Australia should talk to Washington about buying B-2 stealth bombers

China’s recent naval circumnavigation of Australia has highlighted a pressing need to defend Australia’s air and sea approaches more effectively. Potent as nuclear submarines are, the first Australian boats under AUKUS are at least seven years away. Air power is well-positioned to fill the gap in Australia’s long-range strike capability: It has clear advantages over submarines and ships in terms of its responsiveness in the maritime strike role.

But the F-35A and F/A-18F lack the necessary range, and Australia has not fielded a bomber since the F-111 was retired in 2010. No new candidate aircraft has been identified as available for purchase, on a timeline that is relevant, or on a budget within Australia’s means.

Solving this problem requires imagination from Australia as well as its key ally, the US. Fortunately, there is a solution at hand but, like the aircraft itself, it is not easy to detect. As unlikely as it sounds, Australia should pursue America’s B-2A Spirit bomber, and has a narrow opportunity to do so.

Australia, to be clear, would be acquiring the B-2A as a fully sovereign capability, to boost its deterrent and war-fighting capabilities, with China’s strategic challenge primarily in mind. America would also gain by further enabling a close ally to make a stabilizing contribution to the regional balance of power, through a significant augmentation to its air power, alongside the development of undersea and other capabilities via AUKUS.

The B-2A is well suited to meet Australia’s capability requirements in terms of range, payload and stand-alone platform survivability. There are indications that the B-2A is already transitioning to a long-range precision strike role — delivering such weapons as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (Extended Range) with which it was integrated in 2022. Maritime strike was a particular focus of the B-2A’s participation in last year’s RIMPAC exercises, when it demonstrated the use of modified JDAM gravity bombs as low-cost ship-sinkers. These are capabilities the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) already fields.

Obviously, Australia would need to clear some major obstacles to acquire the B-2A.

First, the US has never before entertained exporting the Spirit, given its limited numbers (only 18 remain) and proprietary technology. Second, Australia would be concentrating a multibillion-dollar investment into very few platforms, just when the Australian Defence Force arguably needs to pivot away from ”exquisite” capabilities and inject greater mass, depth and risk-worthiness into its order of battle. Third, the B-2A serves the USAF in a nuclear as well as conventional delivery role, which would have to be reconciled with Australia’s prohibition on possessing nuclear weapons. Finally, Australian critics of the Trump administration would pillory such an acquisition as foolhardy, at a time when doubts about Washington’s political reliability as an ally are peaking.

Without dismissing these drawbacks, there is a pathway for Australia to acquire a viable B-2A bomber capability, on a timeline that is relevant to its strategic needs. And the window of opportunity is relatively slim— requiring decisive action by Canberra within the next couple of years.

Why Not Other Aircraft?

What about other options? There are really only three other avenues, all with significant downsides: buying into the US’s future B-21 Raider program, acquiring B-1B Lancer bombers as they are retired from the USAF, or trying to tie into the British-Italian-Japanese GCAP effort.

While it would provide a capability for the long term, the problem with the B-21 option for Australia is that it conflicts with the USAF’s overriding need to recapitalize its own bomber force. It would therefore not be available until well into the 2030s — if at all. Cost is another factor, at an estimated $16-18 billion USD for a squadron of twelve. And while the B-21 remains laudably on track, indeed under-budget in the FY25 appropriations request, the potential for cost overruns and delays remains.

The main advantage of pressing used USAF B-1Bs into Australian service is that the Lancers are flying now and are already configured for anti-ship missions. The major downside is that the RAAF would have to assume the full burden for the B-1B’s sustainment while the USAF pivots resources to the B-21. Designed for an operational lifespan of 8,000-10,000 flying hours, the B-1Bs now average above 12,000 hours because of the aircraft’s extensive use as a loitering close air-support platform in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the USAF has retired them from all but short-duration missions. While statistics on flying hours aren’t publicly available for the B-2A, the USAF has been much more sparing with them than the B-1B. Australia would be investing at the point of sharply diminishing returns.

The GCAP joint venture aircraft, while not a bomber per se, is likely to be large enough to be considered in the long-range strike role. Australian interest in the program is rising and GCAP is likely to be more affordable than the B-21. But it may not be available on a significantly more favorable timeline, and there is a constant concern that the multi-national nature of the program could lead to delays or spiraling costs.

Meanwhile, the Spirit is already on borrowed time in USAF service, as it will be retired (along with the B-1B) in the early 2030s in order to accommodate the transition to the B-21, without expanding the overall size of Global Strike Command. Although a precise date is difficult to identify, provided the B-21 rollout proceeds smoothly, the USAF could potentially start retiring B-2As at the end of this decade without reducing its overall bomber fleet. (While the USAF has previously stated it could keep the B-2As flying into the 2040s, Northrop Grumman’s $7 billion contract for B-2A maintenance and support concludes at the end of 2029.)

Retiring the B-1B and B-2A in parallel (the venerable B-52 will be retained in service) creates an expensive and burdensome disposal problem for the USAF. Framed in this context, an Australian pitch to buy eight or more B-2As could be well received by both the USAF and the Trump administration, which has emphasized the need for stepped-up burden sharing from allies.

How This Could Work

Make no mistake, this would be a costly effort, one that would have to come as part of a significant uplift in defense spending, closer to 3 percent of GDP, up from roughly 2 percent GDP today. But if the government is willing to do that, then there are mutual benefits for both Canberra and Washington.

Australia has upgraded several air bases to support regular deployments of USAF bombers and other combat aircraft, and B-2As have already operated from Australia, albeit on short-term detachments. An Australian base in the Northern Territory was used to support a B-2A strike mission against Houthi targets in Yemen last October, most likely for refueling.

Future B-2A deployments to Australia could be scaled up, to further explore the practical challenges of maintaining and sustaining these aircraft here. Deep maintenance might still have to be done in the US, and Australia would need to support that part of any agreement. But as the USAF transitions towards B-21, Australia could incrementally take on more of the funding for B-2A maintenance, easing the cost on American taxpayers. Assuming some overlap in the sustainment footprint between the B-2A and B-21, the RAAF and USAF could also develop shared support facilities, in Australia, for Spirits transferring into Australian service as sovereign assets, as well as B-21s which the USAF could begin to forward deploy to Australia around the same time. This promises economies of scale, within an alliance framework.

While the B-2A would be a stopgap capability for Australia, a further advantage of operating it is that it would provide the RAAF with a pathway to transitioning to the B-21, if it eventually becomes available in sufficient numbers for the US to consider exporting it to Canberra.

To assuage anti-nuclear concerns in Australia, the systems that allow the B-2A to carry nuclear weapons could be disabled through software changes that conform to RAAF standards. Similarly, adapting the B-2A for anti-ship weapons, like LRASM, could be done without insurmountable delays.

All this would require a major Australian diplomatic effort to persuade Washington that it can be trusted to safeguard such highly prized stealth and other technologies via a foreign military sale. But the precedent created by AUKUS, Australia’s subsequent ITAR carve-outs and the existing, close relationship between the RAAF and USAF would do much to make this transfer practicable.

