Asia-Pacific

Rudd the Conqueror?

Peter Robson
Green Left Weekly (radical newspaper)
New South Wales, Australia
April 20, 2008

An international peacekeeping soldier (left) from Australia guards a street in Dili, East Timor. (Photo: Jewel Samad / AFP-Getty Images)

Australia's military "would contain a careful mix of capabilities that could in extremis rip an arm off any major Asian power that sought to attack Australia," said Prof. Ross Babbage of the Kokoda Foundation in a private lecture to Australian Defense Force officials according to a March 25 Australian Associated Press report.

In his lecture, Babbage argued for a massive increase in Australia's defense force, including 400 attack aircraft, 30 submarines, and an intercontinental ballistic missile defense system. The Australian government looks likely to accept many of his proposals.

Babbage's lecture came in the context of the Rudd Labor government announcing a new "white paper" on Australia's defense, to be released in September. Babbage is one of many academics contributing to discussions among Australia's military officials, and will be on the ministerial body that oversees the final draft of the white paper.

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To justify massively increasing military spending, Babbage claimed there were escalating threats from China, India, and Indonesia. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Babbage had argued that "Australia would need to learn to walk amongst the giants—Indonesia, China and India—all with immensely larger populations, economies and military forces."

On March 20, The Australian's Greg Sheridan argued that the Rudd government "will offer a certain amount of flim-flam and mushy talk to satisfy its supporters on the Left. But, ultimately, on national security it will make the right, hard-headed decisions."

The Australian Labor Party's 2007 "defense" policy calls for increased military spending. Under former Prime Minister John Howard, military spending averaged around 2 percent of gross domestic product a year, with the current financial year's spending coming to 22 billion Australian dollars. Labor's policy calls for increasing the annual spending to 3 percent per year, with defense the only portfolio free from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's "razor gang," which is tasked with slashing budgets in health, education, and community services.

Rudd has committed to the continuing occupation of Afghanistan as part of the "war on terror." The 1,000 Australian military personnel currently in Afghanistan are to stay there for the "long haul" Rudd was quoted as saying in the April 4 Melbourne Age.

Despite Rudd's pre-election promise to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq, only 550 of the 1,540 Australian troops will leave Iraq in June and there will be continuing strategic support of the United States-led occupation with an Australian patrol boat and several surveillance aircraft operating in the region.

So the Rudd Labor government will both have a more aggressive military spending policy than Howard, and fundamentally continue the policies of the Howard government in regards to the United States-Australia military alliance. The talk of increasing threats from Third World Asian nations has little basis in fact—Australia has not suffered any genuine terrorist threat since the beginning of the "war on terror"—not that any massive expansion of military spending would actually avert or diminish the chances of a terrorist attack.

The Rudd government's commitment to military spending and the public comments by the members of the Labor government indicate that there is not a fundamental rupture with the foreign policy of the Howard government. The twin pillars of Australia's imperialist foreign policy—the alliance with the United States and Canberra's bullying and predatory role in the Pacific (for example, East Timor and the Solomon Islands)—will remain intact.

From Green Left Weekly.




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