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Hopes and fears about the South Pacific drive Australia’s policy ‘step-up’—along with the great needs of Papua New Guinea and the islands.

The hopes and needs get talked up while the fears quietly shape policy.

See that mix in the defence strategic update announcement that the Jindalee operational radar network (JORN), an over-the-horizon radar, will be extended ‘to provide wide area surveillance of Australia’s eastern approaches’.

‘Eastern approaches’ is a polite way of saying ‘Melanesia’.

Australia wants a constant view of every ship and plane operating in our South Pacific arc. What JORN does today for Australia’s northern and western approaches is to be extended to the east.

The Jindalee network is a wonder of Oz science and engineering, based on research started in the 1950s that became a core project in 1970. If it were suddenly invented tomorrow we’d be agog at the achievement: the perfect all-seeing answer for a nation with its own continent ‘girt by sea’.

Bouncing signals off the earth’s ionosphere, JORN does wide-area surveillance. A high-frequency radio signal is beamed skywards from a transmitter and refracted down from the ionosphere to illuminate a target. The echo from the target travels back to a separate receiver site and data is ‘processed into real-time tracking information’.

In Jindalee’s development phase, milestone moments were when the first ship was detected in January 1983, and an aircraft was automatically tracked in February 1984.

The air force says Jindalee’s range is from 1,000 to 3,000 kilometres, depending on atmospheric conditions.

With favourable conditions in the ionosphere (when the signal keeps bouncing) Jindalee can see a helluva long way. Several decades back, what’s known in my trade as a senior government source told me that Jindalee could sometimes track the Russian Backfire bombers taking off from the airbase at Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay. Take that as a boast neither confirmed nor denied, merely underlining that Jindalee is amazing kit.

As Defence Science and Technology puts it: ‘The JORN network is Australia’s first comprehensive land and air early warning system. It not only provides a 24-hour military surveillance of the northern and western approaches to Australia, but also serves a civilian purpose in assisting in detecting illegal entry, smuggling and unlicensed fishing.’

The air force says JORN can detect air targets the size of a Hawk-127 training fighter or larger, and objects on the surface of the water the same size as an Armidale-class patrol boat (56.8 metres long) or larger. Detecting wooden fishing boats is harder, or, in the RAAF’s words, ‘highly unlikely’.

The strategic update announced that the JORN site at Longreach in central Queensland will be expanded to look east as well as north. At the moment, the Longreach transmission station can cover most of Papua New Guinea and further north to the Bismarck Sea.

A new eastern array will be able to sweep around from PNG to cover Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, probably reaching out as far as Fiji.

The timeline for the build is vague. The update allocates $700 million to $1 billion to ‘Operational Radar Network Expansion’, in the period to 2030. Much of that will be for Jindalee to look towards Melanesia.

Australia wants to turn a constant eye on a South Pacific that is, in a phrase du jour, more crowded and contested. See an islands element in the strategic update’s discussion of an era of state fragility, marked by coercion, competition, grey-zone activities and increased potential for conflict.

A driver for the Jindalee decision is found in an understated sentence in the Pacific chapter of Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir: ‘In recent years, China has been reported as taking an interest in establishing a naval base in variously PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands.’

Those ‘reports’ express what Canberra thinks is a grave new fact: our strategic interests in the South Pacific are directly challenged by China. That galvanising fact casts a deeply different light on Australia’s desire to be the preferred security partner of the islands. It’s a thought about China at the heart of the third paragraph of chapter 1 of the strategic update:

Since 2016, major powers have become more assertive in advancing their strategic preferences and seeking to exert influence, including China’s active pursuit of greater influence in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is concerned by the potential for actions, such as the establishment of military bases, which could undermine stability in the Indo-Pacific and our immediate region.

Link the concerned thoughts in that sentence about ‘establishment of military bases’ and ‘our immediate region’ to express this judgement: Australia thinks China wants a base in Melanesia.

If that fear becomes a reality, Australia will have a constant eye for every ship and plane.

The Hong Kong national security law establishes two new agencies: an all-powerful and unaccountable secret police force targeting Hong Kong and a secret intelligence agency that’s explicitly beyond the law and which Hong Kong officials must unquestioningly obey.

