 16,000 km distant in the North Atlantic. We were assured they remained ‘great and powerful friends’; we were wrong.

Now they’re the untrustworthies, and it’s time to remember the folks next door. Whether they now want our courtship is doubtful because they show little interest in us apart from a supplier of meat and wheat, and images of cuddly koalas.

Keating’s dreams of a polyglot Australia are being assassinated by frugal tertiary institution administrators while academics look elsewhere, bothering about values not valuations.

Last century 22 Australian universities were teaching Indonesian. By 2022, just a dozen had survived.

Uni research claims government campaigns to stop the slide “have missed the mark (because) a focus on the economic and strategic importance of Indonesia rarely resonates with students.

“This is because these narratives are too esoteric and future-based for teenagers, who are often more swayed by youth and popular culture.”

Indonesia is predicting it will seize regional leadership as the world’s fourth most populous and economically influential state by 2045 (the centenary of Indonesian independence).

This arrogance is now being kneed by reality: State revenue has tumbled by 12 per cent in the first third of this year, partly because of inefficient tax gathering and wild optimism. Trade is also declining with exports snared by US tariff policy flip-flops.

Australian legacy media’s interest in Indonesia depends on shock and awes of Ozzies arrested in Bali for alleged drug crimes that carry the unused death penalty. Agency reports of natural disasters, like volcanic eruptions and landslides swallowing villages, are a staple.

These space-fillers fit the last-century archetype of Asia – exotic, primitive and chaotic – needing no special knowledge to grasp a conclusion and don a bias.

The complexities of a rapidly evolving multi-ethnic archipelago of more than 280 million –11 of them to one of us – are usually left to ponderous Oz-based academics (White is an exception) rather than costly on-site journos to actualise.

Into this gap has marched Beijing now actively engaging with Jakarta at a depth far beyond our wee dips into small innovative projects. Even far-away Palais Bourbon is more involved than adjacent Australia; French President Emmanuel Macron spent more than two days in Jakarta last month with Brigitte eclipsing PM Anthony Albanese's lone 24-hour dash.

Petty points maybe – though not in cultures where partners and pomp draw far more readers than communiques.

As Defence Minister, cashiered former general Prabowo Subianto turned poli was in Beijing before his election as president last year courting renminbi – and getting applause for his nation’s solid support for the Palestinians.

(Indonesia is almost 90 per cent Sunni Islam, the same faith followed by most Palestinians. It has no diplomatic ties with Israel.)

All this is a fearful distance from the US pro-Israel position. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has called on Asian allies to boost defence spending to five per cent of GDP “to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific”.

This warmonger’s arrogance - also bowled at Australia but batted away by Albanese - suggests the former TV presenter is a postboy for Trump’s ego. To be gracious, maybe he’s just plain crass.

For Hegseth’s gratuitous advice to be realised, Indonesia would need to lift its US$175 billion annual defence budget by 16 times, dump its free meals for school kids programme and scrap or shrink education and health spending.

Although there’s widespread hostility towards the influence of ethnic Chinese citizens, the nation China is seen more as a friendly bank than a military threat.

Hegseth - and our right-wing Australian Strategic Policy Institute which has an office in Washington though not in Jakarta - seem blinkered by the awkward truth: China is Indonesia’s biggest business partner, with annual bilateral trade topping US $130 billion.

Chinese investors know where to slip the envelopes to gatekeepers, but these practices deter ethical Western businesses who are told by PM Anthony Albanese to help Indonesia get ahead.

It’s already there and needs no sanctimonious cents from Down Under when it gets megabucks from the Reds.

It would help the bemused if Professor White’s essay could include this footnote:

Aussies need years of intelligent study to come within a whiff of understanding Indonesia - a nation of passions and contradictions, nothing like our traditional allies.

For peace to prevail let’s try a new slogan: It doesn’t help the arms industries, but ‘getting to know you’ sure beats ’might is right’.

Firswt published in Pearls & Irritations, 10 June 2025: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/06/as-keating-advised-its-time-for-australia-to-seek-its-security-in-asia/

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Got $195? Good, that's the first step

Immigration issues raise sweat in the election debate, with some arguing that the lower the numbers the more jobs and houses for those already here. Others reckon fresh brains and brawn are needed to make the economy grow.

However, all agree encouraging international visitors is good policy if they come, spend ($33 billion last year), gawk and go. We greeted eight million with quarantine dogs in 2024. Most, who’d rather see koalas, come from NZ, China, the UK, the US and India - nations far away.

Less welcome are the folk from the globe’s fourth most populous nation – so close time to watch only one video on the plane.

Australian governments are hypocrites and have been for decades. Both sides say relationships with Indonesia must be given the highest priority. Their words are floss.

Tony Abbott dashed to Jakarta in 2013 to present his credentials as a new PM before visiting Washington or London, saying:

“From Australia's perspective, there should be an urgency - a real urgency - to building this relationship while there's still so much that Australia has to give and that Indonesia is keen to receive.”

It was assumed he was referring to trade in grains and beef. What Indonesians are keen to receive are visas; in responding we reveal our real feelings through policies underpinned by racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, discrimination and deep-down distrust.

Deputy PM Richard Marles isn’t so lugubrious. At last year’s signing of a ‘defence cooperation agreement’ in Canberra he told the future Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto:

“Australia and Indonesia, as the closest of neighbours, have a shared destiny. But from this moment forth, that destiny is very much defined by deep strategic trust.”

The adjective used was not ‘personal’ but ‘strategic’, a term hijacked by the military.

This story is riddled with contradictions. Almost 1.4 million Ozzies visited Indonesia in 2024, but the Australian Embassy in Jakarta only “processes more than 60,000 visas each year for Indonesians planning a holiday or short stay in Australia.”

That’s an imbalance of 23 to one, though this data doesn’t snare those who come to work or study.

The number of Okkers heading for Kuta's beer and bikes is so great that they're clearly unfrightened of their Balinese Hindu hosts despite being Indonesian citizens. This conflicts with polling by the Lowy Institute showing “Australian attitudes towards Indonesia have been – at best – lukewarm. And at worst, they betray a lurking suspicion.”

Those values loiter in Australian Immigration’s 20^th century groupthink and feed their directives.

Here’s proof of the wariness: Immigration rules let citizens of 50 mainly European states – including Croatia and Slovenia - get a free visitor visa and stay for up to three months.

Asian nationals are treated inequitably. Those from Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore can apply online - cost $20. Indonesians aren't eligible. They have to fill in a 17-page form and pay $195 per person – so a holiday for four adds $780 to their air and hotel costs.

That doesn’t build a relationship – it ensures one doesn’t thrive. Fewer Australians are now learning Indonesian than in last century so the next generation will know even less about the adjacent residents, their values and culture.

The benefits of youth backpacking overseas in building character and erasing xenophobia have been studied, but leaving Mum and Dad as a teen to seek your way is more European culture than Indonesian where homesickness is commonplace.

Uber users in the big cities get to polish their geography through meeting drivers from around the world – though rarely from the Archipelago.

So, no floodgates will open for the swarthy-skinned and religiously different, frequently slandered by coarse cartoon cliches in the right-wing media. Nor will many Indonesians overstay: the record is held by Malaysians, followed by citizens of China, UK, the US, India and the Pacific Islands.

The adventurous, determined and well-off usually find working and travelling around Australia can expand their horizons providing they avoid exploiting employers – but few Indonesians get the chance.

The $650 fee is almost out of reach for the average youngster; that’s more than a month’s earnings in a regional head office, double the wage in a small town.

A cap on the applicants of 4,264 places, needing a tertiary education, having functional English, access to $5,000 plus getting approval from Indonesian Immigration adds to the impediments.

Government permission isn’t required for UK and EU backpackers to head south, and there’s no cap.

The average annual salary in Indonesia is reportedly around $15,000. In Britain, it’s $78,000.

The issue of fees and discrimination was raised in a 2023 ‘position paper’ by the Perth-based Indonesia Institute called for reform claiming:

"Indonesia will overtake the Australian economy in market value by 2030. However, efforts to build trade and investment ties with this enormous and growing economy are undermined by Australia's visa regime.

“Indonesian visa applicants are placed in a higher risk category than smaller ASEAN economies.