Yes, it’s wildly ambitious. Yes, the hurdles to making this happen may simply be too many to overcome. But now is the time for Canberra to be contemplating bold moves, and convincing the US to sell the B-2A would transform Australia’s defense posture on a significantly faster timeline — an effort worth pursuing to meet the gathering threats.

A tale of two fleets: gunboat diplomacy in an era of rising military power

When the US Navy’s Great White Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbour in 1908, it was an unmistakeable signal of imperial might, a flexing of America’s newfound naval muscle. More than a century later, the Chinese navy has been executing its own form of gunboat diplomacy by circumnavigating Australia – but without a welcome. The similarities and differences between these episodes tell us a lot about the new age of empires in which Australia now finds itself.

Both were shows of force. The former expressed President Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy of speaking softly while carrying a big stick – the original version of peace through strength – while the latter aimed at disturbing the peace.

The Great White Fleet’s visit was a spectacle. Australians cheered as 16 gleaming battleships, painted white and with shiny trim, paraded into Sydney Harbour. A flight of steps, the Fleet Steps, was specially built in the Royal Botanic gardens to receive the American visitors.

The visit was a calculated diplomatic manoeuvre by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin in making the invitation and by US President Teddy Roosevelt in accepting it. Both Australia, a young federation deeply tied to the British Empire, and the United States, a rising but not yet super power, saw value in signalling US Pacific presence to Japan.

For Roosevelt, the fleet also presented his big-stick foreign policy to European nations: the US had arrived as a global power. Just as important, he saw the fleet’s world tour as helpful in explaining to the American people why they needed to spend money on defence, including ships, as their country opened up to global opportunities but also threats. Deterrence, preparation, social licence all strengthened national resilience.

Deakin saw the chance and didn’t just invite the fleet to Australia but engineered the visit. He wanted the visit to kindle the notion in Australia that it should have its own fleet. Irregular Royal Navy deployments to the Far East could not guarantee Australian security.

Also like Roosevelt, Deakin knew that a passive approach to defence policy would not keep the nation safe in an era of rising military powers, with a strategic shift to proactive engagement needed urgently, not only once a crisis had begun. He was especially concerned about Japan’s growing sea power but, again like Roosevelt, he also had an eye on Russian and (later) German sea power.

While Deakin wanted a national navy and was an empire man, he thought it prudent to start building a partnership with the US. Not yet replacing Britain as global leader, it had burst on to the strategic scene only a decade earlier. It had annexed the Philippines in 1898 in the Spanish-American War and, in the same year, the Hawaiian Islands. These made the US a Pacific power.

Both men in the early 1900s understood the connection between European and Pacific security and both set out to protect their national interests by working together against European and Asian powers seeking to create instability and spheres of influence.

As Russell Parkins well describes in Great White Fleet to Coral Sea, Deakin noted in one of his written invitations to the US that “No other Federation in the world possesses so many features of likeness to that of the United States as does the Commonwealth of Australia”. Roosevelt later acknowledged he had not originally planned for the fleet to visit Australia but that Deakin’s invitation had confirmed his “hearty admiration for, and fellow feeling with, Australia, and I believe that America should be ready to stand back of Australia in any serious emergency”.

This was naval might wielded with soft edges: immense firepower floating on the harbour, and friendly chats over tea ashore.

Today the strategic environment again involves European and Asian powers – Russia and China – seeking spheres of influence, only the dynamics of the naval visit couldn’t be more different. No time for afternoon tea, just the reality that Australia faces a security threat from Beijing that demands national preparedness and international friendships and alliances.

When Australia and China encounter each other at sea, the interactions are adversarial, accompanied by dangerous Chinese manoeuvres, high-powered lasers shining into cockpits, chaff dropped into Australian aircraft engines and sonar injuring Australian navy divers. These are not friendly port calls but dangerous military activities and displays of coercive statecraft.

The Great White Fleet sought goodwill and alliances. China’s naval behaviour is an assertion of dominance. If the Australian public were in any doubt about how Beijing intended to interact with the region, China’s behaviour in this most recent episode should be instructive. The lack of warning given to Australia was a warning itself of what is to come. Beijing wants us to heed it and submit.

We must not submit. We must learn from the incident and change Beijing’s behaviour.

When a Chinese naval flotilla last made a port call to Sydney, in 2019, it was met with some public unease, if not alarm. Australia had, after all, approved the visit. But through a combination of Canberra’s ignorance of history and Beijing’s aim of rewriting it, the visit was approved without recognising that it coincided with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Not long after the negotiated port visit, China suspended ministerial-level engagement as part of coercion to bring Australia into line. Despite some warming in relations in recent years, Beijing chose not to give Australia advance notice of live-fire exercises. The same Beijing that only a few years ago gave notice of a visit now has the confidence to fire at will.

Australia must stop being surprised by every new Chinese military or hybrid warfare development. Beijing’s confidence is growing in all domains, including cyberspace. With intrusions known as Volt Typhoon, China’s intelligence agencies were outed in 2023 as having pre-positioned malware for disrupting and destroying our critical infrastructure. This should also be seen as a rehearsal for later cyber moves.

And now, for the first time in the modern era, we have seen a potential adversary rehearse its wartime kinetic strategy against Australia. Yes, the Japanese did surveillance and intelligence gathering before World War II, but this circumnavigation with live-fire exercises takes us well beyond intelligence collection. Beijing has been undertaking “intelligence preparation of the battlespace” for some time with ships it frequently sends to Australian waters to observe our exercises or to conduct oceanographic studies (which improve submarine operations).

Just as the Great White Fleet helped to inspire the development of an Australian navy, the Chinese flotilla should warn us that our own fleet needs to be larger and ready to assure our security. The rhyme of history is that distant fleets operating in Australian waters matter and should spur our own thinking (and act as catalysts for action) regarding Australian sovereign capabilities.

After all, these episodes underscore an enduring truth about Australia’s geopolitical reality: we are a regional power situated between global hegemons and their very large navies. One could even say that we are girt by sea power. But this is not new territory; it is the blessing and burden of geography and history.

Whether it was navigating the transitions from British to American primacy in the Pacific or more recently adjusting to China’s challenge to the US-led order, Australia has always had to manage its strategic relationships with agility and nuance.

The key difference, of course, is that Australia welcomed the Great White Fleet in 1908 with open arms. Today, Australia finds itself on the receiving end of an unwelcome presence by ships that appear uninterested in friendly port visits. This demands a response that is not reckless but is firm enough to avoid being feckless.

Although the position is difficult, the Australian government should not think it must walk a tightrope in dealing with China. The strength of response to Beijing’s aggression should depend on the minimum needed to deter more aggression, not by a perceived maximum that will leave trade and diplomatic relations unharmed. European countries have made such mistakes in handling Russia – declining to hold it to account in the hope that Putin would keep selling gas to them and delay military action.

There’s no use in pretending or hoping there is nothing to see here except one-off instances of unpleasant behaviour. China’s aggression follows its concept of dealing with the rest of the world, and it won’t stop. Quiet diplomacy won’t deter Beijing from more dangerous behaviour but will embolden it to repeat its actions. Each instance will show Australia is incapable of doing anything about it until Beijing – mistakenly or intentionally – goes so far as to make conflict inevitable. Australia’s time to stand up cannot wait until a live fire drill becomes just live fire.

