THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SOVEREIGN CAPABILITY

SPEECH
ADDRESS TO THE SECURING OUR FUTURE CONFERENCE, ANU NATIONAL SECURITY COLLEGE

WEDNESDAY 25 MARCH 2026

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The rupture was 2,000 metres long. 

The eastern Ukrainian forest floor lay bare, its trees shattered by bullets, shells, mines and drones. 

Trenches and foxholes as far as the eye could see. 

A hellscape.

Bloated corpses, twisted pieces of rubbish and broken equipment littered the muddy ground. 

Along this 2,000-metre axis, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers fought to the death for the village of Andriivka, in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. 

First taken by the Russians in 2022, recaptured by Ukrainians in 2023 and then lost to the Russians in 2024, the prize had been destroyed in the contest. 

The war not only ruptured the beautiful landscape, but it also ruptured life inside the quiet hamlet of Andriivka. 

Andriivka is ruined. No home remains. Its people are dead or gone. 

The story was captured by Ukrainian filmmakers in high definition and made into a documentary called ‘2000 Meters to Adriivka’. 

I watched it last week, and I was stunned by its brutality. 

We see a Ukrainian platoon fighting their way to the objective of Andriivka. 

The tragedy of war—the courage, fear, brutality and death—is captured in high definition by cameras mounted on their combat helmets. 

Looking out over the smashed landscape, Fedya—a young, unflappable student turned combat leader—reflects on the war to camera. His eyes scan across the rubble and he asks a question. 

"There is nothing left over there. Literally nothing. So, what are we fighting for?” 

It’s a searching question. 

It left me wondering, how I would respond to such a serious rupture. And how would Australia respond?

The answer is, we’re starting to find out. Though we’re not at the point of a hot war, Australians are living through multiple ruptures that are changing our politics, our economy and the way that we think about the world. 

Once, Australians were quietly oblivious to the way the world can threaten us. 

Thanks to our friend Professor Medcalf and ANU National Security College Community Consultations, I think we can say that Australians are now at the ‘eyes wide open’ stage.

A massive 64 per cent of Australians are now alert and worried about national security (up from 42 per cent in 2024). 

And younger Australians are becoming clear-eyed too: the number concerned about our security is up from 22 per cent to 55 per cent.

There is a rupture and we are not naive to it anymore. It is frightening and disorientating.

What are the ruptures that we are living through?

I can see three main ruptures, and they are all connected. 

A geopolitical rupture, an economic rupture, and an intellectual rupture. 

First, the geopolitical rupture. 

The post-Cold War global order is now dead, and buried alongside it in the cemetery is the peace dividend that underwrote our trade and prosperity. 

Unrestrained strategic competition and war have returned with a vengeance, and Australia is unprepared to meet that harsh new reality. 

We see wars, and hear rumours of war across Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. 

In Europe, Ukraine and Russia remain locked in attritional combat after four years of war. 

That theatre is now the Western front for the struggle between democratic and authoritarian powers. It’s a hot war but also an industrial contest.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed after the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran on the 28th of February. 

What started as an overwhelming display of airpower by the U.S. military and IDF has now transitioned into the Battle for Hormuz—a maritime showdown that is already sending shockwaves through the global economy. 

All this turmoil after more than two years of war between Israel and Iran’s gang of proxies in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. 

Closer to home, China accelerates the biggest military build-up since the Second World War, its rearmament matched by its strategic and economic growth. 

President Xi is building his strategic options, and one of those options might be for a military operation to take Taiwan by force and bring it under full control of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Our eyes remain fixed on the strait of Taiwan, because in many ways, it is a maritime passage more critical than the Strait of Hormuz, given the precious cargo that pass through those waters. 

Taiwan remains home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and that business produces 90 per cent of the world's most advanced chips. 

Chips that power our phones and tablets. Our cars, aircraft and industrial machinery. Our AI and data centres. All those things that we can’t do without. 

None of this competition and strategic manoeuvring should be new to students of history. But we are surprised because we forgot or ignored the bloody lessons of the last century.

Now we know, once again, that geography is unchanging—as President Trump is learning with the Strait of Hormuz—and that it shapes strategic behaviour.

Competition for geopolitical dominance in Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific was the reality of the last century. Australia had no way of avoiding it, from the First World War to the Cold War. 

Hal Brands in his recent book, The Eurasian Century, remind us that the last century is fascinating because it ‘demonstrates how history is made at the intersection of structural forces, big ideas, and the critical choices leaders make.’ 

If we make decisions based on faulty assumptions, we can expect these structural ruptures to rock our confidence and our steadiness. 

There are flow-on effects, too. 

We are also in the middle of an economic rupture. 

The battle for Hormuz has hit our fuel imports. The cost of that struggle is playing out in petrol stations across Australia with massive price spikes and fuel shortages.

The war had caused a massive disruption to our fuel imports, and we are a long time away from a return to normal shipping out the Persian Gulf. 

But it won’t be business as usual, given the damage to energy infrastructure in the Gulf essential to the global economy. 

President Trump’s war with Iran has revealed the risks of Australia running a just-in-time diesel economy that is trade exposed to the Middle East. 

For more than four decades, we’ve quietly closed our oil refineries and offshored our advanced manufacturing and industrial base. 

That’s why we have been slipping down Harvard’s Index of Economic Complexity over the years. We now sit at 74th, well behind most OECD countries. 