“This higher threshold will have long-term, serious negative repercussions for Australia: we will not be able to… build trust levels between our two countries, or drive social, political, economic and education ties.”

The paper was widely distributed to politicians. It had little impact, suggesting that MPs know their electorates remain wary of Indonesia as the Lowy Institute discovered.

Is the fear factor terrorism and Islam? Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country, but the faith is also dominant in Malaysia and Brunei where it’s practised far more stringently.

Indonesia has been getting tough on terrorism since the Australian Embassy in Jakarta was bombed more than 20 years ago. The US State Department reported:

“Indonesia continued efforts to detect, disrupt, degrade, and deny safe haven for terrorist groups operating within its borders … (Government and Islamic) schools and universities have programmes intended to prevent student radicalization.”

On an international NGO’s Terrorism Index Score with 0 as a country with the highest risk (Burkina Faso), Indonesia ranks at position 30, safer than Germany and Thailand. Australia scores 46.

The Lowy report suggests “building trust and confidence will also require deepening cultural familiarity and understanding at the people level.”

The rules could be changed without reference to Parliament or becoming an issue in the election campaign. The impact would be significant.

Gough Whitlam got rid of White Australia in 1973, but not all the underpinning attitudes. It’s time to update, to erase the discriminatory residuals and create a Fair Australia.

Paul Keating’s 1994 claim that “No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia” might then carry some truth and dispel the ill repute.

First published in Michael West Media 17 April 2025: https://michaelwest.com.au/russian-planes-and-indonesians-unwelcome-to-australia/

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WATCHING WASHINGTON - IGNORING JAKARTA

As Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto steers his giant nation closer to China it’s worth recalling Paul Keating three decades ago: 'No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia'.

His successors nod and offer warm words, but no longer hear their prophet. Caught up in domestic policies and trying to dodge the Trump Martian machine we’re ignoring the neighbour.

We’re in Asia geographically, but not there culturally or politically. Their harbours are close; we want their shelter but they’re indifferent. Updating the chart is urgent.

The US President trashes international alliances like Aussie bogans beat up Bali bars. We now fear Big Bro won’t rush to sort out bullies on a faraway playground with fewer folk than Texas.

An SOS might be triggered by real or imagined Beijing threats – like those this month involving the reported shooting of flares near an Australian surveillance jet over the South China Sea, and Chinese naval live-fire exercises in the east Indian Ocean.

The warships were 280 nautical miles from Tassie, but close enough to churn paranoia and a rush to check the ANZUS Treaty text.

The Cold War alliance “binds Australia, (NZ) and the US to consult on mutual threats, and, in accordance with our respective constitutional processes, to act to meet common dangers.”

It was signed when Trump was a pre-schooler. Now a septuagenarian he’s showing no respect for last-century deals done for a different time and world.

In 1952 when ANZUS was born, Indonesia was run by the mercurial Soekarno dabbling with democracy but settling for autocracy. Its population of 72 million was three years into formal independence after more than three centuries of Duch colonialism.

It threatened to go Communist; the three Western nations panicked and knocked-up ANZUS.

Since then, the Republic’s numbers have quadrupled; it’s the world's fourth-largest state with more Muslims than anywhere else and is destroying democracy. Last year its economic growth rate topped five per cent against our 1.1 per cent.

Although just next door we can’t bother to learn their culture and language and understand their beliefs and values – all essential if we hope to get close.

It also has a new right-wing President. Prabowo Subianto, 73, a disgraced former general, is turning his nation into a military fantasy, parading his ministers in fatigues, forcing them to sleep under canvas. If this demeaning wasn’t real, it would be hilarious.

Prabowo is rubbishing ballots for wasting time and money; better select than elect. He’s told local journos to “prioritize the interests of the nation … a responsible press should know what constitutes the national interest.”

Opposition is stirring. Though so far poorly organised the potential for mass strife is ever present, largely ignored by the Australian media though not by Pearls & Irritations. Water-cannons have already hosed Indonesia Gelap (Dark Indonesia) demos in Surabaya.

Prabowo’s popular policy of free lunches for schoolkids has funding and admin hassles. About 32,000 extra workers are needed to cook and deliver. They won’t be trained at the nation’s many hospitality colleges but at Universitas Pertahanan, the Defence University, where military staff can teach the loading of woks and the arming of trays.

The corruption curse terrifying investors still froths and bubbles. This month seven suspects were arrested in an alleged $19 billion graft case at the government’s oil company Pertamina.

Prabowo has said he wants to forgive convicted corruptors provided who secretly return the money – an idea that’s probably illegal.

Back to Keating last century; his bromance with Soeharto was consummated with the Australia–Indonesia Agreement for Maintaining Security laid in 1995. The plan was fine but Keating’s partner was already losing control after almost 30 years of despotic rule.

One report claimed Soeharto was impressed by the PM, “telling his advisers he admired the Australian's patriotism and praising his readiness to promote an Australia more engaged with its region.”

Though not engaged with the wong cilik – the ordinary folk whose multitudes can destroy the elite. Keating and his crew high in their five-star hotels and embassy briefings couldn’t sniff the winds of change billowing through the crowded kampongs far below.

Your correspondent and other Westerners were regularly cornered by intense youth and wrung dry for fresh news. The Oz motorcade howled through the intersections where masked students sold smudged photocopies of banned international magazines exposing Soeharto’s kleptocracy and brutality.

Keating must have known the pact was one-sided, his counterpart rotten. Why did he ignore this villainy? He’s been contacted for comment but hasn’t replied.

The document was shredded in 1999 after Soeharto fell and Australia helped East Timor through the referendum. A shamed nation lost its pride; trust in Down Under has never recovered – and vicky-verky.

A 2021 Lowy Institute poll showed only 13 per cent of Indonesians want Australia as a “preferred partner”. The figure for Japan, a brutal occupying force in the 1940s, was backed by 46 per cent.

Now Prabowo has put Indonesia into BRICS, "the China-backed bloc of emerging economies” - Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa plus Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE.

It’s in opposition to the G7, France, the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Italy and the EU.

Australia is in neither club though ranking the twelfth largest economy in the world ahead of Canada which is in G7. We’re not even in ASEAN the impotent ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Indonesian wags call it NATO – No Action Talk Only.

The latest paperwork is the Australia‑Indonesia Defence Cooperation Agreement driven and signed last August by Deputy PM Richard Marles who saw a happy marriage. Prabowo doused arousal with cold water saying Indonesia would not “be involved in any geopolitical or military alliances or groupings” begging the question: Why did he sign?

We also have the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a 2020 pact that promised much but has delivered little in trade and less in influence. Its track to success has been potholed as predicted with no one keen to repair except with platitudes.

Some know our grains make noodles, our forests burn, koalas are cute and many shops close early. That’s about it. Korean pop is fun.

James Curran, professor of modern history at Sydney University, wrote that Keating “not only wanted to bury the old fears of Indonesia; he was looking ahead to the possibility of a new threat, in the form of a potentially more aggressive China.

“He was doing what any prudent leader should do – thinking broadly about the nation’s geopolitical future and preparing for any worst-case scenario.”

That scenario is here and now - engineered by Trump. If Canberra has a Plan B it's secret.

Three years ago the Lowy Institute’s Dr Stephen Grenville – formerly with the International Monetary Fund in Jakarta - wrote:

“Indonesia is more important to us than we are to them, and this will become truer as their relative economic weight increases. It's hard to imagine an Indonesian president reciprocating Keating's 'no country is more important to Australia than Indonesia'.”

Our security has expired. Click somewhere for an update.

First published in Pearls & Irritations 6 Narch 2025 https://johnmenadue.com/the-creeping-crisis-were-ignoring/

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Comment: Albanese is not certain to lose government, and may well hold on to a minority government, which could even be more radical. If Dutton wins government, these is lots of conservative baggage, especially, when Dutton was Home and Defence ministers. Nevertheless this is a good early analysis.

By Graham Hryce

The first term Labor prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, must go to the polls before the end of May.

Astute political commentators predict that Albo – as he likes to be known amongst those working class voters that he so unconvincingly pretends to represent – will select April 12 as the election date. That date would allow Albanese to cynically take advantage of an interest rate cut announced by the Reserve Bank last week – as well as enabling him to avoid handing down a budget before the election.