As Teddy Roosevelt put it, big-stick foreign policy involves “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis”. Navigating the best response to aggression therefore requires clarity about what is at stake.

What Australia does in the South China Sea – where it operates in accordance with international law alongside allies – is not equivalent to China’s recent foray into the Tasman Sea. Beijing’s actions represent yet another demonstration of reckless behaviour, following its dangerous harassment of Australian forces. By making various attacks – with lasers, chaff or sonar – China shows an undeniable pattern of attempted intimidation. When Australia sails into international waters, we do so to maintain the rules-based order and promote regional stability, yet when China does the same it is often to undermine the rules and destabilise the region.

The intimidation is in fact regional; it’s not just about Australia. Just as the Great White Fleet demonstrated America’s arrival as a Pacific power, China’s naval activities signal Beijing’s intent to reshape the region’s strategic balance. Australia, as it has done before, must adapt. It must spend more on its own defence capabilities, deepen relationships with like-minded democracies and maintain the diplomatic dexterity that has long supported its survival in a world of rising and falling empires.

Most importantly, the government must bring the Australian public along for the voyage. The threat from China should surprise Australians no more than the threat from Putin should surprise Europeans.

Knowledge is power and the Australian public can be empowered, and therefore prepared, not to be shell-shocked by China’s aggression. It should instead be reassured that the Australian government has the situation in hand and that defence investment is a downpayment on our future security. It should be reassured that the spending makes conflict less likely.

Australia is not a major power, but we have the world’s 13th largest economy and are not without influence. We should stop seeing ourselves as a middling middle power. We definitely shouldn’t act as a small power. We should be confident as a regional power. Our voice, actions and choices matter at home and abroad. It’s why Washington wants us as an active partner and Beijing wants us to be a silent one. Australia’s global advocacy for a rules-based system, and its public calling out of Beijing’s wrongdoing have been highly valued in Europe, Asia and North America.

Smaller regional countries rely on us to stand up to Beijing where they feel unable, while Europe increasingly knows the fight against Russia is also a fight against Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partner, China. And an Australia that stands up for itself and our friends will again demonstrate the value of partnerships to our ally the US.

Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet epitomised show of force as a means to deter conflict as well as preparation should deterrence fail. (Its cruise was also an exercise in long-range deployment.) The time for deterrence and preparation is with us once again. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said this month that China was ready for war, ‘be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.’

We need to show, along with our ally the US and other partners, that war is not what we want but is something we are prepared for. If we cannot show that we have a capable stick, and the intention to use it if required, we will be defeated with or without a fight.

As Teddy Roosevelt said: “Peace is a great good; and doubly harmful, therefore, is the attitude of those who advocate it in terms that would make it synonymous with selfish and cowardly shrinking from warring against the existence of evil.”

The past tells us that navigating strategic competition requires a blend of strategic foresight and political agility. The echoes of 1908 should serve as both warning and guidepost for the uncertain waters ahead.

As Trump sacks scientists, let’s hire them. His drain is our brain gain

President Donald Trump, his powerful offsider Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are slashing public spending in an effort to save US taxpayers anywhere between $US500 billion ($793 billion) and $US2 trillion.

Caught up in these enormous cuts are scientists, researchers, medical experts, technologists and PhD scholars who are losing jobs, grants and scholarships at an unprecedented rate as funding streams are cancelled or put on hold.

To date, DOGE has allegedly made only $US105 billion of cuts. This means they have, at minimum, hundreds of billions to go. In the science and technology sector, these early cuts may be just the beginning.

Believe it or not, there is enormous opportunity for Australia in this unusual situation. If the government acts quickly, this is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.

Australia should take a two-pronged approach. We should attract some of our best and brightest back home from places such as Silicon Valley while also offering fast-track visas to top US-based scientists and researchers who are newly out of a job or low on the funding they need to keep their start-up or scientific lab running.

Australia’s ability to keep up with rapid advances in scientific developments and critical technologies will determine the shape and size of our economy for decades to come. Most of our strategic partners – the US, Japan, the UK, the European Union and South Korea – are larger and have globally competitive tech sectors they’ve spent decades building. In recent years, these have included artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum and biotechnology.

As a mid-sized mining and tourism-dependent economy, Australia has long known we need to diversify our economy and increase our low national spend on research and development, which sits well below the OECD average. We also know we need greater self-sufficiency so we don’t continue to become overreliant on any one single market for access to technologies we have deemed “critical” to our future. Building greater sovereign capability in our science and technology sector is a more important goal than ever.

But we are struggling to keep pace with others. We haven’t spent decades investing in building up our tech sector or making big technological bets when we’ve had the opportunity. Things are now moving so quickly that we’re increasingly in danger of being completely left behind.

Coming from behind doesn’t mean we can’t catch up. It does mean, however, that we need to prioritise innovative and out-of-the-box thinking, and we must take more risks.

In early 2025, we find ourselves in an unusual situation where our closest ally has, rather unexpectedly, flooded the global market with science and technology talent. The cuts are ongoing and broad, impacting everything from medical schools advancing cancer prevention to high-performance computing and the use of AI in national security work.

Other countries will respond to this opportunity quickly. As public funding into universities declines and US universities reduce PhD admissions, top Chinese universities are already proactively recruiting overseas students, allowing undergraduates to skip traditional pathways to fill up PhD programs in areas such as mathematics, engineering, computer science and environmental science.

Canada, seen as a global leader for attracting technology talent, is likely to be a key beneficiary of this talent flood. Its variety of visas, low processing times and proactive talent recruitment campaigns is one reason it recently saw 10,000 foreign tech workers in the US apply for permanent residence in Canada in one 48-hour period.

For decades, the US has provided funding and a home for many of our scientists, entrepreneurs and technologists. Now there’s a unique opportunity for us to reverse that brain drain while also increasing our investment in US talent and technologies. In doing so, we’d be contributing to greater burden-sharing in the US-Australia alliance (specifically AUKUS Pillar 2), noting that Australia has long benefited from – even piggybacked – on US scientific advancements and breakthroughs made in everything from health to renewable energies to defence technologies.

In order to identify the types of scientists, researchers and technologists that would be of greatest benefit to Australia and the potential visa options open to them, the Department of Home Affairs should work with our diplomats, defence, CSIRO, intelligence community and others to form a small, agile taskforce.

Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke should work with parliamentary colleagues and his department to quickly explore options to expand and fast-track visas. Visa options must be fast and flexible, or we’ll lose out to other countries vying for their expertise.

US ambassador Kevin Rudd and his team are well-placed to provide a picture of which top scientists have lost funding. They could work with others in government to promote Australia as a top destination for technology talent while also working collaboratively with the US government to explain how these investments would also benefit them.

The government can play a key knowledge broker role by helping to link up scientific labs and start-ups with grant opportunities, universities and venture capital firms open to investing in them. In exceptional cases, wealthy individuals should make an extraordinary contribution to Australia’s national interests by partnering with the government to attract outstanding scientists and their teams. This public-private investment may end up helping Australia through the next pandemic, provide us with a leading edge in AUKUS Pillar 2 technologies, or devise a cure for Alzheimer’s. It could unearth new methods for environmentally sustainable and cost-competitive extraction of critical minerals. All would provide shared benefit to our alliance with the US and close partnerships.