The law makes any criticism of the government of Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party a criminal offence, and only the National People’s Congress (not any Hong Kong court) is empowered to interpret the law’s meaning. It is a completely unaccountable tool for arbitrary arrests at the whims of the CCP. Whether it is used that way will be a matter for the CCP, not for Hong Kong’s government or courts.

Unaccountable, unquestionable, all-powerful secret intelligence and police officers with their own prosecutors and courts and a mandate to investigate and make arrests for political crimes gives these agencies all the powers of the worst of the world’s secret police forces.

First, the national security law establishes the Committee for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong. The committee is constituted as a secret, unquestionable authority with its own police force, its own prosecutors and its own judges, all under the control of the central government in mainland China.

The committee is established explicitly under the direct supervision of the central government, and because it includes senior cabinet members and government officials, it tightens Beijing’s already considerable control over those individuals. The supervised members of the committee include Hong Kong’s chief executive and the cabinet secretaries for administration, finance, justice and security, along with senior bureaucrats including the director of the chief executive’s office, the police commissioner, the customs commissioner and immigration director. They are to be ‘advised’ on their duties by a Beijing-appointed national security adviser, a role that appears to now be the most powerful position in Hong Kong.

The committee is to have a permanent secretariat headed by a central government appointee. It is forbidden for anyone to interfere with or disclose any information about what the committee does. Its decisions are not subject to any review.

The committee will have its own private police force housed within the Hong Kong Police Force but run by a central government appointee and staffed in part by personnel from the mainland. The national security police are required to carry out tasks assigned to them by the committee, acting on instructions from its national security adviser. Cases will be prosecuted by a dedicated division housed inside the justice department but run by a central government appointee. The committee will hand-pick judges to hear its cases.

At the discretion of the justice secretary, trials can be held in secret, with only the final judgement required to be held in open court. Hand-picked judges are allowed to act in place of a jury. Any appeal against the justice secretary’s decision to hold a trial in secret or without a jury will be determined at the sole discretion of Hong Kong’s chief executive.

The committee has normal police powers as well as powers to prevent anyone from leaving Hong Kong, to require the removal of any online information, to monitor and interrogate people (explicitly including foreign political or government officials), and to intercept communications.

The national security law also establishes a secret intelligence agency, the Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong, to be staffed entirely by mainland officers who must be obeyed by the Hong Kong government but who are not themselves subject to Hong Kong law (or any law anywhere, as law professor Don Clark points out). The office extends the jurisdiction of mainland national security laws, courts and criminal procedures to everyone, everywhere.

The office’s first task is to embed itself in the Hong Kong liaison office and foreign affairs bureau, the People’s Liberation Army’s Hong Kong garrison, and all other national security institutions in Hong Kong. It is expected to ensure that foreign non-government organisations and media are compliant.

The national security office is a central government agency and is expected to claim jurisdiction over matters that involve international sensitivities. When the office claims jurisdiction over a matter, all investigations, prosecutions and judicial processes will occur within mainland institutions according to mainland criminal procedures.

The office and its staff are explicitly beyond the jurisdiction of Hong Kong. An agency ID places a person beyond the law entirely while also compelling the obedience of any Hong Kong public official.

The national security law criminalises four types of acts: separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion. In each case, encouraging or supporting a perpetrator (whether in kind or financially, directly or indirectly) is explicitly criminal.

Separatism offences include planning non-violent efforts to separate Hong Kong from the PRC. Providing any assistance to such an act is also an offence, with sentences of up to five years for minor matters, even if assistance is given without knowledge that it would be used for a separatist act.

Subversion offences include encouraging, planning, supporting or conducting any act that forcefully interferes with the Hong Kong government or central government or any facilities they use. Organising a protest outside the Legislative Council and blocking a train station, bus route or road are in this category.

Terrorist offences are limited to coercive acts that cause or are intended to cause grave social harm, though ‘grave social harm’ is to be interpreted by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress (as are all other articles in the law). Besides the usual descriptions of terrorism, sabotaging transport facilities is explicitly listed, presumably to include the damage done to train stations and roads by protestors. International media covering protests or interviewing protest advocates could be considered to have provided support to or incited terrorism.