Like many social democratic political leaders in the West, Albanese is facing certain defeat in the upcoming election, no matter when it may take place. Other social democratic leaders committed to global elite programs and ideologies, for example Jacinta Ardern and Justin Trudeau – after sensing a rise in populist sentiment in the West – have resigned in advance of being cast out of office by voters no longer willing to tolerate their ineptitude and hypocrisy.

Albanese – like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – has, however, decided to chance his hand at being reelected by an electorate that increasingly cannot stand the sight of him and no longer believes a word he utters. This may be hubris on Albanese’s part, or he may be relying on the fact that, in Australia, first term federal governments are usually reelected.

Perhaps he is so committed to the elite ideologies that he embraces that he simply refuses to acknowledge the rise in populist sentiment that has changed the face of politics in the West in recent years, and threatens to destroy parties like the one he leads. Whatever the reason, Albanese’s political judgment – unsurprisingly – appears to be fundamentally flawed.

How has Albanese’s swift fall from grace come about? The starting point is that he has never been anything other than a fourth-rate politician. The Labor government was elected three years ago with a slim two-seat majority – not because the electorate was impressed with Albanese’s political acumen, but because the tired, divided, and incompetent Morrison conservative government was no longer fit to govern.

Albanese’s demise, in fact, commenced on the night of his election win.

In his victory speech, apparently without consulting his colleagues, Albanese announced that his government’s key policy initiative during its first term would be the establishment of a constitutionally enshrined ‘Voice to Parliament’ – a purely advisory body that would instruct the government on matters relating to Aboriginal affairs.

Never mind that reams of advice on this vexed political issue had been given to governments for decades – with no improvement whatsoever to the disgraceful conditions in which the majority of Aboriginals who live in remote communities have to endure.

Albanese’s radical rewriting of the constitution would have provided well paid perpetual sinecures for members of the urban Aboriginal elite. What prevented members of this elite from providing immediate advice to Albanese – without the need to create a constitutionally enshrined body – was never explained.

The ‘Voice’ was a classically woke, deeply flawed, and controversial proposal. It was, of course, supported by corporate and academic elites as well as most mass media organizations – because it provided a unique opportunity for virtue signaling. Unfortunately for Albanese – because, at his insistence, the proposal entailed amendments to the constitution – the Voice required the electorate to approve it in a referendum. Albanese staked his political career on winning the referendum and spent the next 18 months, in the company of elite leaders, campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote.

The referendum was lost in October 2023 – with 60% of the electorate voting against it. One could not imagine a clearer indicator of the rise of populist sentiment amongst Australian voters and their rejection of woke programs than this decisive referendum result. Albanese simply shrugged off this expensive political debacle – which set back the Aboriginal cause for decades – saying that he was not responsible for the defeat and that in any event “Aboriginals were used to disappointment.” Albanese and his government then blithely pressed on with their commitment to elite programs in other areas (climate change, diversity politics, transgender rights, etc).

At the same time, the Albanese government did nothing to ease the cost-of-living pressures that were progressively impoverishing more and more ordinary Australians. Energy and food prices have continued to rise dramatically over the past three years, as have house prices and rents.

Albanese refused to contemplate introducing policies that would ameliorate the cost-of-living crisis – this would have meant redistributing wealth away from the global elites – that had been for some time the primary concern of most Australian voters. Instead, he delivered endless woke homilies that amounted to little more than exercises in magical thinking – while continuing to confer largesse on anyone fortunate enough to fall within the sacrosanct categories created by diversity politics.

Albanese remains so committed to this elite mode of politics – even now – that one of his key election policies is free childcare for families earning up to $580,000.

Having ignored the deepening cost-of-living crisis, and disregarded the rise of populist sentiment, Albanese sought to placate voters by adopting wholesale the Conservative coalition’s foreign policy agenda. This, of course, came as no surprise. Having adopted the global elites’ domestic policies, it was inevitable that Albanese should also adopt their foreign policy program.

And, as with all contemporary social democratic leaders in the West, it did not occur to Albanese that the billions of dollars wasted on misguided foreign policy initiatives could have been much better spent on easing cost of living pressures domestically. In this Albanese somewhat resembles a latter day Lyndon Johnson – bearing in mind, of course, Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

Albanese enthusiastically championed the unwise and expensive AUKUS arrangement, Biden’s misguided China policy, the Netanyahu government’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the tottering Zelensky regime in Ukraine. Albanese’s capitulation on every one of these issues has been so abject and complete that it is now virtually impossible to have a rational debate on any of these matters in Australia.

Predictably, Albanese’s craven foreign policy cave-in has ended in complete and utter failure – because he could never hope to ‘out-conservative’ the Conservative opposition on these issues.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has effectively demonized Albanese on foreign policy issues in large part because Albanese has meekly accepted Dutton’s framing of the various debates. Dutton is, as one would expect, far more irrationally committed to US expansionism, China-phobia, and the Netanyahu and Zelensky regimes than Albanese can ever be.

But Albanese’s problems do not end there.

Donald Trump’s election as US president has created more difficulties for him – which go far beyond the fact that he and Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd (a former failed Labor prime minister who was rewarded for his political ineptitude by being dispatched to Washington), have made crude and derogatory comments about Trump in the past.

Trump, of course, is a populist leader par excellence, and has nothing but complete contempt for everything that Albanese and his Labor Party stand for. He also, no doubt, despises Albanese’s weakness. Nor is Trump a committed fan of AUKUS.

Trump’s recent wholesale abandonment of the Zelensky regime, and his determination to end the conflict in Ukraine has left Albanese looking particularly foolish. In fact, Trump’s decisive and principled action in respect of Ukraine has sounded the death knell for social democratic leaders like Scholz, Albanese and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Albanese, however, believes he can ignore these facts, and recently made the fanciful claim that he is better placed to cooperate with Trump than Dutton – because of the “enormous respect” that other world leaders have for him.

It is difficult to imagine a more pathetic and self-delusional assertion by an Australian prime minister. Most world leaders would not know or care who Albanese was – and the best that he can hope for from Trump is that he is treated with the benign condescension that Trump reserves for leaders of bit-player nations who supinely do his bidding.

Thus Albanese – only weeks out from an election – finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. The only bright spot on the electoral horizon is that there are 18 minor party members and independents in the House of Representatives – most of whom are ideologically aligned with the Labor party – which means that Dutton has to win 19 seats to form a majority government. Twelve months ago this appeared to be unlikely – but the recent dramatic decline in Albanese’s popularity means that Dutton now has a very real chance of becoming prime minister.

Whatever happens, it is clear that Albanese will not be able to form a majority government. Even if he remains prime minister, it can only be at the head of a minority government forced to rely upon support from the Greens and/or the elite Teal independents. This, of course, can only lead to serious and ongoing political instability.

The absolutely dire position that Albanese and his Labor Party are in has been obliquely confirmed by their first election advertisement, released last week. The advertisement states (untruthfully) that “We understand the pressure that families are under” – and then, under a large picture of Peter Dutton, states “You’ll be worse off under Dutton”.

A more telling admission that Albanese is unable to run on his political “achievements” cannot be imagined. In fact, it is virtually an admission of defeat.

The fact is that Albanese is a doomed social democratic political leader – much like Biden, Ardern, Trudeau, Starmer, and Scholz. Such leaders – because of their unwavering support for the global elites and their ideologies – are incapable of effectively dealing with the pressing economic and political problems that increasingly bedevil all Western nations.

Hence their declining support amongst voters – it now hovers around 30% at best. Scholz, in losing this week’s election in Germany, garnered less than 20% of the vote. Nor are these failed leaders able to understand – let alone effectively oppose - the rising tide of populism that is now engulfing the West.

When Albanese loses the upcoming election, the Labor Party will simply replace him as leader with another non-entity and engage in the usual unproductive post-election postmortem. The Democratic Party in America is currently undergoing such a process – with little success. Not only can the Democratic leadership not agree on why Trump defeated them so comprehensively, they are unable to come up with a viable political program for the future. The fact that the Democrats have been unable to offer any resistance to Trump’s recent radical reshaping of American and international politics is proof positive of the party’s ideological bankruptcy.

The dilemma confronting all elite-oriented social democratic parties in the West is now tolerably clear.