Knowing Musk’s cuts will continue, the winner of the Australian election should assess and expand this talent drive, particularly given the inevitable benefits to our job market and national prosperity.

In 2025, in the concerning global environment we find ourselves in, a “business as usual” approach won’t cut it. Australia must be ready to jump on rare opportunities as they arise, take more risks and make big bets. An enormous opportunity is here now. Soon it will be staring us in the face. It’s time for our parliamentarians to jump.

‘Amusing ourselves to death’ in age of TikTok

Forty years ago, in a seminal masterpiece titled Amusing Ourselves to Death, American author Neil Postman warned that we had entered a brave new world in which people were enslaved by television and other technology-driven entertainment. The threat of subjugation comes not from the oppressive arm of authoritarian regimes and concentration camps but from our own willing submission and surrender.

“Big brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman wrote in 1985.

“There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distract­ed by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Postman’s insight would have been spot-on had he written this today about TikTok. Postman was mostly thinking about mass media with a commercial imperative. People would be enslaved to superficial consumerism. But add a technologically advanced authoritarian power with platforms that – unlike terrestrial TV – are essentially borderless and can reach around the globe, and you have George Orwell’s Big Brother put together with Aldous Huxley’s cultural and spiritual entropy.

Addictive digital entertainment can be corrosive even without a malign puppeteer. But with an entity such as the Chinese Communist Party fiddling the algorithms, it could be catastrophic.

Just in 2025, we have seen much of the Western world so spellbound by TikTok that the thought of living without it brought on the anguish normally reserved for the impact of conflict. “TikTok refugees” became a description, as though they had been displaced like Jews fleeing Europe or Yazidis escaping Islamic State.

Postman noted that we were innately prepared to “resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”

The cries of anguish were depressingly muted as TikTok built up a following in Western countries that now means four in 10 Americans aged under 30 get their “news” from TikTok, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre.

When a ban was flagged, the cries came from those who couldn’t bear to give up the platform and from free speech absolutists who believed any rules amounted to government overreach. If our most popular radio stations had been based in Germany in the late 1930s, the Soviet Union during the Cold War or Syria during the ISIS caliphate, our leaders would have protected the public, regardless of popularity and notwithstanding that it would constitute government intervention in the so-called free market of ideas.

In fact, the market isn’t free because powerful actors can man­ipulate the information landscape.

Billionaire Elon Musk gives free-speech advocates a bad name by posting not just different opinions but promoting false content on issues such as Ukraine on his platform X. But more sinister is a platform such as TikTok, which is headquartered in authoritarian China and ultim­ately at the control of the CCP, with algorithms that have been demonstrated to manipulate audiences by privileging posts that serve Beijing’s strategic interests and downgrading content that does not.

Despite such threats, we have no clear framework to protect ourselves from powerful information platforms, including the newest generative artificial intelligence models such as DeepSeek, which will be increasingly available – and, thanks to their affordability, attractive – despite operating under Chinese government control. As a US court declared in upholding the congressional ban on TikTok, giving a foreign power a vector to shape and influence people’s thinking was a constraint on free speech, not an enabler of it.

Freedoms of speech and expression are core democratic principles but they need active protection. This means the involvement of governments.

US Vice-President JD Vance told the Munich Security Conference that Donald Trump represented a “new sheriff in town” who would defend free speech and “will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree”. It was an admirable derivative of the quote attributed to Evelyn Beatrice Hall describing Voltaire’s principle of “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. But just as we have regulators for financial and other markets, we need regulation of our information markets.

By all means, speech should be as free as possible. Awful mustn’t equal unlawful, to borrow ASIO boss Mike Burgess’s phrase. Speech that hurts the feelings of others or advocates unpopular views cannot be the threshold for censorship. Such lazy and faint-hearted policymaking creates only a more brittle society. But that doesn’t mean we should make ourselves fish in a barrel for malign foreign powers.

Anarchy is not freedom. Governments need to brave the minefield that is modern information technology. If a platform poses risks that cannot be avoided, as with TikTok, it should be banned.

Other platforms that sit within democratic nations’ jurisdictions should be subjected to risk mitigations such as content moderation to deter and punish criminal activity. X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube can be used as avenues for information operations, as shown by Russia buying advertisements on Facebook or CCP-backed trolls posting on X and YouTube, or be used as vectors for organised crime. Even the most ardent free-speech advocates would agree that drug trafficking, child abuse or joining a terrorist group are illegal offline and therefore should be illegal online.

No marketplace remains free and fair when governments overregulate or abdicate responsibility.

The once-free markets of trade and investment have been eroded by China to such an extent that just this week Trump issued a foreign investment policy to protect American “critical technology, critical infrastructure, personal data, and other sensitive areas” from “foreign adversaries such as the PRC”, including by making “foreign investment subject to appropriate security provisions”.

A key principle of the new presidential policy is that “investment at all costs is not always in the national interest”.

In other words, security measures and rules keep American critical infrastructure free.

While it has not yet gained much media attention, it is among the most important economic security policies ever taken to counter Beijing’s objective to “systematically direct and facilitate investment in United States companies and assets to obtain cutting-edge technologies, intellectual property and leverage in strategic industries”, and all of America’s allies and democratic partners should publicly support it and implement it domestically.

We like to think that technologies are neutral mediums that are only vehicles for improvement. As Postman wrote, this belief often rises to the status of an ideology or faith.

“All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress,” he wrote. “And in this sense … history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”

Science and technology have of course delivered extraordinary improvements to our health, our economic productivity, our access to information and our ability to connect with other people regardless of geography – provided we engage with it wisely. We must not become cynical about technology entirely, which is why we must maintain control over it and ensure it serves our interests.

The ultimate solution is knowledge and participation. As Postman concluded, the answer must be found in “how we watch”. With no discussion on how to use technology, there has been no “public understanding of what information is and how it gives direction to a culture”.

Postman wrote that “no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are”. He insisted we were “in a race between education and disaster”.

What Donald Trump Can Learn From Allies on Foreign Aid

There are smarter and more effective ways to streamline and re-strategize U.S. foreign aid.

The Trump administration is not the first Western government to envision a stronger, safer, and more prosperous country by integrating foreign aid with strategic objectives. The experiences of America’s Five Eyes partners, particularly Australia and the United Kingdom, offer encouraging evidence for reform, having achieved tightly targeted development programs supporting diplomatic and strategic priorities. They also offer sobering lessons about implementation pitfalls, including the abrupt disruption of established programs, especially those already aligned with strategic policy, loss of critical skills among government personnel, and heightened unease among international partners. 

The logic driving aid integration is compelling. In an era of great power competition, maintaining separate tracks for diplomacy and development is an unaffordable luxury. China has harnessed development, along with trade and financial investment, as an instrument of strategic influence through both soft and hard means. Both Australia and the UK recognized this reality, merging their aid agencies (AusAID and DFID, respectively) into their foreign ministries to create more strategically coherent development policies. Having made clear its intent to fundamentally reshape USAID, the Trump administration has the opportunity to learn from its allies in the pursuit of the American national interest. 