Collusion offences include asking for or receiving any kind of help or instruction from a foreigner to disrupt any government policy. This could include any member of the Hong Kong or Taiwan diaspora communicating in support of protests. It includes provoking hatred towards the central government or Hong Kong government, which may include all the activities of opposition political parties or unsympathetic media organisations. It could potentially include any criticism of the Hong Kong government, the central government or the CCP anywhere in the world, or the sharing of an article that includes criticism of the Hong Kong government, central government or CCP.

The offences outlined under the national security law include serious crimes, but they also include political ones. Only the CCP is empowered to determine what constitutes a crime and such decisions are made in secret. There is no process of appeal and no mechanisms for accountability or transparency except to the CCP itself, and all decisions are final. The enforcers of these laws are themselves explicitly above the law and must be obeyed.

Just how dangerous the national security office and the national security police ultimately become to the people of Hong Kong depends on how they use their new powers. What they do have, though, is all the unrestrained authority and immunities of history’s most sinister secret police—if they choose to use them.

The 2020 defence strategic update is analysis framed by numbers (and dollars), a melding of meanings and means and mental maps.

To follow the strategic accounting, see what the update counts. Find the strategy in the numbers.

As usual in Oz defence thinking, the United States is the country that Australia mentions the most—it’s referred to in the update 17 times, plus twice in the formulation ‘US-led coalition’.

Of the seven defence white papers Australia released between 1976 and 2016, the US was top of the pops in six. The only time it wasn’t the most discussed nation was in the 1976 document (just after the Vietnam defeat), when Australia talked more about Indonesia and the Soviet Union.

In the update (as in the 2009, 2013 and 2016 white papers), China supplants Indonesia to take second spot in the most-mentions hierarchy.

China gets nine update mentions, but in five of those it’s in the joined phrase ‘the United States and China’. And two of the China sightings are when the document refers to the South China Sea, talking about ‘militarisation’ and ‘coercive para-military activities’.

The update refers to Japan five times. Indonesia is mentioned once, but with   four references to ASEAN that counts as five Indonesia sightings. India is mentioned three times; add four references to the ‘north-eastern Indian Ocean’ for seven India sightings.

If the 2016 white paper marked ‘the return of geography to defence planning’, as Paul Dibb remarked back then, the 2020 update is geography triumphant.

Consistent with Oz usage since the 2013 white paper, Australia’s region is the Indo-Pacific (25 mentions) but—back to the future—the area of primary strategic interests is Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. Dibb calls this ‘decisive refocus’ both a ‘radical shift’ and a return home to defence of Australia. Another wise owl, Geoffrey Barker, sees a new defence paradigm.

Turn to themes and memes. Through the seven defence white papers Australia’s defence thinkers have always worried about self-reliance and order. The r’s reign: rules and self-reliance and region.

In the 2016 white paper, ‘rules’ appeared 64 times—48 of those in the formulation ‘rules-based global order’. The rules repetition was a fearful chant about what’s fraying.

Come the 2020 update, the rules-based order gets three mentions, along with a further two references to rules and norms. The context is fretful discussion about how rules are strained, undermined by disruptions; stability is challenged; and pressures on governance in the global commons are causing friction.

Rules are trumped by threats in the update, with a total of 12 mentions of coercion or coercive activities, to achieve strategic or economic goals without provoking conflict.

As coercion is code for China, you could redo the count to argue that there are more update sightings of China than of the US. That’d be a notable shift in the way Australia orders its strategic thinking. Not so long ago, the rules-based order was also code for US leadership; unfortunately that bit of code has turned to gibberish under President Donald Trump.

China fires up lots of ‘c’ words in the US and Oz vocabulary. The US’s new ‘strategic approach’ to China is to compete, compel and challenge.The update’s discussion of the strategic environment uses ‘competition’ or ‘competitive’ a dozen times, with formulations such as ‘greater strategic competition’ and ‘major power competition’ between the US and China.

Facing coercion in ‘a more competitive and contested region’, Australia’s new defence meme is shape-shifting.

The heading ‘Shape Australia’s strategic environment’ is up first in the defence policy chapter and that thought becomes a chant, with 12 references to Australia’s intent to shape our strategic environment.