These parties long ago sold their souls to the global elites whose rapacious greed, contempt for ordinary citizens and woke ideological fanaticism has generated a populist backlash and crisis of legitimacy that threatens to destroy social democratic parties (as well as mainstream conservative parties) in the very near future.

What is to be done? This has always been a difficult question to answer, but one thing appears certain – there is no point in asking Anthony Albanese – or any of his fellow social democratic leaders – for an answer.

By Graham Hryce, an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

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Over the last decades, much has been said about Chinese CCP influence upon Australian politicians and government officials. However, ever since the days when Marshal Green served as US Ambassador to Canberra between 1973 and 75, any talk about undue US influence upon the Australian government has been put into the ‘fringe conspiracy theory’ category.

The recent revelations by the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, have alluded to massive clandestine activities by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that sought US influence (if not control) over other nations’ policies. This includes Australia. Past US administrations have pushed their preferred policy frameworks on their allies. The closeness of US and Australian policy positions needs a re-examination to understand the nature of any potential influence and if it was a detriment to Australia’s best interests.

In addition, the closeness of US and Australian propaganda ‘fountains’ that became exposed after the Covid-19 pandemic indicates just how much Australia is influenced by US propaganda and influence peddling programs. Much of what was spewed out through the legacy media has now been found to be totally unfactual.

The national leaders who followed the Covid propaganda lines are the same people who are responsible for Australia’s defense policy.

Australian Defence Policy

Australia’s defense policy has been staunchly pro-American since the Second World War. Australia saw the US as a friend in the wilderness, in an unfriendly part of what is termed as the Indo-Pacific, near countries that could ‘tip’ towards communism very easily. The ‘domino theory’ hypothesis supported Australian defense policy for those post-WWII decades.

Australia unquestionably followed the United States to Korea, Vietnam, and, after 9/11, when the ‘war on terror’ paradigm replaced the ‘domino theory’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Prime Minister John Howard saw himself as the deputy sheriff of the US at the bottom of Southeast Asia.

Australia also stood steadfast with the United States on the containment of China, even though China was Australia’s largest trading partner. Australia sought to get even closer to the United States by stationing US troops in northern Australia as a useless gesture of solidarity. Australia joined the QUAD along with India, Japan, and Korea and enthusiastically embraced AUKUS with Britain and the US to complement the China containment strategy under the Morrison government.

Obtaining four nuclear-powered submarines was considered a masterful strategy to protect Australia from imaginary threats a decade or more in the future. Australia under Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also supported Ukraine in an unnecessary war with Russia with a complex history behind it. Peter Dutton, now opposition leader and the former defense minister under the Morrison government, holds exactly the same position.

Both sides of Australian politics and the Australian defense establishment fully support US policy of containment, even with strong and powerful arguments about other potential risks and threats that are totally ignored. Such threats, if recognized, would build the basis of a defense policy that would look substantially different from what Australia has now.

Why Australian defense policy has not changed with the times is a valid question that is entitled to be asked.

Changing factors

Southeast Asia, ASEAN, and the Indo-Pacific region are all undergoing rapid changes. Indeed, things are beginning to happen so quickly, they really haven’t been noticed in Canberra.

Our near neighbor Indonesia is beginning to reincorporate the military into the civil service and civilian affairs. Malaysia is rapidly becoming a government heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. Myanmar is still involved in a deep civil war. Cambodia and Lao PDR are much closer to China, and some nations are becoming organized crime centers that reach into Australia.

At the same time, the influence of ASEAN is on the decline, while the influence of BRICS is quickly rising with Indonesia now a full member and Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam as partner states.

Southeast Asia is now much more developed and much more complex, as Australian influence is waning in the region. Current transactional relationships have not blossomed into fully fledged bilateral relationships, with one of two exceptions.

China (and Russia) are talking about a multipolar world built upon respect for the rule of law, where nations operate together in cooperation, rather than competition. The days of one superpower exercising primacy over the region are long gone. This requires a complete cognitive adjustment so one can see what is and what is not a real threat.

AUKUS is asking Australia to trust the United States for decades into the future. Looking at the US relationship with Ukraine today should ring alarm bells. Is Ukraine being thrown under the bus in the interests of better Russian-US relations? Forcing Ukraine to sign up to new agreements after the event can be interpreted as nothing better than gangsterism. Is NATO being cut loose? These are events policy makers in Canberra should be watching closely.

The old Henry Kissinger adage says, “To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous. To be an ally of the United States is fatal”.

Australia urgently needs to be concerned about its place in the region. Australia is quickly pedaling backward. The reality is that Australia’s leverage in the region isn’t much more than Timor Leste. Australia is alone and isolated and hasn’t realized this yet. Australian defense policy needs a total rethink.

This is thanks to DOGE, which effectively forced Australia to take off their rose-colored ‘policy’ glasses and enable Australia to see new realities. DOGE gave the world a reality check about what the US really is to allies like Australia.

Published in Modern Diplomacy 25th February 2025

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The Australian government continues to dismiss scientific evidence of Post-Vaccination Syndrome and ignore the long-term harm caused by COVID vaccines, leaving thousands without compensation.

By Nick Holt, February 21, 2025, 8:45 AM

Yale University has provided scientific evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause lasting harm, manifesting in a condition known as Post-Vaccination Syndrome (PVS).

The findings, published on February 18, 2025, in the preprint Immunological and Antigenic Signatures Associated with Chronic Illnesses after COVID-19 Vaccination, confirm the existence of PVS and indicate its biological basis.

Despite the data, the Australian government has yet to acknowledge or address the growing number of reported cases.

The study, which analysed blood samples from patients reporting chronic health issues following vaccination, reveals biological markers linked to immune system dysfunction, persistent spike protein in the bloodstream, and a reduction in protective antibodies.

These findings suggest that the effects of the vaccine extend beyond the anticipated timeframe, contradicting earlier claims by health authorities.

Key findings of the study include:

• Immune System Alterations: Individuals with PVS exhibited a reduction in key immune cells and increased activity in others, signalling an ongoing inflammatory response.

• Spike Protein Persistence: The study found elevated levels of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the blood, persisting up to 709 days after vaccination, contradicting prior assurances that it would be cleared shortly after inoculation.

• Antibody Deficiency: Participants with PVS had significantly lower levels of antibodies to the spike protein, despite no prior COVID-19 infection, suggesting an impaired immune response.

These findings support the existence of PVS, a condition that has been debated but not fully investigated by public health authorities. Despite these results, the Australian government has not initiated further investigations or formally acknowledged the issue.

COVERSE, an advocacy group for Australians harmed by COVID-19 vaccines, has called for more recognition and support for those affected by PVS.

Dr. Rado Faletic, co-founder of COVERSE, highlighted the shortcomings of the government’s COVID-19 Vaccination Claims Scheme, introduced in 2022 to compensate individuals harmed by the vaccine.

The scheme has been criticised for its high rejection rate of 95%, leaving many applicants without compensation, despite providing medical documentation linking their conditions to the vaccine.

Dr. Faletic also noted that many who were harmed did not apply for compensation due to the complexity of the claims process and narrow eligibility criteria.

"Over 99% of Australians harmed by the COVID-19 vaccines have not been acknowledged or compensated," he said, emphasizing the gap in the system's ability to address the full scope of vaccine-related injuries.

As Australia heads toward a federal election, Dr. Faletic has urged sitting representatives and prospective candidates to take a clear stance on the issue.

"Thousands of innocent Australians are now permanently disabled from the COVID-19 vaccines," he said.

"These Australians took these products in good faith, at the request of state and federal governments."

The COVID-19 Vaccination Claims Scheme closed in September 2024, despite ongoing promotion of vaccination by the government. During its operation, the compensation program rejected 95% of applicants, one of the highest rejection rates globally for no-fault vaccine injury programs.

Dr. Faletic pointed out that many vaccine-injured Australians did not apply for compensation due to the bureaucratic complexity and narrow eligibility criteria.

"We are confident that over 99% of citizens harmed by the COVID-19 vaccines have not been acknowledged or compensated," he said.

Faletic also noted the broader consequences of the government’s failure to address this issue.

"This ongoing injustice continues to erode trust in our public health system," he explained. COVERSE and the broader community of those affected by COVID-19 vaccine injuries are closely monitoring the upcoming election to identify which candidates will support those who have suffered for nearly four years.

