The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s recent proposal to enrol the science, technology, engineering and mathematics areas of the research universities as part of a national security establishment along the lines overseen by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is a regrettable initiative. (more…)
Michael McKinley
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ASPI’s proposal to further militarise and securitise the university – Part 1
It is now unambiguously clear that certain influential centres of government advice and government policy hold the university-as-institution in contempt. (more…)
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Anti-China Threat Production in Australia: A redundant, out-of-control industry
Australia cannot lay claim to being the sole, or even senior author of its defence strategies and policies.
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Anti-China threat porn: Antiquity’s antidote to its sophistry
If China is a threat to international peace and security, then the relationships outlined below approach the crime of trading with the enemy.
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ASPI, sycophancy and the deepening corruption of Australia’s strategic mindset
Last month, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute announced that its Executive Director, Peter Jennings, had warned another ostensibly independent think tank, the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, that China may trigger a major military crisis over Taiwan in the coming year. The catalysts are held to be twofold: the forthcoming centenary of the Chinese Communist Party and the domestic turmoil in the US resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. (more…)
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For the Prime Minister, sovereignty is reduced to possessing 70 fighter jets
Prime Minister Scott Morrison appears to be suffering from the neurological condition visual agnosia – the inability to recognise certain objects for what they are. It is a condition popularised the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, is his book on the condition, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.
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Sleepwalking into a fascist alliance
Those critically engaged in understanding and debating the future of Australian defence and national security strategies should pass two votes of thanks: the first is to former President Donald Trump; the second to the recent political-strategic proclamations of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (more…)
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It’s time to decommission ASPI
The time has come – indeed, is well past – for those responsible for giving the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) its Length Of Type Extension to decommission it in the manner of a ship of the line, or submarine, whose usefulness to the fleet has demonstrably expired and cannot under any circumstance be regarded as fit for purpose it was designed for. (more…)
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Hamlet’s glass and the Brereton Report: the radical reality of Australia’s security culture
It is almost an invariable rule that the citizens of nation-states in their generality, and Australia in particular, are obsessed with security and fascinated with violence; equally, they are illiterate in understanding their own traditions and practices. And when they ostensibly honour international law, rules-based orders, add peace, they require a more suspecting glance than they are accorded. An iconic play provides the invitation. (more…)
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The Brereton Report: the failure of political and military leadership
Our political leadership will never be the subjects of the Office of the Special Investigator or the Australian Federal Police, nor, therefore, will they ever be charged. Indeed, in their exaggerated innocence they will display only the inevitable hypocrisy of the failed war-maker: a passion for condemning others and a total unwillingness to accept responsibility for their role in their crimes. (more…)
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Australia and the United States: the opposed fantasies at the heart of the alliance relationship
One of the refrains among those defending Australia’s alliance with the United States is that arising out of their pasts, sharing a core set of moral and ethical values, political and economic arrangements, and visions of the desirable world order.
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Pathological philanthropy in the Australia-US Alliance
With confirmed coronavirus cases in excess of two million, the number of new, confirmed cases across the country approaching 45,000 per day for most of the last ten weeks, and resultant deaths in excess of 126,000 (and climbing), the decisions made across the United States to open the economy should not surprise. (more…)
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Accelerating securitisation and militarisation in Australian politics: symptoms of democracy in decline.
As though these trends are not worrying enough in themselves, in the present, they need to be understood as effects rather than causes. And the causes are even more frightening.
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: Surveying Australia’s future submarine debate and finding that it doesn ’t start with Australia. Part 5 of 5.
In the course of studying the arguments for and against the decision to acquire the Shortfin Barracuda submarine to replace the Collins Class boats the sense has emerged that almost every aspect of the debates was concerned with the need to please strategies determined elsewhere. This applies, moreover, to both the bureaucratic inarticulacy of government statements and the Insight Economics reports which, on the other hand, are compendiums of empirically based critique written for Submarines for Australia.
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: Questions which should have preceded the decision on the future submarine. Part 4 of 5
The enemification of China and Russia in US, and thus, alliance statements and documents on international security can now reasonably be described as an idée fixe: a persistent preoccupation which has become a delusional idea that dominates all proceedings and is demonstrably and firmly resistant to any attempt to modify it no matter the dangers – quite possibly fatal – which arise from persisting in it.
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: Substituting the Strategic Dreamtime for the Berthold Brecht Principles of Strategic Analysis. Part 3 of 5.
Sometimes important strategic issues and questions are made more intelligible and transparent when viewed from the perspectives not normally associated with national security and defence policies. Now is one of those times.
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: The SEA 1000 Attack Class future submarine project and the emergence of the neo-Carrollian School of Maritime Strategy. Part 2 of 5.
In a reproach to all reason the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland famously demanded verdict first, evidence later. In an evolutionary turn, the decision to acquire the Shortfin Barracuda for the Royal Australian Navy has taken the Carrollian principle one step further: evidence of a strategic-operational nature which had a direct bearing on the final decision was dispensed with.
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Arse-backwards: the now unmistakeable nature of the Future Submarine programme by refusing to ask the prior questions. Part 1 of 5.
Even from well outside the arcana imperii of the processes which led to the decision to select the Shortfin Barracuda proposal by French shipbuilder Naval Group to replace the Collins-class submarines it is apparent that the result is contrary to the good order and strategic discipline which should be the hallmarks of such a project.