A Unified Strategy: Australia 

The Australian government integrated the Australian Aid Agency (AusAID) with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2013 with the stated goal of better aligning Australia’s development, foreign policy, trade priorities, strategies, and objectives while bringing an enhanced focus on the Indo-Pacific. The integration accompanied a reduction of Australia’s development funding. After reaching a peak of more than AUD $5 billion in 2013–14, or .33 percent of gross national income (GNI), Australia’s development budget has progressively declined, and in 2023–2024 was AUD$4.8 billion, or .29 percent of GNI. This change is also stark in terms of the slice of the Australian budget spent on foreign aid compared to defense expenditures. 

An independent review of the integration in 2019 found that 90 percent of the Australian government’s strategic targets for the integration had been met, driving development allocations towards infrastructure and the Pacific. The review also found “examples of development goals being more strongly advanced through joined-up, whole-of-department efforts.” 

These initial efforts—such as the Pacific Seasonal Worker Scheme and the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific—have since grown to enable more ambitious and innovative integrated development and strategic initiatives. Key among these are the Falepili Union with Tuvalu (which provides Australia with strategic denial rights and Tuvalu with climate resilience monies and opportunities for migration), the agreement between Australia and Papua New Guinea that encompasses development and security elements, and Telstra’s acquisition of Digicel Pacific, the largest mobile provider in the Pacific, with the Australian government’s support amid rumors of interest from China Mobile. While the review stepped carefully around the issue, it found integration had increased Australia’s ability to counter efforts to overshadow Australia’s influence, like China’s Belt and Road and Digital Silk Road initiatives.

However, the review also found several areas of concern. Early morale problems among staff arising from the abrupt way the integration was implemented had largely dissipated by 2019. However, a “pronounced deterioration in skills and systems” remained. The review found that “almost 1000 years of experience left [government service] shortly after integration.” Additionally, “estimates suggest another 1000 years of experience” left the department in the five years before 2019 due to the department underestimating the capability needed to design and deliver development programming. 

This loss of know-how continues to hamper effectiveness over a decade later. While development is now firmly accepted as a tool of statecraft, best wielded as part of a whole-of-government strategy, an article by the review’s author fifteen months ago suggests DFAT still has room to improve in terms of harnessing its development delivery to its full potential.

Strategic Prioritization: The UK

The merger between the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development occurred in 2021. The principal intention behind the merger was to better align the UK’s development activities with its wider diplomatic, trade, and geopolitical interests, both in strategic terms and in terms of in-country representation. The merger coincided with a decision to reduce the UK’s development funding commitment from the .7 percent of GDP enshrined in law to .5 percent of GDP. Notably, the integration occurred while the UK was experiencing the economic slowdown of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which resulted in a double blow to funding in absolute terms, constituting a 30 percent reduction overall.

Alongside the budget reductions, a strategic prioritization of development initiatives was pursued, in which the UK focused on bilateral funding to a smaller group of countries where measurement of effect is often easier to determine, but at the expense of some wider bilateral and multilateral commitments which were deemed to deliver less tangible value to the UK. 

In addition, the UK identified a select set of issues for its development focus, namely, climate investments, girls’ education, and global health—where the UK had demonstrated expertise and where funding would have constructive spillover effects. For example, improving girls’ education is found to reap positive dividends for local security, prosperity, and governance. These initiatives, concentrated in Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and South Asia, are all areas in which the UK’s adversaries were harnessing development as an instrument of influence, dependence, and coercion. 

The UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) review of the progress of the merger in 2024 found positive evidence “of where a more integrated approach has improved the organisation’s ability to respond to international crises and events, which has led to a better result.” 

Two such examples were the UK’s coherent humanitarian, diplomatic, and military response as the leading European power supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion and the joint humanitarian and political response to the Ebola crisis in Uganda. The findings supported the rationale for the merger and the modernization of the department as fit-for-purpose in sharpening the UK’s geopolitical interests. However, the NAO also noted that “the indirect costs” of the merger, “in terms of disruption, diverted effort and the impact on staff morale should not be underestimated.” 

The NAO also reviewed the effect of the overseas development aid reduction and found that while the prioritization compelled in the government’s activities had some positive dividends, “the speed and scale of the budget reduction, and the lack of long-term planning certainty, increased some risks to value for money.” 

What Can The U.S. Learn?

These cautionary tales suggest some considerations for the Trump administration:

First, pace matters more than might be immediately apparent. While decisive action has its advantages, too rapid a transformation risks institutional damage that could take years to repair. Recipient partners need to be assured about the value of the relationship, as reputation matters when development partners have the luxury of choice. A phased integration that maintains critical expertise while gradually aligning strategic direction would likely prove more effective in the long term.

Second, capability preservation requires active management. Both Australia and the UK learned the hard way that development expertise isn’t quickly or easily replaced. The technical knowledge required for effective commissioning, procuring, financing, and managing of development programs, while not unique to the aid world, is distinct from traditional diplomatic and geostrategic policy skills. Any American reforms must include concrete plans for retaining and developing each of these specialized capabilities and empowering them to work together to deliver coherent whole-of-government priorities.

Third, funding stability enables strategic coherence and builds influence with partners. The UK’s experience shows that simultaneous organizational and budgetary upheaval can undermine even well-conceived reforms. While efficiency gains are desirable, treating integration primarily as a cost-cutting exercise risks strategic self-harm. With strategic competitors snapping at our heels, such interruptions cannot always be remedied.

Fourth, clear metrics for success must encompass traditional development indicators and strategic effects. Australia’s focus on its immediate neighborhood and Indo-Pacific infrastructure and the UK’s emphasis on areas of demonstrated expertise and reputational value offer useful models for linking foreign aid and development assistance to broader national interests.

The stakes for getting this change right are immense. China has outflanked the West in harnessing foreign aid as a strategic tool of statecraft, having learned from the experiences of Western development agencies. America cannot afford to unilaterally disarm in this arena and sacrifice its many areas of retained advantage through poorly executed reforms.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s framework of strength, safety, and prosperity provides useful guideposts. Development programs should demonstrably enhance American security partnerships, expand trade relationships that benefit American workers, or strengthen allies facing authoritarian pressure. Programs that cannot should be reconsidered.

Achieving these goals requires maintaining America’s development capabilities even as they are more tightly aligned with strategic objectives. The experiences of Australia and the UK suggest this balance is achievable but demands careful attention to ensure areas of national strength and influence are strengthened, not squandered.

‘Evil’ silence from Canberra on threat to national security

They say silence breeds contempt but the reticence of the Australian government about national security threats is more akin to the quote attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer when resisting Nazi Germany: that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil”.

The government is not responsible for individual violent incidents across our cities, but it is responsible for informing, reassuring and protecting the public. Yet the current malaise of leadership is feeding anxiety and infecting the social cohesion that has stood Australia apart from much of the world despite decades of global terrorism and conflict.

Australia remained united in the face of terrorist plots from al-Qa’ida, attacks by ISIS, wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the malicious rise of China, and Russia’s war in Europe. But we are cracking; rising anti-Semitism and national fear shows domestic division is even more insidious than international incidents.