The organisation is calling for immediate action to rectify the oversight and provide proper support for those impacted by the vaccines.

Read More here …………………

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Who needs who? Anthony Albanese with Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s president-elect at the time, in Canberra last August.

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I came across Hamish McDonald’s article on the decline of teaching of Indonesian in Australian schools on Duncan Graham’s Substack Indonesia Now this morning. Places I used to haunt like the Department of Indonesian studies at Melbourne and Monash Universities are gone. To most Indonesia just means t trip to Bali for a holiday. Very little is understood about the great nations that will soon play a major international role in the region. Unfortunately, Australia is now seen with little strategic importance by Indonesia (and other regional nations).

In June last year one of our best-known international affairs analysts, Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute, floated a striking proposal in the journal Australian Foreign Affairs: a formal military alliance with Indonesia that would vastly extend the ambit of the “echidna” defence strategy he has advanced as an alternative to Canberra’s deeper alignment with the United States.

The idea highlighted a shift in Australian views that has gone largely unnoticed. No longer do strategists in Canberra see Indonesia as a potential enemy. With its population stabilising at around 280 million and no sign that its people are eyeing off Australia’s arid lands — indeed, its government sees the sparsely populated Kalimantan as the place for expansion — Indonesia is now seen as a friendly power worth cultivating. Roggeveen took this shift even further.

The commentary from various specialists in the journal treated his idea sympathetically. Nor, beyond some mention of its military’s human rights record, did they seem fazed by the idea of greater closeness. But they posed the question: what’s in it for Indonesia, beyond the relationship it already has with Australia?

Among the friendly critics was Melissa Conley Tyler, former national director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, who ran four sessions of a “track-two” dialogue with Indonesian representatives between 2011 and 2018. “My clearest memory is the shift I saw over the decade: a clear sense of Australia becoming less and less relevant to Indonesia,” she commented. “While we were working hard to get Australia’s key sector leaders to see the emerging giant on their doorstep, you could almost see the Indonesians’ attention drifting away.”

A leading Indonesian strategist, Evan Laksmana, said Indonesia was unlikely to see Australia as one of the cornerstones of its foreign policy, ranking it below ASEAN, the United States, China, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia as priorities. For Jakarta, the question was whether it was wise, within its long tradition of formal non-alignment, to lean closer to the West. Australia was seen simply as the West’s local branch office.

The point that Jakarta now has bigger fish to fry was emphasised last month when Prabowo Subianto, the former army general elected president last year, was guest of honour at India’s annual Republic Day parade in New Delhi. On the sidelines he was negotiating purchase of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile developed by India and Russia. Earlier in January, Indonesia became a full member of the BRICS association of powers uncomfortable with the America-centred global financial system.

On the other side of the relationship, Conley and others point to a desultory interest in Indonesia among Australians outside the defence forces. The country is Australia’s most popular holiday destination, with 1.37 million visits there in 2023. Beyond holidays in Bali, though, interest doesn’t run very deep.

Trade is well down the list for both countries, at a total of $26.7 billion two-way. Investment is paltry, with only $1.27 billion invested by Australians in Indonesia (and $2.22 billion here by Indonesians). A report commissioned in 2023 by foreign minister Penny Wong from banker Nicholas Moore outlined steps to build up investment in Southeast Asia, but Australian businesses don’t seem to be jumping back into Indonesia, especially as that means to put themselves at the mercy of its corrupt judicial machinery. The recent arrest of Jakarta’s popular former investment board chief Thomas Lembong on a murky corruption charge hardly builds confidence.

In a wider setting, the decline of Indonesian studies in Australia continues. This was emphasised at the end of last year when two big private schools announced they were shutting down Indonesian-language studies. One was Scotch College in Melbourne. The other, much more surprisingly, was the Essington School in Darwin, where Bahasa Indonesia has for many years been a compulsory subject in primary grades and in Years 7 and 8 in senior school.

This is Darwin, a forty-minute flight from Kupang in West Timor and closer to Denpasar than to Sydney. And it’s in the Northern Territory, which has long tried to position itself as Australia’s front door to Southeast Asia.

The federal member for the Darwin region, Labor’s Luke Gosling, an Indonesian-speaker from his army career, says it is a “huge backwards step for government and private schools to be ignoring our huge and strategically important neighbour.” Indonesia was expected to be in the world’s largest five economies by 2040, he said.

“Only half of Darwin and Palmerston schools currently teach Bahasa Indonesia,” Gosling tells me. “In the past, NT governments have prioritised the Indonesia relationship and almost every school taught Bahasa. We also had teacher exchanges between Darwin and eastern Indonesia.” He also sees potential to teach Bahasa in Eastern Arnhem land.

Paul Nyhuis, Essington’s principal, told me the decision was made after long consultations with staff, parents and students, and had aroused little controversy in the school community. None of last year’s Year 8 students had elected to continue with Indonesian. “The student voice had spoken, and the engagement in the recent language has really waned.” The school would now be looking at a more “global” language such as Chinese, French or Spanish for in-school tuition, as well as investigating online language options.

The story is pretty similar elsewhere in Australia. Enrolments in any language at Year 12 dropped from 11.3 per cent of total enrolments in 2010 to 8.2 per cent in 2022. Enrolments in every one of the major languages are down with the exception of Spanish, which is coming up from a low base. Indonesian showed the sharpest fall (47 per cent) from 1161 enrolments to 619. In New South Wales the decline is drastic: from 439 sitting Indonesia in the higher school certificate in 1991 to just seventy-nine last year, despite a small 6.6 per cent bounce in language studies overall in 2024 (which is still only an extra 363 students).

Statistics for study below Year 12 are patchy. Most states have what could be called a token requirement for foreign-language study. In New South Wales, it’s optional at primary schools, and at state secondary schools the only requirement is one hundred hours over one twelve-month period between Years 7 and 10.

“Any teacher that happens to speak a foreign language tends to be designated to teach that language — and that becomes the language policy for that school,” says Sarah Richardson, executive director of Asialink Education at Melbourne University. “It’s almost impossible for a student to start studying a language in primary school and then to continue to study that language into high school, so kids end up with a bit of an introduction to various languages. This feeds into university Asia studies that are also struggling.”

The big exception is Victoria, where in 2011 Ted Baillieu’s Liberal government instituted a policy mandating foreign language study in all schools from foundation year to Year 10. The uptick was immediate. By 2020, 339,124 government primary school students — almost nine in every ten — were learning at least one language. At secondary level, some 43 per cent of all state school students (103,824 of 242,884) were learning a language. Some 181 primary schools and seventy-four secondary schools offer Indonesian.

Why is Indonesian losing popularity? It’s partly evidence of a shrinkage of options at university level. Only twelve universities have an Indonesian studies program, down from twenty-two in 1992. In the 1980s and 1990s, leaders like Bob Hawke and Tim Fischer talked up the importance of Indonesia, recalls David Reeve, a historian and former professor of Indonesian. “At UNSW we were turning students away.”

Then, from 1998, came turmoil and catastrophe in Indonesia: the fall of Suharto, the violent exit from East Timor and resulting Indonesian hostility to Australia, the Bali bombing, explosives at the Australian embassy and a Jakarta hotel, the Aceh tsunami. “Parents didn’t want their kids to study Indonesian because they didn’t want them to go there,” Reeve said. Schools couldn’t get insurance at reasonable cost for study tours and immersions. “Suddenly at uni, the Indonesian department was a charity case,” he said. “We weren’t earning enough to stay open.”

The gap at higher education has partly been filled by the multi-university Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies and the New Colombo Plan, which since its start in 2014 under foreign minister Julie Bishop has placed more than 12,700 students and young professionals in Indonesia. Fortunately, Indonesian is a language that can be acquired relatively easily for everyday purposes at that age.

At schools, Reeve views the current curriculum content as a bit boring for young Australians: too much classical Javanese dancing and theatre and not enough contemporary popular culture, in contrast to the anime and Murakami novels in Japanese or Gangnam Style and stylish films in Korean. “Indonesia doesn’t market itself, except as a tourist destination,” he says. And along with Essington’s Nyhuis, Reeve thinks a foreign-language capability hasn’t been pushed as an opportunity-enhancing adjunct to other study majors and professional qualifications, rather than as an uncertain pathway on its own to a job.