Doing the count (finding the topography in the typography) sifts for shifts in language and changes that are such big breaks they mark inflection points.

Along with shaping, the other new bit of vocab put in lights is another way of talking about coercion—‘grey zone’ activities (11 mentions):

‘Grey zone’ is one of a range of terms used to describe activities designed to coerce countries in ways that seek to avoid military conflict. Examples include using para-military forces, militarisation of disputed features, exploiting influence, interference operations and the coercive use of trade and economic levers. These tactics are not new. But they are now being used in our immediate region against shared interests in security and stability. They are facilitated by technological developments including cyber warfare.

The definition of grey zone is one of two text boxes, a design feature that puts something up in lights.

The second box marks a big break, ditching 50 years of Australian strategic theology: Australia no longer believes it has 10 years’ warning time of a conventional conflict, based on the time it’d take an adversary to prepare and mobilise for war.

Previous Defence planning has assumed a ten-year strategic warning time for a major conventional attack against Australia. This is no longer an appropriate basis for defence planning. Coercion, competition and grey-zone activities directly or indirectly targeting Australian interests are occurring now. Growing regional military capabilities, and the speed at which they can be deployed, mean Australia can no longer rely on a timely warning ahead of conflict occurring. Reduced warning times mean defence plans can no longer assume Australia will have time to gradually adjust military capability and preparedness in response to emerging challenges.

Lucky is the country that has 10 years’ warning of war. Unhappy is the country that no longer has that comfort.

Order suffers. Coercion rises. Geography is back. War in the Indo-Pacific, ‘while still unlikely, is less remote than in the past’. The update is a sombre accounting.

China’s Communist Party leaders have long understood the potency of symbols and the power to write history.

It’s why Hong Kong protesters defacing the Chinese emblem with black paint and throwing a Chinese flag into the harbour were such an affront. It’s why many pro-China stalwarts here were so incensed by Hong Kong demonstrators brandishing the British colonial flag. And it’s why a seemingly innocuous question on a high school exam—asking whether Japan had done ‘more good than harm’ to China during the early half of the 20th century—ignited such official outrage that the question had to be pulled from the exam.

I often thought about the Chinese government’s near obsession with their symbols and controlling their historical narrative when considering how the United States has taken somewhat the opposite approach.

Americans largely hate seeing their flag burned at a protest, but the Supreme Court has ruled that flag-burning is a form of free speech protected by the constitution. Athletes choosing to kneel during the national anthem to highlight racial injustice is considered offensive to many, including President Donald Trump, but most Americans agree that such a protest should be allowed.

But the symbols and history of the old Confederacy—the 13 states that rebelled against the government during the Civil War—present a different, more difficult challenge. America only now is coming to a long-overdue reckoning.

Statues and monuments to Confederate generals and politicians are ubiquitous across the south. Military bases are named after Confederate generals. Highways and streets bear the names of the old stalwarts of Dixie. And at some political rallies and protests, Confederate flags seem to outnumber the stars and stripes.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman in May, and the ensuing nationwide demonstrations against racial inequality, some of these Confederate statues are coming down. They’ve been toppled by activists or relocated to museums. The state of Mississippi finally removed the Confederate battle emblem from its flag. NASCAR, America’s stockcar racing organisation with deep roots in the south, has banned Confederate flags at all its events.

It’s long past time.

As a beginning reporter fresh out of college, I moved to Washington DC and made my first ever trip by car across the Potomac River to Virginia for a story. Passing Arlington National Cemetery, I found myself driving on something called the Jefferson Davis Highway. I knew enough Civil War history to be horrified. Davis was the president of the Confederacy. Sometime later I ended up on Lee Highway, named after the Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee.

Naming highways after the defeated losers of a civil war would be the equivalent of going to Nanjing, China, and finding a major thoroughfare named ‘Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek Boulevard’.

The difference is that China erases the vanquished. In the US, at least in the south, monuments were erected in their honour. The reasons for this are many, starting with the south being allowed to write its own version of history.

Southerners like to refer to the Civil War as ‘the war between the states’, and the proximate cause is called a dispute over states’ rights. The war, from 1861 to 1865, is exalted as ‘a noble cause’.