The government’s systemic abdication of responsibility, cloaked in silence and evasive justifications, is not a one-off relating to the caravan plot against Australia’s Jewish community but a troubling trend, exemplified by the tactic of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and ministers only commenting if asked by media and, even then, answering with non-statements.

Australians are not naive. We understand the need for operational secrecy in matters of national security and that classified intelligence should not be divulged lightly. But “operational details” cannot be a catch-all excuse to deflect legitimate scrutiny or hide truth.

Uncertainty breeds fear so governments must be on the front foot. Almost within the hour of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, US president Franklin Roosevelt was instructing his press secretary to immediately inform the media. While not comparable events, the principle is key: keep the public informed and confident that its government is in control even in the most challenging times – even more important in the digital age.

Albanese’s refusal to address questions about the explosives-laden caravan, due to “ongoing investigations”, added to confusion, anxiety and speculation. A stonewalled public is not a secure one. Similarly, his reluctance to clarify whether he discussed China’s sonar pulse attack on Australian navy personnel in a meeting with Xi Jinping just days after the incident in November 2023, citing the confidentiality of diplomatic talks, simply resulted in doubt and more questions.

While discretion in diplomacy is essential, selective silence is inconsistent given the broad topics of leaders’ meetings, if not the exact words, are usually published, and suggested he just didn’t want to admit he had inexcusably failed to raise the matter.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s handling of the case of Yang Hengjun, the Australian arbitrarily detained in China, is equally disconcerting – failing to even acknowledge on January 19 Yang’s sixth year of detention, and previously insisting on being “constrained for privacy reasons”, despite Yang’s own desire for public advocacy. Hiding behind the veil of privacy appears less about protecting Yang’s interests and more about protecting the government’s.

This week marks one year since Beijing sentenced Yang to death so a comprehensive condemnation and demand for release is required. Similarly, Wong omitted to mention China in her readout of January’s discussions with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in contrast to Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya’s honesty that China was a central part of his meeting with Rubio.

Meanwhile, when asked about the US and European countries reviewing the security risk of Chinese-made smart cars, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said no such review would happen here as the priority was consumer choice. On that basis, we’d welcome Russian gas or perhaps Iranian nuclear know-how, not to mention that prioritising price now will mean consumers in the future will have few choices but Chinese-made smart cars.

The pattern of evading, ignoring or downplaying security threats is itself a security threat. It erodes public trust – and cynicism can quickly turn to conspiracy. It creates an information vacuum to be filled by conspiracy theories and speculation, leading not just to an uninformed but a misinformed public. And it has the potential to weaken Australia’s strategic position by reducing the confidence of our allies and increasing that of our rivals.

We’ve seen it before. The flood of illegal boats from 2008 and refusal to acknowledge pull factors created not only a backlash against illegal immigration but reduced confidence in legal immigration and emboldened criminal organisations. It was only by being upfront about the illegal immigration problem that confidence was restored in Australia’s strength as a migration nation.

Importantly, division is distinct from difference. Different opinions, including on world leaders or policies, are to be promoted as the basis of freedom of speech. But support for terrorist groups and acts of intimidation and violence are not free speech.

Our longstanding national resilience means the cracks can’t be papered over but can be resealed quickly by a government willing to lead, including with some good old-fashioned naked truth.

Image: © Thennicke 2016, Wikimedia Commons

PM’s timid reply to antisemitic terror is dangerous. Silence is surrender

Australia’s national resilience and social cohesion are under strain, with the most visible cracks seen in the alarming rise of antisemitism. Governments, most particularly the federal government, whose responsibility it is to lead national debates, desperately need to engage more forthrightly with the Australian public.

The discovery in Dural of a caravan containing explosives and, reportedly, an antisemitic message and the addresses of a synagogue and other Jewish buildings, is the latest shock that will heighten anxiety in Australia’s Jewish community and further inflame public tension.

We can give police some benefit of the doubt that they had operational reasons for secrecy about the caravan, but these decisions must be balanced against the need to confront the underlying problems of extremism and hatred, and to reassure Australians that we have national leaders who are facing up to them. If our politicians had been leading the conversations that we need, there would be greater goodwill for understanding operational decisions, rather than the fraying patience that we are seeing.

Instead of confronting extremism, radicalisation and the growing influence of ideological violence, policymakers have retreated into reticence, offering platitudes that fail to give the public confidence or deter those who seek to cause harm. This absence of leadership is a communications failure and a strategic miscalculation that threatens social cohesion and national security.

The federal government’s reluctance to educate and inform the public about terrorism and extremism is fuelling uncertainty and fear. Security agencies such as ASIO and the Australian Federal Police play a vital role in countering threats, but their mandate is to act once the danger has escalated to the level of criminality and national security risk.

The broader responsibility – explaining the ideological drivers of extremism, reinforcing shared values, and setting clear boundaries of acceptable conduct – belongs to the government. Yet, time and again, the government has abdicated this duty, preferring to let ASIO’s annual threat assessment stand as the only authoritative voice on extremism in Australia. That is not enough. National security is not just about neutralising threats but about preventing them from taking root in the first place.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hardly lifted anyone’s morale when speaking defensively about the discovery of the caravan during two radio interviews on Thursday morning. On ABC radio, he failed to mention antisemitism at all. He refused to say when he’d learnt about it, describing that as “operational details”, and refused to say whether the national cabinet had discussed the investigation. Most of his commentary was about what the police had said and done. The closest he gave to an expression of the government’s view was by saying: “We remain concerned about this escalation.”

It wasn’t until a press conference later in the day that Albanese said, unprompted, that there was “zero tolerance in Australia for hatred and for antisemitism” and that he wanted “any perpetrators to be hunted down and locked up”.

One of the core failures underpinning this crisis is a misinterpretation of tolerance. Australia prides itself on being an open and inclusive society, but inclusivity does not mean tolerating the intolerable. Support for terrorist leaders and groups is not free speech, nor is it a legitimate expression of diversity – it is a direct threat to social stability. When governments fail to call this out unequivocally, they enable a dangerous dynamic by which extremists feel emboldened, and the broader population grows resentful and anxious. An anxious public is not a resilient one.

While the rising cost of living is at the forefront of most Australians’ minds, physical and social security must remain the government’s highest priority. People need to feel safe, and that safety is reinforced not just by policing, but by clear, decisive leadership.

The government’s approach – avoiding public discussion for fear of inflaming tensions – belongs to a bygone era. Excessive reticence was a flawed strategy even before social media, but now, in an age in which digital communications dominate every aspect of our lives, it is a liability.

Government hesitancy leaves a vacuum that is filled by those who want society to break. Without direct and frequent public engagement, we give ground to those who distort facts, push dangerous ideologies and promote violence.

ASIO head Mike Burgess was left swinging in the breeze last September after he told the ABC that the organisation assessed entrants to Australia for any national security risk, which might not cover someone who had only expressed “rhetorical support” for Hamas. Amid the political controversy that followed, the government should have swung in quickly and stressed that the wider visa check would, of course, include rhetorical support for Hamas but that this wasn’t ASIO’s job. That failed to happen, leading to days of public anger and confusion.

