Speaking to an embassy-hosted summit of heavy hitters from Australia's cashed-up superannuation sector, along with Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Ambassador Kevin Rudd, Secretary Bessent said plenty of nice things about Australia. He was suitably impressed by the investment power of Australia's enormous pool of retirement savings.
But Bessent also made three things clear. Donald Trump is determined to impose tariffs, there's no guarantee of an exemption for Australia, and linked to the trade threat is a requirement for allies to lift their defence spending.
"US security assurances and market access need to meet with stronger commitments from our allies to spend more on their collective security and to structure their economies in ways that reduce imbalances over time," Bessent said. Bluntly put, this is a warning to spend more on defence or risk losing the US security blanket and access to the US market.
- ABC News, 27th Feb 2025
The fact that the United States Secretary of Defence is speaking to anyone at all from the financial sector in Australia at all, is alarming. The fact that the United States Secretary of Defence is speaking to people from Australia's superannuation industry, is cause for a five-bell fire alarm. We have to assume that our so-called 'ally' is deeply untrustworthy and that the reason why he wants to speak to anyone in the superannuation industry at all, is because he wants to confiscate the money.,
The fact that the United States Secretary of Defence has made any threat at all, to any of its allies to lift their defence spending, is the sort of thing that the mafia does. If someone can actually tell me the difference between this and a protection racket being run by gangsters, then I'd like to know what it is.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers was sent to the United States, to make negotiations with presumably the United States' Department of Trade, on the subject of tariffs. The response from the Department of Trade was one of abject incompetence from an administration which may as well be functionally fascist at this point, but being sent to the United States' Department of Treasury and being told that if that if Australia wants to trade with the US, we have to spend a lot more on Defence, sounds like the sort of treatment that you'd give an enemy.
I mean, I thought that paying $368 billion for submarines which will never exist and that we will never ever see, in the downright disgraceful AUKUS fealty treaty would be enough but no. Just like the fat kid who beats up kids for their lunch money, the United States has made it obvious that their loyalty and protection to Australia is actually non-existent.
I actually understand why that feckless and gormless idiot, Scotty From Marketing, signed over our sovereignty to America. As someone who knew that his time would be coming to an end and who would be given a cushy job for life as a consultant for News Corp or the IPA (like Mr Abbott was), then he knew that he would never face the consequences of his actions. It was very easy for that two-bit Pierrot to sell-out because it's really easy to sell the stuff that you don't actually own.
My hope is that Treasurer Chalmers and Ambassador Rudd make it clear that as a sovereign nation, what we spend on our defence must be a decision for our parliament which has been democratically elected, not an undemocratically appointed dogsbody from an entire ocean away. If Treasurer Chalmers and Ambassador Rudd didn't tell Secretary Bessent to "get stuffed", then they both need to resign immediately in favour of someone actually committed to the defence of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Because as the current US administration is in no uncertain terms trying to prove, is that the United States is both untrustworthy and unreliable as any kind of ally. Given that the United States wants to kick Canada out of the Five Eyes intelligence group for literally no other reason than having the audacity to refuse to fall at the feet of Donald Trump and kiss them, we must also assume that AUKUS is also functionally worthless.
As demonstrated by the fact that the only time that Australia called for help from the United States in the East Timorese scuffle in 2006 which involved civil unrest and an attempted coup, the United States which had an aircraft carrier situated in the Timor Sea did squat-all, while the International Stabilisation Force was made up of troops from Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Portugal. We must assume that given the current administration's abject belligerence to its neighbours and its open imperial ambitions to conquer Greenland, Panama, Canada and Gaza, that if anything happened in Australia, that we would be dropped as quickly as a plate of cold vomit.
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