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The offer of military bases to the US clashes with the government’s stated aim of distancing itself from a great power rivalry, says the former secretary of Home Affairs. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Pezzullo: Labor has ‘picked a side’ in war with China
Australia has already taken a side in the great power rivalry between China and the United States, leaving the government unable to chart the middle course it proclaims without nullifying the ANZUS alliance, Michael Pezzullo tells The Saturday Paper.
The former Department of Home Affairs secretary is calling for urgent public debate about the real-world consequences of decades of decision-making in Canberra and Washington. Pezzullo, a former Defence deputy secretary and lead author of the 2009 Defence White Paper, said the public needed to understand the unacknowledged contradiction at the heart of Australia’s foreign policy.
According to Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Pezzullo says, Australian policy is predicated on the notion that “we don’t want the region to be defined by great power rivalry”.
“We want to have our own independent and autonomous way of engaging with South-East Asia … and not manage those relationships through the lens of the US–China conflict or rivalry,” says Pezzullo.
“Fine. That’s a very, very good aspiration. But our defence policy presumes not only that great power rivalry is something that we need to engage with, but we’ve picked a side in great power rivalry and we’re quietly – incrementally and arguably, in a way that’s not fully transparent – putting in place essential building blocks of what US Congressman [Michael] McCaul said when he visited here.”
At the conclusion of a 10-day visit to Australia this month, McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Australian this country was now “the central base of operations” for America’s military to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
“If you really look at the concentric circles emanating from Darwin – that is the base of operations, and the rotating [US] forces there are providing the projection of power and force that we’re seeing in the region,” he said.
That, says Pezzullo, is an obvious description of Australia’s circumstances but one that has never been clearly stated or even publicly acknowledged by Australian political, military or bureaucratic leaders.
“That means we’re in the middle of great power rivalry. We’re not distancing ourselves from it,” says Pezzullo. “Our foreign policy says great power rivalry is a problem for the region, and the region should have its own voice, but there are a couple of problems with that.”
The former secretary, a career public servant who led the Department of Immigration and subsequently Home Affairs for almost a decade, says those problems hark back to then prime minister Paul Keating’s approach in the mid-1990s of “security in and with Asia.”
“The problem with China itself is creating insecurity in Asia. The way they are pressing against Japan, the way they’re pressing against the Philippines, the way they’re making strident statements about one day resolving the Taiwan question with potential military force,” says Pezzullo. “You can’t have security in or with Asia if Asia itself is fractured on security grounds.”
Though Pezzullo disagrees with Keating on policy related to China, like the former prime minister he is adamant this country has not had the necessary public discussion about its defence posture.
“You can try to avoid getting involved in any kind of conflict, which I suspect most of the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] would want to do, but you can’t ignore it,” says Pezzullo, who believes Australia’s ties to Washington under the 1951 ANZUS Treaty oblige it to follow the US into any war in the Pacific area.
“We’re actually so hardwired, in some cases going back decades, into what euphemistically is called US deterrence,” says Pezzullo. “But the flipside of deterrence is you’ve got to be able to prosecute a war.”
In a speech to the National Press Club in April last year addressing Australia’s interests in a regional balance of power, Penny Wong defined Australia’s role as being to lower the heat on any potential conflict, while increasing pressure on others to do the same, and at the same time striving to strike a balance where strategic reassurance through diplomacy is supported by military deterrence.
“In our China relationship specifically, the Albanese government will be calm and consistent, and continue to do as we have since coming to office: cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, manage our differences wisely, and above all else, engage in and vigorously pursue our own national interest,” Wong said.
However, the view from Beijing, says Pezzullo, would be squarely focused on Australia’s actions since 1963, when Australia was negotiating the establishment of the North West Cape US naval communication station near Exmouth in Western Australia, followed by the Pine Gap intelligence gathering and surveillance base in 1966.
“If you’re in Beijing you say, ‘Well, okay, we know there’s some critical infrastructure in Australia that supports American military capabilities and operations, that’s before you even get to weapon systems’,” says Pezzullo.