Labor has accelerated this trend with their aggressive pursuit of decarbonisation in pursuit of their Net Zero energy and industry strategy. 

It should come as no surprise that the Albanese government is bailing out Whyalla Steelworks in South Australia and the Tomago Aluminium Smelter in NSW. 

Today we learn that the government is now going to bail out Rio Tinto’s Boyne Aluminium Smelter.

This is painful to watch.

The truth is that we’ve been happy to run a trade surplus built on the exports of raw commodities, while we’ve allowed our supply chains and sovereign capability to wither away.

And the cost of that trade-off is now clear in the present oil supply shock. 

We are vulnerable to what happens in maritime chokepoints thousands of nautical miles from our ports. 

This has led to our final rupture. 

An intellectual rupture. 

Australia bet long on globalisation and US strategic primacy, accepting that the Cold War had brought an end to great power competition. 

But we failed to anticipate the rise of China, Iran and Russia and their mutual interest in disrupting the peace underwritten by U.S. leadership and hard power.

This led us to outsource our military obligations to the United States, and to offshore our industrial capacity to neighbouring countries in our region. 

And the trade-off was our security and resilience in a fuel crisis like the one that we are in today. 

You can trace our shrinking strategic mind in our official policy documents, as we narrowed our field of view to focus on our northern approaches and the Indo-Pacific.

Why? To justify cost-cutting in defence and military spending. We see that in the 2023 Defence Strategic Review with the return of the air-sea gap thinking of the 1980s. 

That is all good and well. 

But that myopic thinking didn’t anticipate our entire nation being severely disrupted by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. 

And by focusing our defence strategy so locally, we have not updated our capabilities to meet the modern threats that have emerged through sustained combat in Europe and the Middle East. 

The Royal Australian Navy couldn’t spare a single ship to protect sea lanes out of the Red Sea in 2023, nor can we send a vessel to the Strait of Hormuz to escort tanker ships.

That’s because our frigates aren’t protected against Iranian drones and missiles.

It’s a sad state of affairs. 

So, what do we do about these ruptures? 

Let me return to the young student Fedya, surveying the ruins of Avdriivka, and to the way he answered his own question.

Because he reminds me of how Australians can be in moments of rupture—when we are at our best.

He asks:

“So, what are we fighting for? To rebuild it. This is our land…these fields, these forests, everything will grow back. Everything blooms again, grows. And same with all these cities we are fighting for. Over time, they will be rebuilt. And maybe we’ll live even better than before. Because all this Soviet influence will be gone. We’ll be starting from scratch. I think that war is probably the best time in life to just start everything over from scratch. And we have such a moment now."

Feyda and his comrades were fighting for their home, and the chance to rebuild it. 

I think the growing crisis can bring us together on the task of nation-building. 

We have been down the path of globalisation and decarbonisation. 

That led to deindustrialisation, and dependence. 

Now is the time for a fresh vision. 

For a new effort of reindustrialisation. 

Nation-building that will restore our resilience and our independence. 

That gives us more control over our circumstances. 

That insulates us from the capricious nature of global events, and gives us more leverage at the table of nations. 

That makes us a more reliable partner to our friends and allies. 

Let me close with two actionable items. 

First, energy security. We must abandon Net Zero and put the energy needs of the Australian people first. 

We are not cost-competitive as a nation. Our power prices are killing our industrial base, which weakens our resilience.

I know many people are concerned about climate change, but I must make clear that Australia only produces about 1.2 per cent of the world’s carbon. 

I should also add that we export coal and gas to the world’s biggest and fastest growing emitters like China and India. If we are fine to sell it abroad, why shouldn’t we use it secure our own energy security? 

Yesterday, the President of the European Commission lamented Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, and how that has been a painful uncoupling. 

Yet we are on track to become a dependency of China as we buy their solar, wind and batteries and rush to install 82 per cent renewables in our grid by 2030. 

Almost all of it made overseas: we are literally building a trade dependency into our power grid.

Electrification has a role to play, but our economy will need petrol, diesel and jet fuel for decades ahead. 

That’s why all options should be on the table, including converting coal to liquid, and refining the fuels that we need right here in Australia. 

Second, we must recover our lost advanced manufacturing capability. We need the Australian economy to look like a Swiss Army Knife: complex, multifunctional and adaptive.

Right now, our economy resembles a butter knife — it only does one thing. It’s no good when global events disrupt your supply chains and you have no options as a country.

But if we have an advanced manufacturing capability, we can pivot labour and capital quickly to strategic sectors in a crisis. That’s what I mean by resilience. 

There are also additional societal benefits that come from advanced manufacturing. We will be more productive as a nation, and productivity drives real wage growth. It lifts everyone up, including the wages of workers in non-skilled jobs. 

There’s a renewal that we can have in this nation, and I believe it begins with energy security and advanced manufacturing. 

Why is this important?

People are desperate for an Australia they feel part of and can believe in. 

I’m 43 years old and I know many young Australians are increasingly disillusioned with our political system and the economy.

They think the housing system is rigged against them and that the Australian dream for them is just a dream – one that is becoming increasingly unattainable.

I want a country where we build things of value and stand tall on our own two feet. 

Where we can weather the global events with calm, because we’ve prepared for the storm. 

That’s the Australia that I know we can be, and we mustn’t waste the opportunity in the present rupture.

[ENDS]