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The “China threat” has moved beyond the frantic into the realm of the explicitly dangerous.
One of the most disturbing features of Australian Foreign and Defence policies over the last two years has been the obvious encroachment into actual policy-making by not only the intelligence agencies – which is outrageous enough in itself – but also by the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), Andrew Hastie. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Australia’s Domestic War Parties: The Colonisation of the Australian Strategic Mind
National Defence and Security questions in Australia are, like so many areas of government policy, difficult to follow, let alone master, and debate about them tends to attract only a small attentive public. The answers to them, in the form of various forms of cost, however, are frequently in the currency of death and destruction. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Australia’s AUSMIN invitations: clean the driveway, wash the dishes. Again
In the course of the current AUSMIN talks Australia has once again been invited, by the United States, to assume a role for which it is well, indeed over-qualified for – namely to provide janitorial services in the aftermath of a series of strategic debacles by the US itself. Serial prodigality and recklessness are to be rewarded with serial subservience and indulgence. It’s a tradition. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Reflections on the nuclear dimensions of Hugh White’s ‘How To Defend Australia’
Australian strategic thinking, like Dracula’s Transylvania, is very much troubled by the undead. Research undertaken 50 years ago by Ian Bellany, a nuclear physicist and predecessor of Hugh White in the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, wrestled with a remarkably similar Australian defence problematic – namely whether nuclear weapons might be a safeguard against a rising China and concluded that other options (military and diplomatic) were far more preferable. The times have changed, and with them, so it seems, the need to disinter the corpse if only to rebury it. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Another climate change warning and the return of a Pentagon prophecy the new government might take seriously.
Richard Butler recently made the point on this site that, in relation to foreign policy, the Australian Government finds the disposition and pose of the ostrich to be to its liking: a futile self-absorption in reality denial. To this I would add that it is common to almost every policy area, and it recalls the traditional response of the successive Pontificates over so many years to their own travails. Essentially and ironically, it is an attempt to insist that the intruding world of dissent and challenges to the status quo ignore the nature of necessity and things which provide for current comforts and privileges at the expense of long-term disaster. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Returning to the time of “Able Archer” and Australia’s need to remember 1983
Nearly thirty-six years ago NATO carried out its annual Able Archer command post exercise designed to simulate an escalation in conflict with the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations which culminated in a coordinated nuclear attack against the Soviet homeland. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The present and future national security policy of Australia is to be found on the coast of Victoria.
National security will not be the determining factor in the forthcoming elections but it will get frequent redacted mentions for the purpose of injecting elements of fear and additional insecurity into the impoverished discussions it will attract. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The unsettling reality if Five Eyes is the guardian against Huawei, Part 2: A survey audit concerning prudence, integrity, law and ethics.
In the frequent denunciations of Huawei and ZTE the inference is that these Chinese corporations are existing, or potential espionage agents of the Beijing Government and a threat to all who have been foolish enough to acquire their products. These threats, moreover, are held to be of a type that are politically, legally and ethically enjoined by the Five Eyes community and it is these axiomatic principles which distinguish it from others less scrupulous. To believe this requires a deposition of the type of religious faith which Voltaire saw resulting from the first knave’s encounter with the first fool. An examination of three propositions might suffice to indicate that Five Eyes’ protection involves a preference for an intra-alliance schedule of threats, costs and risk, which are never made explicit over another schedule of an external nature, not the absence of threats. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The unsettling reality if Five Eyes is the guardian against Huawei, Part 1: Questions of Honesty and Loyalty.
According to a recent assessment Australia is the world’s 11th most vulnerable country in terms of its exposure to internet security threat. This is the general case. The particular case, articulated by the Five Eyes signals intelligence agencies, is that China is to be feared the most because Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, and ZTE, China’s second largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, are both attractive suppliers technologically speaking, and a definite national security risk because they cannot conceivably be regarded as independent of the Chinese Government. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The Occupation of the Australian Mind.
Fear and apathy have taken up residence in the collective political consciousness of Australia. Indeed, it may be that they have achieved that most desirable of states for governments seeking to remain in power, or oppositions sensing their imminent ascendency to it: a state of collective unconsciousness that consents to its own increasing subservience and essential irrelevance while believing that it is being kept safe. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The ascendancy of the age of Thorby (PART 1 – the state’s justification for requiring passive citizens)
Contrary to popular belief, modern democracy does not welcome an active, engaged citizenry especially between election campaigns because its interventions would hinder the operations of the state. The preferred condition is one of citizen passivity in which the authorities go about their business of securing the national interest as defined by themselves through an ever-increasing array of “national security” arrangements contrary to any robust definition of accountable and responsible democracy. In Australia this is justified by fiat and pseudo theory, and practised in plain sight. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. The age of Thorby (PART 2 – The addictive denial of transparency and the protection of malfeasance)
Where matters defined under the rubric of national security are concerned, the intelligence agencies of the state demand nothing less than the indulgence to act with unwarranted secrecy – secrecy beyond that which is absolutely essential. Over the last 80 years, as detailed in Part 1, this arrogation and its putative rationale have been explicit especially in the politicised legal casuistry of the Attorney-General. “We, the people” should understand our place as unknowledgeable actors in the drama of governance and desist from dissent; indeed, against an abundance of evidence, we should trust the state – it is the repository of secret information and our guardian. A spelling revision of “citizen” is required: sitizen. (more…)