There was a moment in federal parliament this week when the seriousness of the looming Aukus announcement seemed to dawn on the defence minister, Richard Marles. “It is difficult to overstate the step that, as a nation, we are about to take,” Marles, in the acting prime minister’s chair, solemnly told the chamber on Thursday. “Australia will become just the seventh country to have the ability to operate a nuclear-powered submarine. We have never operated a military capability at this level before.” The statement may not have been intended to…
Tag: Aukus
Defence minister Richard Marles on Labor’s diplomatic reset with China – podcast
Australia is walking a fine line between the US, which it relies on for security, and its important trade partner China as fears grow of a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Defence and foreign affairs correspondent Daniel Hurst recently interviewed defence minister Richard Marles on Australia’s position in the global contest for power. How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know The Guardian
‘We don’t have limitless resources’: Australian government prepared to scale back defence projects
Richard Marles has signalled the Australian government is prepared to scale back some defence projects to fund others in a major shake-up, declaring “we don’t have limitless resources”. The deputy prime minister said the government would weigh up “how best we can use the resources that we have to make sure that we have a defence force which maximises Australia’s capability”. In his first substantive interview of the year, Marles refused to rule out the possibility Australia’s first nuclear-powered submarines could be built offshore before production in South Australia can…
Energy makes the headlines, but reset on diplomacy is Albanese’s real power play
For weeks, all eyes have been on soaring energy prices, and what the governments of Australia will do to give households and businesses relief. Governments answered part of the national water cooler question on Friday, agreeing to new price caps for coal and gas, and to rebates for people on low and middle incomes. The impact of the proposed price caps seems clear. Power bills will increase, but they will be lower than they otherwise would be in the absence of government intervention. Consumer rebates are still a bit of…
Penny Wong issues emphatic plea to US and China to ‘prevent catastrophe’ of war
Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has urged China to take up a US offer to put in place “guardrails” to prevent growing tensions from spiralling into war. Wong will use a speech in Washington DC on Thursday to hit back at claims that Australia’s plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under Aukus is driving a regional arms race. Wong will also urge the leaders of China and the US to learn from diplomacy spurred by the Cuban missile crisis, saying she hopes “nationalistic domestic posturing won’t sink their efforts to…
Caroline Kennedy praises Australia’s bipartisan foreign policy despite PM’s claims on Labor and China
Caroline Kennedy, the nominee for US ambassador to Australia, has said the Aukus security deal will provide “a lot of deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific even before the nuclear-powered submarines are ready. With Australia set to enter a federal election campaign within days, Kennedy praised the country for standing firm with “a bipartisan foreign policy” in the face of “Chinese economic coercion”. But she also said the prospect of a security agreement between China and Solomon Islands showed the US needed to be “more visible” in the Pacific. Kennedy said the…
China’s response to Aukus deal was ‘irrational’, Peter Dutton says
China has responded “irrationally” to the Aukus pact between Australia, the United States and Britain, the defence minister Peter Dutton says. The conservative Australian minister continues to mount forthright criticism of the Chinese government, accusing it of “bullying” countries that stand up to Beijing. Dutton on Sunday said the Australian government had formed the Aukus partnership with the US and the UK because it wanted to see “see increased stability and peace in our region”. “The response by China to that, I think, was irrational,” Dutton told Sky News Australia.…
Former PM Paul Keating says Australia ‘has lost its way’ – video
Former prime minister Paul Keating has told the National Press Club that Australia ‘is now very much at odds with its geography and it has lost its way.’ The former Labor PM said Australia must deal more productively with China and criticised the current government for looking for its ‘security from Asia rather than in Asia’. Keating also called the federal government’s planned submarine project under Aukus ‘like throwing a handful of toothpicks at the mountain’ The Guardian
Could China ever invade Taiwan – and what would happen next?
For much of the past two years, as Covid-19 has spread across the world, Taiwan has seemed like an oasis – successfully keeping the virus under control and continuing with life more or less as normal. But at the same time, just as they have for decades, the island’s residents have lived in the shadow of a threat from China, which claims sovereignty and says it has the right to seize control. In recent months, with China’s president, Xi Jinping, repeatedly proclaiming that his “unification” policy “must be fulfilled”, fighter…