The right-wing Donald Trump United States administration has demanded that Australia increase its military spending from 2% of GDP (about $56 billion a year) to 3% ($84 billion) and the major parties have been, predictably, quick to obey.
Socialist Alliance calls instead for a 50% cut in military expenditure and to use the $28 billion instead to address the urgent housing, cost-of-living and climate crises.
Coalition leader Peter Dutton wants to go all the way with Trump’s war drive demand and, today, Labor defence minister Richard Marles announced that tonight’s budget would increase defence spending by $10.6 billion over the next four years.
This will bring $1 billion in defence spending for guided weapons manufacturing, an AUKUS submarine base and a frigate program, Marles said.
Labor had already announced a $50 billion military spending boost over a decade, which he said was the “most significant increase in defence spending since the end of World War II”.
This would be a massive waste of public funds and is irresponsible when the biggest threat we are facing is actually the climate emergency, which Labor and Coalition governments alike have worsened by giving the coal and gas companies billions more in subsidies and tax concessions to make Australia a global climate rogue state.
The billions spent by Australia on the military have overwhelmingly been used to join the US and other imperialist states in waging war on other countries, from the Gallipoli invasion to the long and disastrous wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, which have mainly killed millions of people in the countries invaded.
It is a total misnomer to call this “defence”.
Australia’s growing military expenditure to increasingly integrate all wings of the armed forces into the US military machine and the AUKUS deal is pivotal to advancing this integration, also known as interoperability.
AUKUS is also speeding up the integration of a growing arms industry with the US, British and Israeli military industries, making Australia even more complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
The major parties share the ambition of making Australia one of the 10 top arms exporters in the world, and Labor has played an insidious role in enticing the trade union movement into this project with the promise of new, well-paid and highly skilled jobs.
Socialist Alliance rejects this plan to publicly subsidise the world’s blood-stained arms corporations, which have an increasing interest in perpetuating wars for their profit.
The Greens have recently announced a plan to cancel AUKUS and reallocate $4 billion from savings within the defence budget towards “domestic production capabilities of uncrewed marine and aerial vehicles as well as missiles, strictly for defensive purposes”, without relying on US and foreign arms companies.
Senator David Shoebridge, the Australian Greens defence spokesperson, claims that this is a practical alternative to “dependence and integration with the US military”, which would be used only to “to defend Australia, not threaten our neighbours”.
Will the Greens proposal really do this and how does it sit with its core value of “peace and non-violence”?
This question is being asked by many Greens members and supporters, as well as others in the peace and antiwar movements. The Greens’ plan must be critically examined and assessed. Greens members should also ask how this policy was decided without consulting members in the party’s branches.
The reason why Australia’s armed forces have been used more for offensive purposes in imperialist wars on other countries rather than real defence is not only because Australian governments have been forced to do this by imperialist powers, such as the US (and before that Britain), it is also because Australia, itself, is a junior imperialist power founded as a racist colonial settler state.
Australian governments, Labor and Coalition alike, have always been the most enthusiastic supporters of imperial wars and Labor’s shameful complicity for the ongoing Israeli-US genocide in Palestine is fully in this tradition.
A truly defensive plan for security needs to be built around breaking from Australia’s imperialist role and on building relations of solidarity with its neighbours.
For a start that means Australia must stop being the biggest climate rogue state in the Pacific and respect our regional neighbours’ urgent calls to stop expanding our fossil fuel extraction and exports.
We should scrap AUKUS, close Pine Gap and all the other US bases and arrangements allowing the stationing of US military anywhere in Australia.
Australia could follow Cuba’s good example in helping countries in the Global South with medical training and literacy aid, instead of demanding hegemonic military links with neighbouring countries.
The Australian military is totally shaped for imperial purposes. Turning it into a truly defensive institution would require more than breaking with the US military.
It will require breaking from the globalised arms industry, including so-called Australian arms manufacturing companies. It would require the replacement of the military machine, now firmly in the control of the capitalist class (regardless of which party is in government), with truly defensive institutions under the control of the people.
That’s a big change, but that’s what is required.
[Peter Boyle is a Socialist Alliance candidate for the NSW Senate.]