What all this means is that an initiative started under the Menzies government in the 1950s to prepare Australians for dealing with the tumultuous new neighbour that had suddenly emerged from the Dutch empire, then was kicked along by the Hawke and Keating governments, is now faltering badly, save in Victoria where a Liberal state government partly stemmed the tide.

“While many in government realise that a lack of Asian-language learning is a major problem, there is a lack of political courage to really address this issue properly,” says Asialink Education’s Richardson. She suggests each state could pick one Asian language for study from Year 1 to Year 12, or require students to learn a language consistently through high school, or mandate language study online moderated by teachers.

For Melissa Conley-Tyler, the fate of language teaching helps explain why Roggeveen’s alliance proposal would fail to attract support. “Defence ties alone — no matter how logical or valuable — cannot create the closeness of relationship required,” she commented. “For Australia to matter deeply to Indonesia, it needs to engage in the whole range of issues that preoccupy Indonesian leaders… the health, education, skills, social infrastructure, digital economy, green energy transition and other challenges Indonesia needs to surmount to escape the middle-­income trap.”

Strategic analysts need to broaden their horizons, she said. “Australia’s security requires the use of many tools of statecraft, not just defence. National security advocates can be a powerful constituency for whole-of-­nation international engagement, which has flow-­on security effects. Australia lacks the political will to do something as simple — yet as game-­changing — as making Indonesian language a compulsory school subject.”

And why not Indonesian? It uses the Roman alphabet, is spelled phonetically, has no tones, is accepted at all levels of fluency (kids could try it out in Bali with their parents, then later on while surfing in Nias or seeking spirituality in Java), and offers pathways notably to Hindi/Urdu and Arabic. Nor does country study imply endorsement of the government involved, as ANU China specialist Amy King was recently at pains to point out. If West Papuans do manage to break loose from Jakarta, their common language would be Bahasa Indonesia, not Tok Pisin.

But compulsory? Politicians quick to insist students study more maths, science, English, computer coding or patriotic history have so far baulked at making a choice that would mean facing down the entrenched teacher cohorts of non-selected languages and the ethnic lobbies. Still, this is surely something federal education minister Jason Clare and his Coalition shadow Sarah Henderson should be thinking about.

Hamish McDonald

Hamish McDonald, a former foreign editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and regional editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, is author of two books on Indonesia.

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According to the Australian Dyslexia Association, “Dyslexia is estimated to affect some 10% of the Australian population.” This squarely puts the problem in the hands of schools. Studies in the United Kingdom indicate that at least 80 percents of students with dyslexia in the UK are never diagnosed.  

Dyslexia, or Specific/Significant Learning Difficulty/Disability (SLD) is a general learning disorder that involves difficulty in reading and writing, due to not being able to listen and identify speech sounds and relate them to the written word, and make the necessary sounds to communicate back. Dyslexia is neurological, and as such cant be cured. 

The general signs of dyslexia are difficult to recognize before a child attends school. The only tell-tale sign is the child maybe very slow to pick up speech as an infant. At pre-school and early primary school, the child will be observed as a slow learner. The varying severity of dyslexia often makes it very difficult to spot and diagnose, especially by untrained teachers.

The first obvious signs may only appear in the early primary grades where a child has difficulty in learning new words, reading and repeating nursery rhymes. As the child’s education continues, he or she will have trouble understanding and grasping new concepts presented in class. 

Thus, in the class situation, a child will start falling behind the rest of the students, where social problems will begin to manifest. This will lead to loss of self-esteem, lack of confidence, and possible depression at an early age, particularly if the child is not diagnosed. Often, they are targeted by other students for bullying, just because they are different. 

During these years, the child will struggle with English comprehension, doing mathematics, solving maths problems, and learning a foreign language.

Dyslexia has no correlation with intelligence. This is a mistake many make in assessing these children. 

Dyslexia is sometimes associated with other learning disorders as dyspraxia, the difficulty of performing coordinated movements, dyscalculia, the difficulty in dealing with numbers, dysgraphia, the difficulty of turning thoughts into the written word, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a hyperactive behavioural disorder. 

In addition, dyslexia may be associated with prosopagnosia, a condition where a person has difficulties recognising peoples faces. This will often be accompanied with a form of anonic aphasia, where a person has difficulty in remembering names. 

Like dyslexia, all the above are neurological disorders. There is a probability these conditions may accompany dyslexia. Due to the complexity of these disorders, differing extremities along a spectrum, and differing sets of symptoms, they are extremely difficult to diagnose, outside a clinical situation, where cognitive tests are done. 

When dyslexia is associated with other disorders, the child may find great difficulties in learning. This can lead to social integration problems, where on occasion they withdraw from parents, teachers and friends. With the addition of ADHA, students may be seen as class disrupters, being anxious and/or aggressive in the classroom.

Without any assistance, these students are likely to eventually just drop out of the education system, with low self-confidence and self-esteem. This often leads to delinquency.

If students can be diagnosed early, they can be assisted in the early years. This may require one to one speech therapy, and specialists assisting the child finding the best ways to learn. The key with dyslexic students is teaching them how to learn along side others. This is most desirable as it assists these students socially ingrate with people around them. Being segregated into any special needs classes may lead to social isolation in future years. 

If dyslexia is not discovered and diagnosed, the child will go through school life continually struggling to understand new work. Children not knowing and understanding their disability, may just go on living with low self-esteem, because they will continue to compare themselves with others through life. 

In most cases, this leads to stress, anxiety and depression in life, where they will be incorrectly treated with drugs. For example, they may be medically treated for depression, when the real problem is learning to live with their cognitive disadvantages, due to dyslexia. In addition, they may continue through life having trouble with relationships. 

Dyslexia is of concern to about one in ten people. Un-diagnosed they may have trouble progressing in any career within regimented organizations, which most are. However, if they know how to compensate for their cognitive weakness, chances are they can go on and have a fulfilling career. 

There is a strong positive correlation between ADHD and successful entrepreneurs. A number of studies have shown that people with ADHD can become high achievers with the energy, motivation, and give them a propensity towards action. However, ADHD may also bring impulsiveness, which could lead to recklessness. Once again diagnosis is the key, so those who have ADHD know how to cope with the behavioural traits it brings. One can build new strengths by understanding their weaknesses. 

Dyslexia is a massive challenge for an already overloaded and under resourced education system. Putting the responsibility of finding and diagnosing dyslexic people by the teacher is grossly insufficient. According to the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (NITL), only 5 percent of teacher training courses in Australia devote any time to dyslexia. Special and compulsory training is needed to be incorporated within the teacher training curriculum as a minimum. 

To support teachers, there must be a sufficient special education infrastructure behind them. This is made even more difficult, as the types and degrees of the dyslexic grouping requires more art than science to assist students learn how to learn, and overcome their weaknesses. There are no textbook remedies, where solutions are found through deductive problem solving. This is especially the case where these conditions when mixed together at different intensities require creative solutions. 

Such an approach will assist many people live fulfilling lives. This can turn many people who might be dismissed as losers into high achievers. 

Originally published in Eurasia Review 2nd September 2024

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US sanctions as a weapon of war are having an unexpected affect. Russia, China, and Iran are developing alternative routes of trade and finance, and cooperation with other nations. Perhaps the biggest product of sanctions has been to encourage the rapid development of BRICS plus, now a very strategically important block.

BRICS was formed in 2001 as an economic association between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa to promote cultural, trade and political cooperation between the members. BRICS has created a development bank, a Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a BRICS payment system, and a BRICS basket reserve currency. The estimated population of the grouping is 3.2 billion people, or 42 percent of world population. BRICS combined GDP represents around 26 percent of total world GDP.

BRICS is becoming closely interconnected with the members of the 9 member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), where influence across the Pan-Eurasian region is strong, Iran just being added as a new member. The SCO grouping has grown from the original Russo-Chinese security alliance, where central Asian Republics now have a multilateral platform for dialogue. This is a platform where India and Pakistan, as well as Iran and Saudi Arabia are holding bilateral talks.

Geo-political and geo-economic cooperation has been enhanced with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), where trade can expand into Africa and South America.

