Are We Ready For War?

Defiant in word, dependent in deed: Australia’s uneasy posture in the shadow of US–China rivalry.

When the Prime Minister delivered the John Curtin Oration in July, he began with Frank Forde’s moving tribute to his fallen wartime leader.

“The Captain has been stricken in sight of the shore,” the acting Prime Minister told Parliament when announcing Curtin’s death on July 5, 1945. Fifty-nine days later, the war in the Pacific would end.

Ben Chifley said his friend “… died as truly a casualty of war as any soldier who fell on the battlefield,” because the stress of leading the nation through the most dangerous chapter in its history hastened his death.

Anthony Albanese’s speech served two purposes: to honour a great leader and to enlist Curtin’s legacy to his own strategic cause. He evoked Curtin’s battle of wills with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt over the deployment of two Australian divisions returning from the Middle East.

“Curtin wanted those troops for the defence of Australia. Churchill wanted them in Burma – and Roosevelt backed him,” the Prime Minister said.

Curtin prevailed and Albanese used this confrontation as a lens through which to refocus Curtin’s earlier strategic shift, from British dependence to going all in with America.

“Curtin’s famous statement that Australia ‘looked to America’ was much more than the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another,” Albanese said. “Or swapping an alliance with the old world for one with the new. It was a recognition that Australia’s fate would be decided in our region.”

This glosses over the fact that Curtin’s appeal to America came when he feared Australia’s fate would be decided by Japan. Our weakness was fiercely exposed after the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin. Australia lacked the means to defend itself and had no practical option but to throw its lot in with a powerful friend or fall.

Whether or not it was Japan’s intent to invade Australia, the threat of a battle on home soil was clearly in Curtin’s mind when he made his radio address to the American people in March 1942, in the wake of the fall of Java.

“We will not yield easily a yard of our soil,” Curtin said. “We have great space here and tree by tree, village by village, and town by town we will fall back if we must.”

Listening to that address and re-reading the December 1941 Melbourne Herald article, where Curtin announced the shift to the US, there is a visceral sense of urgency in his bid to recruit Washington to our aid.

“You must be our leader,” Curtin tells his American audience. “It is a matter of some regret to us that, even now, after 95 days of Japan’s staggering advance south, ever south, we have not obtained first-hand contact with America.”

He says foreign minister, Dr Herbert (Doc) Evatt, and his wife, “who was born in the United States,” will be dispatched to Washington to plead Canberra’s case.

In the article and the speech, three things stand out. The first is Curtin underscoring that Australia does not come to the US as a “mendicant”, but as a nation “committed, heart and soul, to total warfare”. Australia is valuable to the US because it will pull its weight in the fight.

Curtin also laments that the Allies had failed to read the signs of the times.

“Facts are stern things,” he told the Americans. “We, the Allied nations, were unready. Japan, behind her wall of secrecy, had prepared for war on a scale of which neither we nor you had knowledge. We have all made mistakes, we have all been too slow; we have all shown weakness.”

Finally, Curtin regrets the time it took to stir Australians out of their complacency.

“The Commonwealth Government found it exceedingly difficult to bring Australian people to a realisation of what, after two years of war, our position had become,” he says in the Herald article.

Curtin’s call was answered. By mid-1943 there were 150,000 US troops based here. By the war’s end, over one million American servicemen had passed through this country, as it served as the US base for its operations in the western Pacific.

Parliament continued to sit in Canberra during the war and the War Cabinet was sometimes convened there. Recently Sky News returned to Old Parliament House with a panel of former ministers and defence experts to confront the threat of this era: China’s battle with the United States for regional dominance.

A long shadow of the past fell over our War Cabinet as two themes emerged: a failure to rapidly respond to the signs of the times and complacency.

The Executive Director of Cyber Intelligence at CyberCX, Katherine Mansted, said we need to get better at talking about the China threat.

“We’re not thinking for one minute that we can dissuade (Chinese President) Xi Jinping from his course,” she said. “We’re talking to the Australian public because the decisions that will be made to make Australia resilient won’t always be made around cabinet room tables. They’ll be made around dining room tables and boardroom tables by Australians who need to be equipped to understand what they are combatting so that they can innovate and have the resilience to combat it.”

Dr Ross Babbage, founder of Strategic Forum and a former senior defence official, urged an era of truth-telling.

“We’ve got to get informed, we have got to get strong and we have got to get scary, and by that I mean selectively invest in some things that cause the other guy to change their calculations,” Dr Babbage said.

Unfortunately, the biggest roadblock to truth-telling is the Albanese Government. It seems to believe staying largely silent about the threat from China is good diplomacy because it buys a superficial peace. Meanwhile, Beijing is preparing for war, by rapidly expanding its navy, air force and missile arsenal. It has already planted virtual bombs on our critical infrastructure. It’s also stockpiling food, fuel and critical minerals to ensure it can stand alone in a prolonged conflict.

And while Canberra whispers sweet nothings to Beijing, it’s determined to speak loudly and wave a small stick at Washington. As the Prime Minister’s John Curtin Oration underscores, the government wants to boldly assert its independence from President Donald Trump while quietly sheltering beneath America’s security umbrella. It’s a peculiar posture: defiant in word, dependent in deed, with bold talk in Canberra and quiet reliance on the Marines in Darwin.

This is buying no friends in Washington and fooling no one in Beijing.

Former Home Affairs chief Mike Pezzullo points out that Canberra has already gone all in with Washington by basing increasing numbers of US troops and kit here. In any conflict between China and America, that decision makes this country a target.

One clear break with the past is that Australia is nowhere near pulling its weight in the alliance by preparing for the chance of war. Successive governments have squandered the precious gift of time. If the worst happens, we are a long way from ready.

No sane person wants war. Everyone hopes for peace, but hope is not a strategy. Sometimes you don’t get a choice. Sometimes trouble chooses you. A wise government should pray for the best and plan for the worst. And any preparation has to begin with telling the truth.

War Cabinet is a one-hour Sky News special built around the most consequential question confronting the nation: is Australia ready for war if deterrence fails? Filmed in the Cabinet Room at Old Parliament House—where John Curtin once led Australia through its darkest hours—the program convened a formidable panel of former political leaders, defence strategists, and drone and cyber experts to run a live national security simulation.

The broadcast brought together Alexander Downer, former Foreign Minister; Joel Fitzgibbon, former Defence Minister; Mike Pezzullo, former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs; Jennifer Parker, former senior Royal Australian Navy officer and defence strategist; Peter Jennings, Executive Director of Strategic Analysis Australia and former Deputy Secretary of Defence; Major General (Ret.) Mick Ryan, former senior Australian Army officer and defence strategist; Dr Ross Babbage, founder of Strategic Forum and former senior defence official; Katherine Mansted, Executive Director of Cyber Intelligence at CyberCX; and Dr Oleksandra Molloy, Ukrainian defence analyst.