[A speech delivered to the CAUKUS Conference, Washington DC, 21 September 2024.]

CAUKUS speech

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen:

Let me start with a confession: sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the size, scale and complexity of the strategic challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

These dimensions only seem to grow the closer you look. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and the challenge isn’t idling. It’s coming at us fast. And the free world isn’t prepared for it.

Not only are we unprepared for it, we struggle to grasp it intellectually.

Walled off by an educational deficit in Chinese language, culture and history — we fail to appreciate the scale of what’s coming. Not to mention the scale of what’s already arrived. What is happening around us, and within our societies.

How to meet the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party must be the single most important public policy challenge the free world faces this century. And the time for making plans is fast running out.

Australia is a regional power in the shadow of this growing threat. And, to this point, my country has been reluctant to grapple with the strategic challenge. Like the frog at the bottom of the well; life’s been good and the water is fine. Why talk of threats, when there are none to see?

Indeed, we’ve had our own set of reasons to stay complacent. Or at least conflicting imperatives to not rock the boat.

One reason is our favourable geography. We’ve been shaped by what one historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has called the tyranny of distance—the long range from Europe that has shaped our economic and strategic history.

That distance has protected us from the immediate effects of wars and kept us largely freely from foreign entanglements. Our oceans serve as a defensive moat against the ambitions of other lands, and those nations sitting between us and China give us unique strategic depth. Totalitarians may have bombed our harbours, but their armies never set foot on our lands. Our natural advantage of position and geography means the question is not as existential as it might be for Taiwan or Japan.

Another reason is cultural. Because of our favourable geography and abundance of natural riches, we consider ourselves the ‘lucky country’—impervious to the misfortunes of history visited on other peoples and nations.

We don’t like to make hard strategic choices because, in the end, it’s always worked out for us. ‘She’ll be right, mate’ is the Aussie vernacular that best expresses this sentiment: an almost passive fatalism that things will work out in our favour—including the outcomes of the geopolitical movements afoot. It’s part of our national psyche to expect things to fall our way. We don’t think our luck will run out.

A third reason is economic. And this is one fog we like to have. For we are surrounded by wealth thanks to trade with China. We fuel China’s growing industrial might with our natural riches—coal, gas, bauxite, rare earths and iron ore—and our customers pay top dollar. Our primary producers also profit with grain, beef, wine and lobster exports. Students from China fill our top private schools and our universities, and they pay top dollar there too.

Business with China is profitable: governments like it because it fills our state and federal Treasuries with revenue and pays for many of our essential services. Business elites love it because it’s made quite a few Australian billionaires over the past quarter of a century.

And it’s not just individuals who enjoy the profits: working families are also building their wealth through trade with China. Business with China is paying many mortgages across the country—particularly in working constituencies like mine, who provide the labour for many of the big projects fuelling China’s economy.

A final reason for our reluctance to grapple with the strategic threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party is electoral politics. And here, I worry, our judgement is badly clouded. For our elected leaders are afraid of breaking our increasingly fragile social cohesion.

Australia is home to 1.2 million people with Chinese heritage, and public policymakers are fearful of alienating this group of Australians and, as a consequence, losing elections and political power. A fear that may be misplaced, after all, many Chinese families that call Australia home have come from around the world, not just the PRC. Many have been long standing and loyal citizens and contributors to Australia over several generations.

Still, the Chinese Communist Party knows these fears exist in our political parties, and has been effective in sowing discord through local groups and online platforms like WeChat, insinuating legitimate security concerns are instead motivated by racial prejudice. As a consequence, debate is stymied and the necessary actions to secure our future are not always taken.

Because of these macro geographical, cultural, economic and political influences, Australia’s intellectual leaders are happy for us to stay in our corner of temperate water, thinking things will just stay this way. They look up, but like the fabled frog, they only have a narrow field of view—neglecting the darker strategic reality of strategic competition that Mike Studeman articulated so clearly last night.

The question is: can we haul ourselves out of this well so we can appreciate the wide expanse of sky above us? And having seen the full picture, are we willing to take action to protect ourselves?

Back then to my opening comment: the size, scale and complexity of this strategic challenge can indeed feel overwhelming. And in my darker moments, I’m tempted to find sympathy with the strategic nihilists. They’ve looked outside the well, but they argue there’s no point pushing out into the world and its strategic contest, because it has no regularity, rationality or form, such that no policy papers will help us.