Iran and Argentina have applied for BRICS membership, while a host of nations including Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand, and Turkey are in close dialogue with BRICS.

Observers within the region state that interest in joining BRICS increased greatly after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are rumoured to be advanced on their respective negotiations to join BRICS within the next couple of years.

This would radically shift alignment within Eurasia where there would be a strong nexus between Riyadh, Tehran, Ankara, Moscow, Beijing, and Delhi. The objective here is to develop a commodity trade regime that would bypass the US Dollar.  This would severely weaken primacy of the US Dollar as an international currency.

There are already moves by Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Turkey to use Rubles, Yuan, Rupees, Turkish Lire, and Rials as trading currencies backed by commodities and gold. Banks are bypassing the SWIFT system for their own. The system is also accommodating payments with commodities.

Since the Nord Streams incident, Turkey is interested in taking the lead as Russia’s gateway to the EU for gas exports. Turkey can then become the gateway to the EU from both Russia and Azerbaijan. This will connect Egypt, Greece, and make Turkey a major hub in Europe for energy. Russian pipelines to Turkey via TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines already have a capacity of 39 billion cubic metres per annum. Balkan Stream will deliver gas to Europe. There are plans to rapidly expand these capacities.

These relationships are also benefitting this grouping militarily. Iran is now supplying Russian forces with a modified Shahed-136 kamikaze drones, proving much more effective than Russian drones on the battlefield.

Consequences for Australia

The rapidly changing regional order needs a new and up to date analysis. Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Thong’s visit to Beijing at the invitation of Xi Jinping last year, signals an improvement in bilateral relations. China’s diplomatic, trade and investment relationships with the rest of ASEAN are now very strong. Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have all announced they are applying to join BRICS.

China is not seen as the adversary in the region, in the way Australia sees China. The recent announcement of stationing potentially nuclear armed B-52 bombers at Tindal Airbase in the Northern Territory, can be seen as provocative in the region. The Australian Government consideration to send advisors to Europe to train Ukrainian troops, complementing an already wide array of consultants, advisers, and mercenaries, together with weapons is not an act that will contributing to the lowering of tensions.

With India’s embracing of BRICS, it’s commitment in time of any conflict to the QUAD must be looked at very closely. The QUAD is portrayed as an important strategic agreement to Australia.

We have witnessed China de-couple trade with Australia. Why buy beef from Australia when it can be bought from Brazil? Expect more de-coupling as China utilizes the Belt and Road even more. With the sharp change in China’s business ideology, public enterprises are growing in influence and importance. Australian corporations must see these shifts and try to couple up with this change in the nature of China trade.

According to BRICS diplomats within ASEAN, Australian trade diplomats are already fighting a de facto trade war, where the booty is market-share. For example, trade diplomats have long informally agreed which markets should be deemed traditional for products from respective exporting countries. Breaking these informal agreements is considered an act of war, be it for beef, lamb, fruits, or services. Australia will not be retaliated by one country, but all the BRICS members, if it breaches these understandings. This is a trade war Australia cannot win and is damaging Australia’s reputation, where ordinary citizens are not even aware of.

The US pivot Mark I, II, & III to the Indo-Pacific in contrast, lacks the lustre of the Chinese advance into the region. They have been based upon the premise of competing rather than cooperating in mutual coexistence. One of the US misunderstandings is that China is not alone, it’s bringing a new trade regime with it to the region. Australia may have US military hardware on its territory, but through the cultural, political, and economic paradigms within the region runs the risk of isolating itself. These are areas the US alliance cannot assist Australia.

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Australians have been told for generations the United States is vital to Australia’s defence and security. The Anglo-centric defence and foreign affairs establishment in Canberra still sees a non-polar world dominated by the US, and is focused on preventing an emerging multi-polar world. This has been national policy since the Cold War, placing an important emphasis on ANZUS. This stance has been supported by think tanks like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), heavily funded by the pro-US defence establishment, and got Australia involved in a number of meaningless wars and military actions.  

The ‘demonization’ of China and Russia is making it almost impossible to put forward alternative viewpoints, where one would be labelled a Sino-Sympathiser or Putin supporter. Iran and North Korea are seen as evil empires, where history plays no credence, as we saw in the Ukraine playbook.

The new AUKUS alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States locks Australia into US and UK Pacific policy for at least another 30, if not 50 years. As Australia’s defence spending hits AUD 50 billion in the 2023-24 budget, surpassing 2.0 percent of GDP, a proportion of those funds are beginning to be spent on projecting an Australian presence into the East China Sea and Taiwan Straits. These areas are of little true strategic interest to Australia, when there is a wide area of sea to Australia’s west, north, and east, shared with a number of emerging nations.

The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), which is a blueprint for Australia’s future defence posture came with a built in assumption that Australia’s security correlates with US policy in the region. The DSR even goes further, saying that the Australia-US alliance will become even more important in the coming decades (see P.18). Building up regional ties was a mere afterthought.

The DSR was a lost opportunity to debate any alternative options concerning Australia’s security future.

Australia’s immediate neighbourhood is a rapidly changing place

Australian defence capabilities have slipped over the last few decades, with critical shortages in manpower. This has happened when our near neighbour’s defence capacity has risen to the point of where some now consider Indonesia to be a middle power, occupying an area to the immediate north-west of the Australian mainland. Australia’s Lowy Institute also cites Indonesia as a regional middle power. Indonesia’s GDP is now 75 percent of Australia’s GDP and could surpass Australia over the next decade.

Indonesia will spend AUD 38 billion on defence this year modernizing its military. Military spending could become even a higher priority for Indonesia if Prabowo Subianto wins the presidential election to be held later this year.

While the political and military dynamics are rapidly changing in Australia’s own neighbourhood, there are distinct risks that Australia’s visons are fixated further afield, completely missing what lays just before us.

Australia’s immediate neighbourhood could have been given more consideration. The attention given to the immediate region appears to be token. The potential security effects of any natural disaster, or any radical shift in any neighbour’s ideology would be of far greater concern than the game of détente being played between China and the US. As we are witnessing in Myanmar, potential regime change is not a far-fetched reality.

What is Australia banking on today with the US?

US defence policy appears flawed and has become overly aggressive over the last 3 years of the Biden administration. Diplomacy as a tool has been downgraded and lack of it, failed to avert massive scaling up of the Russo-Ukraine war over the last two years. A peace agreement was vetoed by the administration more than a year ago, costing endless Ukrainian lives, and stepping up international frictions. There is open speculation over the real drivers of this war from the US standpoint. This leaves question marks as to who is really driving US defence actions. Is it the Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Defence Department/Pentagon, former Obama administration people, or Preseident Biden himself? This doesn’t relate exclusively to the Biden Administration, US foreign/defence policy has been heading in this direction across previous administrations.

We hear about China’s expansionary presence in the South China Sea, a place it has been in for more than a thousand years. A large percentage of citizens of countries around the South China sea were Chinese migrants. With the exception of China’s advance across the border of Vietnam in 1979, China has not invaded any country. China’s activities in its immediate region are interpreted very differently to the way Australia’s strategic and defence experts are interpreting the presence (expansion), reasserting influence after a 65-year hiatus. This issue requires much more examination than was provided in the DSR.

In contrast, China’s Pacific theatre and shipping routes are surrounded by US bases in Korea, Japan, Guam, along with a heavy naval presence ensuring ‘freedom of navigation’. The US has a containment doctrine in place, which Australia subscribes to through the AUKUS nuclear powered submarine plans. Indonesia has deep reservations about AUKUS.

US defence competency must be questioned with the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan and reinhabiting of the country by elements of Al Qaida. The unchecked run of the Taliban is strengthening the Pakistan Taliban which could topple the government in Islamabad, allowing the Taliban to control Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Iran has gained access to billions of US Dollars, which is funding Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen. Although not widely reported in the legacy media, merchant ships are being sunk by low cost Houthi missiles on a regular basis in the Gulf of Aden. The failure of US high technology weapons to keep shipping safe will require a drastic rewrite of military tactics. The US is depleting its own stockpile of weapons in Ukraine, and terrorist cells are establishing themselves in the continental the United States.

Much of the above could have been preventable. The soundness of current US policy should at least be discussed to ensure Australia is not harmed as a party to some future conflict unnecessarily.

