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Way back in time, in some big Sydney hotel conference room, some of the best policy analysts from the United States where sitting around and the subject at hand was - 'The Australia-US alliance'.

Source : PortMac.News | Independent :

Source : PortMac.News | Independent | News Story:

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Australia & China: it's complex and Scott Morrison knows it
Way back in time, in some big Sydney hotel conference room, some of the best policy analysts from the United States where sitting around and the subject at hand was - 'The Australia-US alliance'.

Up in the back corner, a corner dubbed cheerfully by some of its inhabitants as the "naughty corner", sits Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper.

It's the naughty corner because White has questioned the continuing global influence of America, particularly in our region, and argued that China will soon be the dominant power.

'We are going to be on our own'

In his 2017 Quarterly Essay, Without America, White wrote of the US coming to realise it can't be the dominant power in Asia, even if it blusters and behaves like it is.

The essay contains a chilling hypothetical moment when the US President has to decide how to meet a threat from an escalating Chinese presence in the South China Sea.

It becomes a make-or-break moment when the Americans have to decide whether to back their threats with action or not.

The implication some saw in this for Australia was that we might be forced to choose between the US and China.

But White's point was "we are going to be on our own".

Plenty of people in the foreign policy establishment have tended to poo-poo this view of American decline in recent years.

Even confronted by the chaos and horror of the Trump administration, governments and diplomats console themselves that, underneath the chaos beats a functioning heart of institutional rationality and competence which will reassert itself at some point.

Also, they say, the sheer economic power of the US cannot be underestimated.

The result has been that much of our foreign policy discussion has continued to be publicly conducted in a "China/United States" prism, even if the 2016 Defence White Paper set the scene for a more realistic shift in policy.

China isn't specifically mentioned

Jump forward to the Prime Minister's speech this week about the defence "strategic update".

It has become a regular feature of Government statements and press conferences on a variety of foreign and security policy matters that, despite everyone knowing that the subject at hand is China, China isn't specifically mentioned.

There was the announcement, for example, of the major cyber hacking efforts a couple of weeks ago. Then there was the announcement of a major new spend on anti-cyber hacking capacity earlier this week.

On Wednesday came the announcement the Government was going to divert spending earmarked for new equipment later in the decade, and instead spend around $15 billion in the next couple of years buying missiles and the other accoutrements of, you know, actually fighting a war.

There were references to growing strategic competition in the region between China and the United States, but no direct reference to the fact that the greatest threat to stability was seen as coming from China.

In some very sobering comments, Scott Morrison said we had not seen "the conflation of global, economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced here in Australia in our region since the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s".

But it wasn't just China that didn't rate a lot of direct mentions in the speech.

Equally striking, but less commented upon, was the relatively low key references to the United States.

Our biggest trading partner — and our belligerent neighbour

The Government's instruction for the defence forces to "pivot" to more local defence issues (that is, not do so much fighting on the other side of the world) made reference to the US alliance being "the foundation of our defence policy", but the nub of the speech was that "we must be prepared to invest in our own security".

It was the most independent a statement of defence policy we have seen for some time, no matter how closely linked we are with the US in an operations sense.

Suddenly, we are not just observers of what China and the US are saying about each other or the region.

Our relationship with China has become a complexity all of its own: it is our biggest trading partner but also a belligerent neighbour who has been hacking into our business and political systems and bullying the neighbours.

Local neighbourly disputes are also proliferating: Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Pacific to name a few.

Donald Trump's efforts in North Korea? Well that went well, didn't it?

Both the realisation that has been growing in Canberra about the changing world — but even more so, the fact that it has now been called out publicly — signals that what happens with China in the next few years is likely to be as all consuming for our politics as the coronavirus is now.

We can't just keep riding shotgun to the US. We will have to make our own complex decisions.

We can't stay under the blanket any longer

Voters in Zoom focus groups have been saying for months how safe they feel staying at home in the COVID-19 world, and how much they have been dreading having to go back out into the world if the situation eased.

The surge in Victoria has messed with people's minds on that even further.

But in both the case of the shift in regional dynamics, and the health and economic situation at home, we can't stay under the blanket any longer.

University of Melbourne economist Jeff Borland says there has been a "holding pattern" in the labour market in April and May.

Businesses cut staff hours, rather than sacked people, while they waited for some sign of what would come next, and were aided in putting off these decisions by the presence of the JobKeeper wage subsidy and other forms of assistance for business that have been on offer.

Voters in the Eden-Monaro by-election have been casting their pre-poll ballots, or will cast them on Saturday, in that same slightly dream like state of suspended animation.

The result will be spun by the victors

The hour of reckoning, for the economy, for voters and for the country, is getting closer though.

Voters cast their ballot uncertain about what is going to happen next, and uninformed by the Government about its future plans.

Voters so often opt for continuity in times of such uncertainty. Yet this is a Labor seat, not a Government one.

It is such a strange election that the main interest will be in how its result is spun by the victors, rather than how people vote.

The question beyond the by-election is whether the serious nature of the issues in play degenerate into gross populism or something that reflects the gravity of the times.

Story By | Laura Tingle, ABC's 7.30 reports chief political correspondent.


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