Equally dangerous is the government’s willingness to indulge in false equivalencies. Responding to attacks on Jewish Australians by condemning “all forms of hate” or vaguely mentioning “antisemitism and Islamophobia” is both politically weak and strategically harmful. Each act of violence or intimidation should be condemned for what it is – without hedging, without lumping disparate issues together, and without fear of offending those who sympathise with extremists.

This failure of clarity extends to the review of Australia’s terrorism laws, where there is discussion about removing the requirement for an ideological motive. Instead of diluting definitions, the government should lead the discussion on what ideology is, why it matters, and how it fuels extremism.

The government’s refusal to deal with reality is at the heart of this crisis. There is no neutral ground when it comes to national security. Attempting to placate all sides by responding too slowly and downplaying threats only emboldens those who seek to justify intimidation and violence.

Everyone accepts that history and geopolitics are complex – not least in the Middle East – but there is no justification for bringing foreign conflicts onto Australian streets. Like it or not, the federal government’s faltering responses have facilitated a false equivalence between Israel and Islamist terrorist groups, emboldening extremists who now see Australia as a battleground for their ideological struggles.

Australians can see the world is unstable and don’t appreciate being dismissed or misled. The government’s failure to engage honestly is backfiring. Public trust erodes when people feel their concerns are ignored, and social cohesion weakens without leadership. To maintain our national resilience, the government must step up, speak clearly and reassert the values that make Australia a safe and united society. Silence is not a strategy – it’s a surrender.

DeepSeek is a modern ‘Sputnik’ moment for West

The release of China’s latest DeepSeek artificial intelligence model is a strategic and geopolitical shock as much as it is a shock to stockmarkets around the world.

This is a field into which US investors have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars, and which many commentators predicted would be led by Silicon Valley for the foreseeable future.

That a little-known Chinese company appears to have leapfrogged into a neck-and-neck position with the US giants, while spending less money and with less computing power, underscores some sobering truths.

First, the West’s clearest strategic rival is a genuine peer competitor in the technologies that will decide who dominates the century and, second, we need to step up our efforts to become less not more reliant on Chinese technology.

More than any other single field, AI will unleash powerful forces from economic productivity through to military capabilities. As Vladimir Putin said in 2017, whoever leads in AI “will become the ruler of the world”.

Marc Andreessen, the influential Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, called the DeepSeek announcement a “Sputnik moment” and “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs” in AI. The US was shocked into action by the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, investing billions into a public-private sector partnership model that helped win back and sustain tech dominance that would play a major role in winning the Cold War.

Andreessen is right but, in many ways, this breakthrough is even more consequential than Sputnik because the world’s consumers are increasingly reliant on China’s technology and economy in ways we never were with the Soviets.

So what does the West need to do now? Above all we need to stop underestimating our major strategic competitor. If hundreds of billions of dollars isn’t enough investment, we either need to redouble our efforts or work more smartly, bringing governments and the private sector together, and working across trusted nations, as we’re doing with AUKUS security technologies – one of which is of course AI.

We also need to dramatically step up so-called derisking of our economies with China’s in these critical technology fields.

When our leaders say they want us to have consumer choice including Chinese-made tech products, they are ignoring the considerable risks of future Chinese dominance, given we have seen the way Beijing is prepared to use its economic power for strategic purposes, whether through 5G or critical minerals.

As it stands, Beijing will have control over the majority of our smart cars, our batteries, the news our public gets through social media and, if models such as the open-source DeepSeek are adopted cheaply by Western companies, the supercharging power that AI will bring to every other sector.

DeepSeek’s breakthrough should actually come as less of a surprise than the stunned market reaction has shown.

In 2015, China told the world its aim was to supplant the US as the global tech superpower in its “Made in China 2025” plan.

At the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) our research in our Critical Technology Tracker has been showing for almost two years that Chinese published research is nipping at American heels.

It surely isn’t a coincidence that at the end of 2024 and the early weeks of 2025, Beijing has shown the world its advances in both military capability in the form of new combat aircraft, and now dual-use technology in AI. Simultaneously we see Beijing’s obsession with keeping Americans and all Westerners hooked on TikTok, which ensures its users see a Beijing-curated version of the world.

Some observers are arguing that the DeepSeek announcement shows the ineffectiveness of US restrictions on exports of advanced technology such as Nvidia’s advanced chips to China.

Far from backing away from such protective measures, the Trump administration should consider stepping them up, along with further investments in data centres – already under way through the Stargate project.

Restricting chips to China is still an important tool in the American toolkit – it’s just not a panacea.

As Donald Trump’s reportedly incoming tech security director, David Feith, argued last year, the US should also target older chips because “failing to do so would signal that US talk of derisking and supply chain resilience still far outpaces policy reality”.

It’s not certain how much direct support DeepSeek and its backers have received from the Chinese government but there are some clues in the way the company is behaving. The DeepSeek model is open-source and costs 30 times less for companies to integrate into than US competitors.

Founder Liang Wenfeng has been blunt that the company is not looking for profits from its AI research, at least in the short term – which would enable it to follow the Chinese playbook of undercutting competitors to create monopolies. And the firm had reportedly been stockpiling the most advanced Nvidia chips before the US restrictions, and has received allocations of chips apparently through the Chinese government.

These facts hint at the lopsided playing field China likes to create. As Edouard Harris, of Gladstone AI, told Time magazine: “There’s a good chance that DeepSeek and many of the other big Chinese companies are being supported by the (Chinese) government, in more than just a monetary way.”

While the West continues to debate the balance between fully open economies and national industrial and technology strategies with greater government involvement, China has already fused its industry with its government-led national strategy and is evidently stronger for it.

China sees the West’s open economies as a vulnerability through which it has an easy access to our markets that is not reciprocated.

DeepSeek is yet another reminder that China’s technology is a force to be reckoned with and one that its government will use strategically to make China more self-sufficient while making the rest of the world more dependent on China.

We must start recognising this era and responding decisively.

James Curran is wrong: ASPI is and will remain independent

James Curran gets a number of things wrong in his column on the Varghese Review and the work of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Above all, ASPI did not “work hand in glove with the Morrison government on how to play China as an issue in Australian domestic politics”. This is a baseless accusation, for which Curran provides zero evidence. One can only assume the intention is to make ASPI a political target in the aftermath of the review’s release. ASPI is a non-partisan institute that shouldn’t be painted as working or aligning with any side of politics.

Curran further alleges that ASPI has “strayed” from its founding charter, regarding itself as an “ideological font” for “calling out and confronting an assertive China”. ASPI is, and will remain, a non-partisan, independent think tank as stipulated in its charter, laid out in 2001.

He then avers that “some of its analysts created an atmosphere in which to question government policy settings on China was deemed unpatriotic”. These allegations are also completely unsubstantiated. Who is he talking about, exactly?

Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China.

The only person at ASPI that Curran mentions by name is the executive director, Justin Bassi. He accuses Bassi of making a “reprehensible” and “juvenile” comparison between the 14 recommendations in former diplomat Peter Varghese’s report and the 14 grievances against the Australian government, aired by the Chinese embassy in 2020.