All that, of course, is a revisionist view. The war was the result of a southern insurrection by traitors against the legitimate government over one single issue—the southern states’ desire to keep black people enslaved as human chattel. The various euphemisms employed today are all about whitewashing that horrific history.

Why? Because after the defeat of the southern insurrection and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, many northerners wanted to unify the country again and accept the traitor states back into the fold. There was a brief period called ‘Reconstruction’, during which freed black slaves were supposed to be granted their civil rights and the north would supervise the former Confederate states. But northern politicians eventually lost interest, and the post-slavery south was able to impose a new system of racial segregation known as ‘Jim Crow’, which persisted until the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s.

Many statues honouring Confederate leaders were in fact erected not after the Civil War, but much later, in the 1950s and ’60s, as a show of defiance against integration and black civil rights. The statues, like the flags, were meant to perpetuate the culture of white domination.

In the US, there was never any attempt to ban Confederate iconography or hero-worship of southern generals in the way that, for example, Germany after World War II banned Nazi propaganda and emblems, including the swastika.

Today, the Confederate flag is displayed to show defiance of the government and rebellion against disliked policies. Confederate flags are a fixture at Trump rallies. I was surprised to see armed protestors demonstrating against coronavirus lockdowns in Lansing, the capital city of my home state of Michigan, waving Confederate flags—in the industrial midwest, far from the old Mason–Dixon line that separated north and south.

As much as I find the flag loathsome, and as curious as I am about why supposedly ‘patriotic’ Americans would wave the banner of insurrectionists, I respect their right to wave it. For me, it’s a matter of free speech. Whether someone is carrying a Confederate flag or burning an American one, it’s like kneeling during the national anthem; I may find it distasteful, but I will always support their right to do it.

Where to draw the line between permissible and proscribed, when it comes to historical iconography? It’s a difficult one that many countries are now grappling with. One test for me is whether the expression is individual or public. An individual carrying an offensive flag is exercising their right to free speech. But a statue or monument on public land, or a highway named after a controversial figure, is being supported by taxpayer dollars. If a large portion of the population finds a statue or a highway name offensive, then it seems time for a change.

China’s draconian new law in Hong Kong prohibits many forms of expression once tolerated as free speech. These include banning displays of banners or pamphlets promoting independence, and making use of the phrase ‘Liberate Hong Kong; revolution of our times’ a criminal offence. Since the law became effective on 1 July, Hongkongers have been scrubbing their social media accounts of potential offensive posts, and restaurants and shops have been removing stickers and post-it notes with pro-democracy slogans.

China is also now trying to impose ‘patriotic education’ in Hong Kong schools, in an effort, in Beijing’s view, to eradicate the vestiges of a ‘colonial mentality’ and force young Hongkongers to love the motherland and exalt Communist Party rule. China’s form of instilling patriotism includes erasing atrocities like the Cultural Revolution and the massacre of pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square.

Banning Confederate flags and monuments, and removing the names of known racists from military bases and the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, is often loudly derided, including by Trump, as part of a ‘cancel culture’ that wants to erase elements of American history. But this change is coming after decades of public debate, a bottom-up grassroots movement for inclusion and equality, and a new national reckoning with injustices of the past.

In China and Hong Kong, the banning of flags and slogans, and the moves to erase history, are being imposed from the top down, by a single party state that wants to solidify its control. It’s how the Chinese Communist Party has managed to stay in power for more than 70 years—by knowing the potency of symbolism, and exercising its power to write its own version of history.

In this episode, ASPI’s Genevieve Feely speaks to gender equality and social inclusion expert Amy Haddad about multilateralism to mark the 75th anniversary of the UN. They discuss the challenges the organisation faces, opportunities for reform, and changes in gender representation at the UN.

Next, Jake Wallis and Samantha Hoffman from ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre discuss their report, Retweeting through the Great Firewall, and how they went about analysing 170,000 Twitter accounts to uncover an influence operation targeting Chinese-speaking communities outside of mainland China.

And finally, ASPI’s Graeme Dobell and historian Peter Edwards discuss the evolution of Australia’s intelligence agencies and why, following the establishment of the home affairs portfolio, there should be an inquiry into the intelligence agencies similar to those conducted by Justice Robert Hope in the 1970s and 1980s.