Earlier this month, Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles signed off on more frequent rotations of nuclear-capable US bombers and fighter jets through Marine Rotational Force – Darwin, a marine air-ground taskforce of the US Marine Corps based at Robertson Barracks and at RAAF Base Darwin. From 2027, up to four US nuclear submarines and one from the United Kingdom will begin rotating through HMAS Stirling naval base off the coast of Perth for nine months of the year.
“They’re not coming here to train in terms of how to fly long distances,” says Pezzullo. “This is different. This is forced posture, where they can forward deploy for operational purposes. And then it gets to the question of nuclear weapons, what kind of weapons would they bring with them?”
While careful to emphasise that there is no suggestion any nuclear weapons would be permanently stationed in Australia, Pezzullo says it is logical to conclude that US military assets staging in Australia at the start of a potential crisis would not be coming to Australia with “dummy rounds”.
“They’re not going to come here with anything other than their assigned war load – in other words, the load that they would take into battle,” says Pezzullo, adding the time had come for a more open discussion with Australian people about what that would mean.
In statements from the bilateral consultations with the US, Pezzullo says, there are “euphemistic formulae” referencing deterrence. “But deterrence only works if the other party finds that your threat of military force is credible.”
Why, for instance, asks Pezzullo, is Australia extending runways and building infrastructure for US strategic bombers? He argues that may be to complicate the Chinese strategic calculus so that, in the event of a crisis, a possible US attack could come not only from Guam or Hawaii or the US west coast but also from Australia.
The same applies to the nuclear submarines rotating out of Garden Island near Perth, he says: an operational forward deployment has melded in the public mind with the AUKUS agreement.
“I don’t understand how people have fallen for this,” says Pezzullo.
“I won’t call it a deception, because that implies too much malicious intent, but certainly it’s confusing to relate it to AUKUS, because people think those submarines are coming there as kind of a downpayment on us getting our own Virginia-class submarines.”
Under the AUKUS pact, Australia is expected to acquire at least two second-hand Virginia-class submarines from the US from 2032 – five years beyond a potentially pivotal year.
In February last year, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Burns, said the US agency knew “as a matter of intelligence” that President Xi Jinping had ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to conduct an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.
The key question then, argues Pezzullo, is not whether Australia would be prepared to deploy its forces as far north as Taiwan, which would be so small relative to what the Americans would need that it wouldn’t matter, but whether Washington would be allowed to operate through Australia.
“And once you do that, you make yourself a target, so you have to protect those forces. Then you have to mobilise your own military and probably your home nation, because you’re going to potentially be copping missile strikes and the mining of ports and submarine attacks off our coast,” says Pezzullo.
On any reasonable reading of the ANZUS treaty, Pezzullo says the US would take “a very dim view” of a lack of assistance from Australia should a conflict in the Pacific area threaten significant American casualties. While Australia should continue to emphasise it wants peace in the region, he says, an authoritarian regime that is willing to push the envelope with coercive actions must understand it faces a strong opposing coalition.
Pezzullo has views on how the ANZUS alliance should be leveraged, as befits a bureaucrat who has spent his entire working life in the nexus of defence and home affairs – though he’s been months out of it. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sacked Pezzullo last November after an independent inquiry found he had breached the Australian Public Service code of conduct in relation to a series of text messages the then Department of Home Affairs secretary allegedly sent to a Liberal Party insider during the Turnbull and Morrison governments in an attempt to influence political processes.
Pezzullo says the government should operationalise the ANZUS alliance and run it on a day-to-day basis, similar to the way the NATO alliance operates.
“At the moment, the ANZUS treaty is just kind of a political agreement on a shelf. Yes, there’s lots of exercises and things like that, but they’re not currently being run for the purposes of thinking about how would we actually fight a campaign to defend this key infrastructure across the north of Australia, as a base to operate up into the South China Sea.”
Pezzullo also urged the government to consider introducing an annual statement from the prime minister to parliament on Australia’s national security, to ensure people were better prepared for what might lie ahead.
“Government has to explain, because in the end, they’ve got all the intelligence, they’ve got the best way of assessing these issues, and they have to explain how all this fits together,” he says. “If there is a complete disconnect between the government and the people, you better know that now.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 31, 2024 as "Pezzullo: Labor has ‘picked a side’ in war with China".
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