That there are too many structural forces at work, too much chaos, too many animal spirits for our statecraft to be wielded in any prescriptive or scientific way. To switch from the pond image, to music, the best we can hope for is to play along like jazz musicians, sensing and feeling the rhythm of things and responding as best as we can. Securing our interests in moments of unplanned fortune.

Playing along is the temptation for junior alliance partners, like Australia, which must find a way through the geopolitical competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Many in Australia argue today that we should hedge, and not take a side. That we should pursue strictly our own interests. That only fools think they can make a difference to the inevitable rise of China, and its eventual eclipse of the United States.

Like Leo Tolstoy in ‘War & Peace’, it’s tempting to believe we are slaves of history, unable to impose ourselves decisively on the strategic situation. One of Tolstoy’s greatest characters, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, after experiencing the chaos of battle, explains why he believes military genius to be a myth. He asks this question of war and strategy: ‘What science can there be in a matter in which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when that moment will come?’

Prince Andrei was talking about Napoleonic warfare—which is to say pre-industrial warfare minus the complexity of today’s technology—but I think his question can be applied to the current strategic competition.

Can we make a difference given the interplay and uncertainty of so many outcomes?

Today the question is pressing given China’s deep integration into the world economy and supply chains—how do we pursue our objectives of statecraft in an world where our prosperity is tied to our greatest competitor? How far are we willing to follow the logic of political, economic and strategic sovereignty?

How much agency do we have both individually and collectively as the free world to push back on the Chinese Communist Party, and what are we seeking to achieve by doing so?

Why should we lash our security interests to the US so tightly, through AUKUS and other arrangements? Why would I bother flying all the way here from Perth, if I thought building and strengthening alliances meant Australia might lose strategic agency?

For countries like mine, these are big questions worth pondering. There are costs involved. I’m particularly sensitive to it as my family, like thousands of Australian families, has felt both the sting and the salve of US strategic might in the Second World War.

First, the sting from a great power. My great uncle, Private Neil Callaghan, perished aboard the SS Montevideo—a Japanese-flagged ship carrying Australian prisoners of war from Papua New Guinea to Japan—on 1 July 1942, in the South China Sea.

The Montevideo was sunk by the final torpedo of the USS Sturgeon, sending more than 1000 Australian prisoners of war to the deep. In a twist of irony, the Sturgeon had been rearmed at Fremantle, only 30 mins up the coast from the new AUKUS base. Wounds from a friend in the fog of war. Many families, like mine, still sense a hollowness in our stories, from that enduring loss.

Second, the salve from a great power. My grandfather, Flight Lieutenant Norman Hastie, was saved by US Army Medic Sergeant O. Mayberry, on 31 March 1945 after being shot aboard a Catalina during the air-sea rescue of a downed aircrew in the Indonesian archipelago.

My grandfather was on a mission to sweep up downed US bomber crews, if they had to bail out during their mission. His aircrew was diverted to rescue an Australian fighter aircrew that had been shot down.

After an intense firefight, my grandfather was hit through the abdomen at his machine gun post. The US medic stabilised him for three hours, until US surgeons saved his life on Morotai Island. If it wasn’t for a Virginian army medic that day, I wouldn’t be standing here in Virginia giving this speech tonight. And thousands of Australians could tell a similar story, that if the Americans hadn’t turned up, at the Coral Sea, at Buna-Gona, at Milne Bay, where would we be?

I don’t share these personal stories tonight to highlight the tradeoffs inherent in allied warfare. Instead, I share them to illuminate the most important thing for us going forward—that of our shared democratic values.

I should also say I am outnumbered by Americans —my wife and children— in my own household.

I believe the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists are badly wrong. I’m not a fatalist. History shows me that it’s not blind forces of class and economics that decide outcomes. Good men and women are the ones who change the course of history. Strong relationships, built on common values, activate alliances and change battlefields.

The strength of those relationships, and the convictions they shared, are why our forebears fought the tough battles of the Second World War in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. For our values. That is the source of our strength. Our logic. Without which, every action we take is simply the grammar of competition. Our logic must be driven by our values. And our values govern both what we stand for, and how we fight for it.

So here are a few thoughts on how to shake off the complacency. I offer them in humility, as a fellow pilgrim who has been able to look outside the well, because of many people in this room, and by virtue of my service in the Australian Parliament.

First, we need to double-down on our democratic values.

Second, we need to build and raise up competent political and strategic leaders.

