This is part IV of a series on Australia–New Zealand relations (part I here, part II here, part III here).

The Australian Army can find positive things to say about its Kiwi counterpart, usually in a sardonic tone. My favourite in this version of an Oz Army compliment: ‘The Maori Army? Better than Gurkhas! They bring their own officers and you don’t have to pay them’.

In the South Pacific, we can add to those assets the fact that the Maori Army can sing while the Australian Army has a hard time just chanting. The Kiwi cultural feel for the region can matter. In East Timor, the Australian Army on foot was known for its sunglasses. The Kiwis stomped on the habit because of their awareness of the need for eye contact when out amongst the people.

The NZ Army is admired for doing what it does on a shoestring. The other side of the same budgetary coin is that it’s derided for bludging off others when it does turn up at a job—looking to fellow forces to overcome Kiwi deficiencies in transport and kit.

The Australian and New Zealand militaries have had a lot to do with each other in what have been long-term jobs in Bougainville, Timor and the Solomons. The old bonds have been burnished by new experiences. Read more

Australia has a range of interests in Antarctica. Preserving our sovereignty over our Antarctic territory remains a fundamental interest. Since 1936, Australia has claimed 42% of Antarctica. Our claim, including extensive offshore areas, gives us significant influence in Antarctic governance. We wish to maintain the continent free from strategic confrontation. This means we don’t need to worry about the security dimension of the cold continent. A peaceful Antarctica saves our defence dollars.

We also have a strong interest in a healthy Antarctic and Southern Ocean ecosystem at our maritime back door. That includes taking advantage of the special opportunities Antarctica offers for science. Antarctica is providing important data on climate change. Science is the cornerstone of our Antarctic presence. It’s the currency of influence in the governance of the continent. We want to be able to shape the political environment in a region proximate to Australia. And we want to derive economic benefits from Antarctica.

In the new National Security Strategy (PDF) there’s little attention devoted to Antarctica. There’s a brief mention in the section on ‘Australia’s place in the world’, that notes ‘[o]ur extensive ocean and seabed interests extend well away from the shoreline and include important interests in Antarctica’ yet it doesn’t capture well enough the strategic interests the continent holds for us. Read more

The new National Security Strategy (NSS) is meant to set the context for the next Defence White Paper, scheduled for release later this year. But it falls short on one key point. While NSS provides a good coverage of Australia broad security interests, it could’ve better elaborated Australia’s strategic worldview. The 2000 and 2009 Defence White Papers included a chapter called ‘Australia’s Strategic Interests’, however the image of strategic interests sketched out in these was limited, reactive, and heavily defence-oriented. When the Defence Minister spoke at both ASPI and Lowy functions in August last year, he outlined Australia’s strategic interests in the same way—and no one raised so much as an eyebrow.

However, there’s a problem in seeing Australia’s strategic interests merely as ‘those national security interests… in relation to which Australia might contemplate the use of force,’ as the 2009 White Paper put it. For one thing, this approach puts the cart before the horse—making us think first about where we might be willing (and able) to use force and then defining our strategic interests accordingly.

The potential use of force is of course where the Defence Department focuses its attention and, as a result, it tends to frame the debate in those terms. In the 2009 Defence White Paper, our Defence Department lists our ‘most basic strategic interest’ as defending the continent of Australia from armed attack. ‘Most basic’ is apparently meant to mean ‘most important’ strategic interest, given another phrase where a secure neighbourhood is described as ‘our next most important strategic interest’. The security, stability and cohesion of our immediate neighbourhood, including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, New Zealand and the South Pacific island states falls under this section. Read more

Nic Stuart’s enquiry regarding the need for submarines, asks the reader to think back to the very beginning, the 2009 Defence White Paper. Yet, 2009 is hardly an appropriate start point if we are to adequately grasp the need for submarines, or understand broader Australian maritime strategy.

The real beginning was 1901. In the years following Federation, the fledgling Australian Government sought to understand its needs for the defence of the realm. On 7 April 1902 Major General Hutton, Commandant of the Military Forces of the Commonwealth, noted:

The defence of Australia cannot… be considered apart from the defence of Australian interests. Australia depends for its commercial success and its future development firstly upon its seaborne trade and secondly upon the existence, maintenance, and extension of fixed and certain markets for its produce outside Australian waters. It therefore follows that Australian interests cannot be assured by the defence alone of Australian soil.

The Commonwealth first seriously considered acquiring submarines in 1907. Alongside the mix of destroyers and cruisers that made up the first fleet unit, Australia eventually elected to purchase three submarines, and in 1914 the first two, AE1 and AE2, arrived at Sydney. So began Australia’s nearly 100-year association with submarines, running through the J, O and Oberon classes, until Collins in the 1990s and the current debate. Read more

Later this month Perth will host the fifth meeting of AUKMIN, the annual gathering of Foreign and Defence ministers from Australia and the United Kingdom. It will be a curious gathering, overshadowed by a doubt that both sides won’t raise but which still dogs this oldest of Australia’s bilateral relations: neither country takes the other seriously as a potentially closer defence partner. Australia doubts that the UK’s new-found interest in Asia really goes beyond trade and investment to include deep engagement on security. The UK wonders how much interest Australia has left for Europe after the Asian Century White Paper tied us so firmly to the region’s economic success story.

The litmus test for substance in a bilateral defence relationship is what the two defence forces actually do together. Reading the last AUKMIN communiqué from January 2012, I’m forced to the reluctant conclusion that the answer is ‘not very much’. The communiqué shows that ministers ‘discussed’ all manner of strategic issues, from the Arab Spring to Fiji—going so far as to commit themselves to ‘sharing strategic insights and aligning… thinking’. The reader searches in vain for just one practical measure of planned and funded defence engagement. Both the 2012 and 2011 communiqués deploy the phrase that the two countries are ‘committed to working together in concrete and practical ways’ on security cooperation—effectively demonstrating the iron rule of communiqué writing: the less substance there is in the relationship, the more spruiking is needed.

The fact is that defence cooperation between the UK and Australia is limited and at risk of shrinking further. Because of cost saving measures, secondments between the forces are reducing, as is training and exercising. Intelligence exchanges and strategic dialogues are low cost and show that each country has a lot to gain from deeper engagement but they can’t wholly replace the practical value that comes from close service to service engagement. Of course there is a deep cultural affinity between the two Defence organisations, but wallowing in heritage and history is no substitute for an active and modern strategic relationship. Read more