Bassi simply noted that there was a “grim irony” in the numerical coincidence, as one of the complaints was widely interpreted as a demand to defund ASPI because it has produced research and commentary critical of the Chinese Communist Party. How is this observation in any sense juvenile? Varghese did not recommend closing down ASPI, but he did recommend that direct government funding for ASPI’s office in Washington DC be discontinued, along with other moves designed to tighten government controls over the sector, including a role for ministers in setting research priorities and appointing government observers to ASPI’s board.

The fact that the government has agreed with most of Varghese’s recommendations is worrying in itself, but especially in light of the Chinese government’s long-running campaign to vilify ASPI. Regardless of the government’s or Varghese’s intentions, Beijing might be forgiven for leaping to the conclusion that ASPI has had its wings clipped in the diplomatic and economic cause of stabilisation – a policy that some ASPI analysts (myself included) have legitimately contested.

The fact that the government coincidentally celebrated the full resumption of the live lobster trade with China the same week it released the Varghese review and its official response can only have strengthened such associations, and perhaps even buoyed the belief in Beijing that its economic coercion of Australia was effective, after all. The timing of this statement, at a minimum, showed poor judgment.

ASPI continues to abide by the guidance in its charter that its main purpose is to provide “alternative sources of input to Government decision-making processes on major strategic and defence policy issues”. Also, that it should help to “nourish public debate and understanding”.

ASPI’s research output on China is an important part of what we do, though only one part. As an institution, ASPI is proud of the breadth of its China expertise and language skills, which is unsurpassed among think tanks in Australia. ASPI has also provided an outlet for prominent Australia-based academics to publish policy-relevant research on China. ASPI has contributed significantly to Australia’s stock of China expertise. Just this week, the US designated companies including battery maker CATL as Chinese military companies after years of research from institutions like ASPI about links to the Chinese government and military, and about human rights abuses.

Ministers from around the world seek out ASPI analysts for briefings on our research. Datasets we have built over the past decade as a public good have been used by governments and organisations worldwide.

Blind spot

In his report, Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China. But universities, for their own reasons, have long since abandoned the field in the areas that matter most for Australia’s strategic policy – the external behaviours of China’s Communist Party, through its state security apparatus and the People’s Liberation Army. ASPI will continue to do what it can to nurture the talent required to fill that national blind spot and to publish ground-breaking research in these areas. ASPI’s researchers would collegially welcome a greater investment of resources by other think tanks, universities and the government in this regard.

Curran and others are free to criticise ASPI and other research institutes but should focus on evidence, not innuendo. I, for one, would much prefer to be writing about Australia’s regional security environment, defence capability and military strategy. A glance at the international headlines is sufficient to understand there is an urgent and growing appetite for expert analysis in these areas, to inform the general public, and provide alternative policy inputs for the Australian government.

Make no mistake, command and control will crush ASPI’s independence

For China watchers, there’s a grim irony contained in the 14 principles that former senior official Peter Varghese recommends in his long-awaited review into national security think tanks, released last week.

Fourteen was also the number of grievances the Chinese embassy notoriously unveiled in 2020 and that Beijing expected to be addressed if diplomatic relations were to improve – the 10th of which was defunding the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Beijing hasn’t quite got its way through the recommendations of Varghese, who is now chancellor of the University of Queensland. But the embassy’s champagne stocks may be a little depleted once its officials have measured his list against their own.

Beyond the impact on ASPI itself, there is a deeper danger in the principles, accepted by the Albanese government: the push to exercise more control over think tanks and to dampen the contestability that researchers provide.

ASPI was set up in 2001 precisely to contest the advice that the Howard government was receiving from the Department of Defence. We have since grown into a broader national security think tank that looks at modern threats ranging from cyber and disinformation to authoritarian abuses of power in places such as China’s Xinjiang.

We are recognised globally for our groundbreaking work on China – none of which is convenient to the government’s narrative of diplomatic stability with Beijing. The idea that the security issues ASPI has pursued independently – and often well ahead of national and global trends – may in future be given the thumbs up or down by ministers and bureaucrats is deeply unsettling. Yet the Varghese report recommends this command-and-control approach.

After delivering the 50-page report, Varghese then wrote an op-ed in these pages at the weekend responding to the responses to his report. This is ironic given his report’s criticism of “op-ed overreach”. The problem with Varghese’s insistence that we all just need a Bex and a good lie-down is that a veritable chasm exists between his rhetoric expressing support for think tank independence and the actions he’s actually recommending.

First, think tanks would have to bid against one another for operational funding. That sounds superficially appealing, but if two institutes are competing for a grant and one has been nicer to the sitting government, who is better placed? Not all think tanks will resist self-censorship when they know fearless critiques may jeopardise future funding.

Second, ministers and their departments would set priorities for research, meaning anything that didn’t match the government’s agenda or was sensitive could be discouraged.

If an organisation wanted to look at China’s political and hybrid warfare, or the rapid and opaque modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, this might not go ahead if it didn’t suit the government. The government’s response here went further than Varghese by adding ministers, not just department heads, as gatekeepers.

Third, the government will require government officials to sit on think tank councils, making them at least an observer during think tanks’ internal deliberations and perhaps even a voice to influence meetings. Again, the government’s response went further than Varghese’s recommendations.

This is inconsistent with the many other organisations that receive federal funding.

And while Varghese points out some entities already have government officials on their boards, he leaves unanswered his own question of whether they have had independence compromised. The answer is yes, a government official sitting on a non-government board likely has impact, including to censor criticism.

Fourth, specific federally funded research projects would be “co-designed” by bureaucrats, potentially putting guardrails on the researchers’ instincts.

The government gives grant money to the arts but nobody expects a bureaucrat to stand over the artists telling them how to stage a performance of Hamlet or do an interpretative dance.

Finally, there is the shutting of support for ASPI’s Washington office. Here, Varghese appears simply not to understand the role of think tanks’ overseas offices – saying it’s a problem “having ASPI freelance”. Freelance is a synonym of independence and, to be clear, we are independent and not there to push the views of the government of the day.

We are there to foster debate on issues that are important to Australia and its people, such as Indo-Pacific security and global rules. This has long-term value.

ASPI is known and respected across the political aisle in Washington for its nonpartisan and hard-hitting work, with many in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, including incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio, citing our research numerous times.

So it makes zero sense that the Australian government would narrow rather than expand Australia’s options for engaging with Washington when the US is moving into a new Trump administration that will bring challenges for the Australian bureaucracy.

Varghese himself acknowledges that the kind of contestability ASPI was established to provide is essential and refers to our research as “groundbreaking”. Regrettably he also refers to our China research – on human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Beijing’s interference in Australia and other countries – as controversial. Let’s face it, it was controversial only in the sense that Beijing didn’t like it.

Some of this review’s recommendations are reasonable and welcome, but the problems at its heart represent an abandonment of principles that successive governments for more than 20 years have recognised and respected.

Still, ASPI believes in our mission to pour sunlight on security threats to Australia and to help improve understanding – whether among policymakers or the public – of the steps needed to keep ourselves safe. We will continue to build on our proud legacy – because this work has never been more vital.