Third, we need to unashamedly re-industrialise the free world, or else be a supplicant to Chinese industrial power.

And, finally, we must build personal relationships, outside our wells, and across all the ponds. They will be our strength, and they are the basis of our alliance frameworks. I offer my jet-lagged self tonight as evidence that I am committed to this final point. I am honoured to spend the weekend with you all.

Our democratic values. We are a free peoples—that’s the wellspring of our strategic agency. That’s what makes us distinct from the Chinese Communist Party, and other authoritarian regimes bestriding the world stage. That’s why my great-uncle and my grandfather fought happily alongside their American friends in the Second World War.

They volunteered to fight because they believed in our political institutions, in ordered liberty, in the rule of law. That those things were worth preserving for themselves and their friends. Even at great cost. If we don’t start from the same place as they did, we won’t prevail. That’s our point of difference, and it’s the basis of winning more friends to our cause.

Henry V makes this point when he gives an order to his soldiers to treat the French kindly during their march through the countryside. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to win more allies, it would do well to heed Harry the King’s declaration: ‘When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”

The gentler gamester is the soonest winner. There is much wisdom in this Shakespearean poetry. We must build our alliances not through coercion but through the strength of our values and behaviour.

Values must guide us forward in this new era of strategic competition. For that, and this my second point, we need competent political and strategic leadership. Values must have purchase on reality and they must guide action in the world. Sadly, our education system is failing in this regard, captured as it is by any number of interests inimical to our values—including those working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

If we hope to produce a new generation of leaders for this time of competition ahead, we must seek reform of our education system. Relativism is still incumbent in our universities and it is only weakening us.

If our intellectuals are unable to say what a woman is, then we will utterly fail at the truly challenging analytical task of grand strategy. If our children are constantly told that our nation state is illegitimate, then we have no hope of raising people to defend it.

If we allow the lie to persist, that some of our children must live with the shameful label of coloniser, like some new mark-of-Cain, then we are broken and defeated, before any battle has begun.

Only by returning to classical values in education and building a new cultural consensus, will we see young leaders—across our respective nations and in their respective fields—meet the challenge posed by this era of intense competition.

Mentoring the next generation through informal groupings is also vitally important work. I am the beneficiary of such mentoring and investment. I think of Dimon Liu, Matt Pottinger, John Garnett, Matt Turpin and others who have spent time answering my questions. Helping me understand the wider picture. To them, I say thank you. We need more of it.

Here is the main thing: people freely coming together on a common cause is something that the Chinese Communist Party simply cannot do. They only understand power and force. They spend more money on regulating and surveillance of their own people than on external security. And that’s saying something. They have no grasp of friendship, let alone voluntary alliances.

However, they excel at protecting and subsidising industrial power at our expense. Only this week, we have seen the emergence of a new type of warfare.

Asymmetric methods have always been with us. Ever since David put a rock through Goliath’s forehead. But Hezbollah’s exploding pagers and radio devices is a case study in what can be achieved with sophisticated supply chain warfare. The alarm bells are ringing in my ears because we continue to allow the Chinese Communist Party to control our sensitive supply chains.

We’ve seen what can be done to our adversaries. And the chaos and discord and fear it engenders. We can not allow China to bring that chaos to us. We must not allow them to wither us by decarbonising our economies—stripping away years of hard-earned industrial muscle—while bulking up their own economies with our coal and gas.

There is a dark paradox here: we purchase wind turbines, towers, batteries and solar panels from China manufactured using our fossil fuels. This madness must end, or else we won’t be capable of lasting long if war were to break out.

Stocks of weapons would run down quickly, and we’d struggle to replenish them. We must have the capacity to supply ourselves, to build things ourselves if we are to last in the industrial high-tech meat-grinder of modern warfare.

Finally, if our alliances are to endure, they must be based on flesh-and-blood personal commitments. Ultimately, it’s this moment, sharing what we are seeing, that will shake us to leave our tepid ponds of complacency.

This growing alliance must be based on friendships, underwritten by shared values. That’s what we are doing this weekend. Yes, we are doing policy work and having important discussions.

But we would have missed the point if we didn’t return home with new and refreshed friendships. During a crisis, you cannot rapidly build trust or shared understanding. On the contrary, a crisis will test those things to their limits. You draw down on credit in a crisis, that’s why we are making investments now. On that note, my friends, it has been an honour to speak with you tonight. Thank you for listening.