Australia’s unique issues in the region

Being antagonistic towards Australia’s largest two-way trading partner China defies logic. We can observe and learn from the results of the Morrison government’s approach to China. China trade is just too important to put at risk. In 2022-23, the two-way trade with China increased 12 percent, totalling AUD 316.9 billion. This made-up 26 percent of Australia’s two-way trade with the world. 

Canberra’s Anglo-orientated bureaucrats really need to learn from neighbours in the region how diplomacy could better be conducted in the region. We are no longer the ‘superior’ white man of the south.

Australia’s greatest strategic threat will not be from military attack. It will most likely come from a massive natural disaster to the north. This could lead to massive casualties and exodus to the shoreline of Australia. This would happen with little warning.

China has already become extensively involved in the Australian economy. Now, 5.5 percent of the population in Australia are Chinese.  This is an important cultural connection to China, as China sees the diaspora as overseas Chinese citizens. One of the best ‘bellwethers’ to measure the Australian-China relationship is the number of tourists that visit each year. When this picks up, then we will know the Australian-China relationship is becoming healthy once again.

These are the cultural issues that will help to prevent any mishap with China.

Meanwhile, Australia must look at how best to defend itself in the immediate region. Submarines for coastal surveillance would be good. Nuclear powered submarines bought on the ‘never-never’ might not even be around when they might be needed.

Australia’s biggest defence is diplomacy and soft power. Australia must move beyond just transactional relationships with its neighbours. Much closer relationships must be built with our neighbours, and this means integrating the military, if possible. Our best defence and also biggest threat is Indonesia.

Australia shouldn’t be playing other nation’s games. It has its own game much closer to home.

4Originally published in Eurasia Review 29th February 2024.

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The Australia media on Thursday 29^th February was abuzz with two stories concerning so-called spies.

First, the Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) Mark Burgess claimed that a person working within a foreign intelligence cell in Australia, dubbed the “A-Team” was offered access to a former but unnamed prime minister.

The second story was that a Chinese-Australian business man and former Liberal political candidate Di Sanh Duong was jailed for two and a half years for attempting to influence a former acting immigration minister, Alan Tudge, Di Sanh Duong is believed to be the first person convicted under the Foreign Interference Act, passed in 2018 by the federal parliament.

Influence operations by foreign governments has been going on in Canberra since the 1950s. Many potential Australians have been cultivated by the US government and associated agencies. This grooming included all expense paid invitations for trips to conferences in the United States and the introduction to officials.

Leaked US Embassy cables in Caberra and consults in Sydney and Melbourne, published by Wikileaks found that former NSW Premier and foreign Minister Bob Carr had been briefing the US embassy since the 1970s on the internal decision making of the Australian Government during the Whitlam era, and on the internal workings of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). This relationship began in the mid 1970s when Carr was president of Young Labor and an education officer of the NSW Labor council. In recent years, Carr has been close to the Chinese, and has been of interest to Australian intelligence organizations in the past.

Wikileaks cables also pointed to former Labor senator Mark Arbib, who was a ‘protected’ US embassy source, passing on information and commentary about Australian politics.

US diplomatic cables also implicated the former Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president and later prime minister Bob Hawke, saying he regularly conferred with the US Consulate in Melbourne during his ACTU years.  Leaked US documents have confirmed what many believed that the US had infiltrated the Australian Labor Party. One cannot forget former ALP party secretary David Combe’s relationship with Soviet diplomat back in 1984, which led to swift action on the part of the Hawke government at the time, in the interests of sovereignty and transparency.    

Fast forward to the present, the current foreign minister Penny Wong’s brother is a member of Malaysia-China Chamber of Commerce  organization – Youth Entrepreneurs Committee in Malaysia, which is directly funded by the Chinese United Front.

These relationships don’t mean any ill-proprietary. Wong’s relationship is one degree away. In Asia, organizations seek funds from any source willing to provide them.

In Australia today,  5.5 percent of the population are Chinese. Most are proudly Chinese and have a strong loyalty towards China. They are also Australians and proud to be a citizen. The Chinese diaspora doesn’t see any conflict in this. Actions taken to benefit both parties would be considered something positive. This is the culture Australia must deal with as diaspora identity is complex and blurred. The former Liberal MP Gladys Liu had to deal with this. She would always be guilty by association. Just like Penny Wong’s brother, Liu was a member of the China Overseas Exchange Association, purported to be a bureau within the United Front, Liu also associated with members of the local Chinese community, who were also purported to be connected wit the CCP. So, was Liu a patriotic Australian trying to bring Australian-Chinese relationship closer, or a person of influence?  

If one reads Clive Hamilton’s 2018 tome ‘The Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia’, no one will be surprised with the networking, financial enticements, donations to political parties, organizational connections with universities and labour unions, and even ‘honey traps’ set by foreign entities carried out at all levels of Australian politics and government today. China is doing at an unprecedented level, what the US did in the 50s onwards in Australia. What China has is a massive diaspora, which extends Chinese influence at all levels in Australian society.

The author knows for a fact, this was all studied and planned by the Chinese more than two decades ago, where Chinese academics, the diaspora in Australia, and intelligence worked hand in hand to develop an executable multipronged strategy. This strategy is much more sophisticated than what Philip Agee described about the CIA in the 50s and 60s, in ‘Inside the Company: CIA Diary’.

Today, many acts of espionage are not even recognized as such, disguised as cultural exchange, mutual cooperations, or just friendships. One will not even know they have come in contact with a foreign operative.

Espionage has become blurred today.

Originally published in Eurasia Review 29th February 2024.

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Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese and the ‘yes’ vote campaign leadership are in denial over the defeat of ‘The Voice’ referendum last week, where 61 percent of Australians rejected the proposition. Had the referendum been approved a defacto-third house of parliament would have been set up, where a nominated group of 24 Indigenous Australians would have advised parliament and the executive.

In parliament last Monday during question time, Albanese appeared to blame ‘white people’ for the defeat at the referendum. Albanese in an answer to the opposition said he still supported the rest of the Uluru Statement of the Heart, which included a treaty and Makaratta truth telling.

Albanese is determined to find a new way to respond to the Uluru Statement, in spite of how Australians voted in ‘The Voice” referendum. Albanese appears to be taking advice on the issue exclusively from a group within the Aboriginal community, who were involved in the framing of the Uluru Statement, which may not represent the thinking of the majority of the Indigenous Australian community.

Rejection of called for a royal commission

Even though the prime minister is still pushing for a treaty and truth telling, a call for an urgency motion by Nationals Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who was one of the leaders of the no campaign, to hold a royal commission into child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. This was totally was totally rejected by both Labor and the Greens.

Calls for an investigation of money being spent of Aboriginal welfare are just being ignored.

Such a rejection by the government and Greens in the Senate over fundamental issues regarding the welfare of Aboriginals deeply questions the agenda the government really had in mind for ‘The Voice’.

The government only talking to ‘recognized’ indigenous leaders, and the ABC only providing a platform for this elite, has contributed to the creation of a feudal-strata within Aboriginal society today.

The refusal to investigate alleged corruption within the ‘Aboriginal industry’ is effectively protecting a group of elites, who may not have been transparent to the public about the use of public funds and the outcomes achieved.

This protection has created a class of elites who are now beyond any public accountability. The refusal to investigate child sexual abuse within the Aboriginal community effectively deems marginalized rural Aboriginals as serfs in a feudal society, led by elites, who monopolize their voice.

These actions taken only a few days after ‘The Voice’ referendum casts strong doubts over the sincerity of the government in the first place, where it is blatantly refusing to listen to Aboriginal voices, already inside the parliament.

It was only the indigenous voices who the government wanted to appoint to ‘The Voice’ that the government wanted to deal with. Other Indigenous voices are not good enough.

This is post referendum evidence indicates Australians made the correct choice in rejecting ‘The Voice’, as it has been shown to be a sham by the government’s actions. “The Voice’ was never about the welfare of Indigenous Australians, especially those marginalized. ‘The Voice’ was about empowering an activist elite class, which has shown over the last few days not to care about marginalized Indigenous Australians.

The government has been trying to create symbolism about correcting past ‘wrong doings’, rather than be concerned about the real issues that face Aboriginals today.

Any future proposals from these groups must be treated with scepticism.

Originally published in the Eurasia Review 20^th October 2023

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