Australia’s arms escalation is in the interest of no one but death
Independent Australia, By Bronwyn Kelly | 2 May 2025,
Instead of arguing about whether Australia needs more submarines, we would be better off working towards a world where no one needs them. Bronwyn Kelly reports.
THOSE WHO HAVE HAD the patience to listen to the full day of speeches and questions at the recent Sovereignty and Security forum held at the National Press Club have been given a unique insight.
The event, organised by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, shed light on what happens when members of an elite defence establishment attempt to set Australia’s strategic direction. They jockey for money for an industry of death.
Usually, they jockey quietly, but this particular forum allowed several to display how much of their thinking is motivated by money and is therefore fixated on militarism – as though peace and disarmament were not a prospect to be contemplated at all in Canberra.
Turnbull kicked off the day’s discussion by asserting that Trump’s America is now a country whose values are “aligned to a might is right world” and that, as such, it no longer shares Australia’s values. He made little, if any, reference to what Australia’s national values might be. Presumably, we were simply meant to infer that Australia should no longer aspire to emulate America, at least in its “might is right” approach to economic and military strategy.
As the day moved on, no one demurred from this description of America. They took it largely as a fact and mostly as one that would be long-lived rather than short-lived. There was general agreement that America has changed with the rise of Trump and that this has implications for our choices in defence, diplomacy, trade and international relations. Accordingly, they set about the laudable exercise of discussing how Australia should “recalibrate”.
But it was those with a vested and sometimes even nakedly pecuniary interest in defence industries that proved themselves to be among the most unwilling in the room to recalibrate. Instead they used the day wherever they could to argue for massive expansion of defence industries and weapons exports and also for increasing what they called a “deterrent” capability – shorthand for building a defence force and armaments at such a large scale that any adversary, no matter how much bigger their military capability might be than Australia’s, would calculate that an attack on Australia would not be worth the cost. At least that’s the theory.
Someone should tell them that deterrence doesn’t actually work when there is a large and insurmountable imbalance of power as there is in the case of Australia vis-a-vis China, Russia and the US. It’s a lot of money for nothing in our case, and our adoption of deterrence as an overriding posture in the most recent National Defence Strategy simply makes matters worse by forcing others to distrust us more and arm themselves. But that’s another article. Suffice to say here that those championing more investment in defence seemed unable to contemplate anything other than arms escalation.
Perhaps the most disheartening feature of the discussion, however, was that at no time did those advocating for arms escalation ask whether expansion of defence and defence industries was in Australia’s interest or show how it would be. They bypassed the questions of what is in our interest and what Australians might value and be prepared to defend militarily, and instead jumped straight to the issue of how much more funding they needed for the defence industry. The clamour for a greater share of GDP to be spent on defence activities swamped voices such as those of former foreign minister Gareth Evans and former chief of defence Chris Barrie — both of whom attempted to argue that the whole debate should be reframed so that we decide what is in our interest first, before we design a strategy to protect it in defence and foreign policy………………………………………………………………………….
At the very least Australia’s alliance with the U.S., especially if it continues to take a military form, is very likely to defeat other attempts to engage more positively with the rest of the world and particularly with Asia. The need for greater engagement with Asia was something that most speakers agreed on at the forum – and yet the prevailing impression was that most could not bring themselves to think of abandoning the alliance, even as an option.
This reluctance begs the question of how far the prevailing regime in America diverges from our “values” before we say it’s behaving in a manner that is so contrary to our interests that we must detach ourselves from it? How many more regime changes, brutal incursions and even genocides fostered by the U.S. will it take? How much more destabilisation of other economies? How much lower should America sink into autocratic behaviours, threats to allies and obliteration of human rights within its own territory, before we detach ourselves? How much more ugly must America become?
…………………….Given that Australians don’t want their economy and well-being disrupted by war, they’d be far more likely to want to concentrate on strategies that reduce or prevent the need for military expenditures. This is not what those attached to defence industries want to hear, but if they are asking Australians to sacrifice all their well-being and place themselves unnecessarily at dire risk of attack, they should be prepared for justifiable pushback.
The next time Mr Turnbull hosts a forum for these elites, everyone will be better off if he frames the occasion so that they stop arguing about whether we need submarines and start working towards a world where no one needs them. Arms escalation is in the interest of no one but the merchants of death. So if elites are invited again to ponder a “recalibration”, a plan for eventual disarmament should be acknowledged as a necessary permanent feature of a viable defence strategy. Nothing else is in our interest.
Dr Bronwyn Kelly is the Founder of Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP). She specialises in long-term integrated planning for Australia’s society, environment, economy and democracy, and in systems of governance for nation-states.
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