The Albanese Government in a completely expected move, has decided to drop $368bn of coin on American and British built nuclear submarines (with some assembled in Australia) as part of the AUKUS defence arrangement, in a wave of fanfare and pomp at San Diego. After having committed monies to paying for zero nuclear submarines under the previous Morrison Government, the Albanese Government has decided that paying a slightly more absurd amount of money for some nuclear submarines is a better deal.
The reason given for this is that the government says that it wants the capability to defend Australia's trade routes. The rhetoric being spewed forth from the rightwing trashmedia is that Australia should fear China who will absolutely invade us tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then next week. Australia is prepared to take on this threat of invasion by having these submarines battle ready by 2030. The reason given for wanting these submarine immediately becomes a nonsense when you consider that Australia's biggest trading partner is China. This means that Australia wants to defend its trade routes against China, while at the same time its biggest trading partner is China.
The rule of the schoolyard says that you should try and make friends with the biggest bully, if for no other reason than they will not bully you. Australia who is a very small kid in the world schoolyard, is insistent of giving its lunch money to its old friends America and Britain, in the hope that they will protect it against China; whom they say is the biggest bully. This is despite the fact that China has never even so much as raised a hand to us, and both America and Britain are very very far away. This is also despite the fact that America and Britain were both the originators of a war based on actual lies; which demonstrates that if there are any bullies, it is them. Meanwhile, the only time that Australia ever called for America's help, which was during the East Timorese crisis of 2006, America gave us exactly zero help; which demonstrates that they can and will drop us like plate of cold sick at the first opportunity.
If you had been watching Sky News Australia on the 14th of March when the announcement was being made that we were buying submarines, you would have seen the news during the middle of the day extolling the need to buy nuclear submarines and saying that this was an Australian triumph but in the evening, Peta Credlin then went on to say that nuclear submarines were a hideous waste of money. "Spud" Dutton appeared several times throughout the day, saying that he pay for these submarines via tax cuts (in defiance to the laws of simple arithmetic) and cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. What a top idea. If we're going to start a war with China, we may as well start by attacking vulnerable and needy Australians. People with specific medical needs are very obviously commie Chinese pinkos.
As expected, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian, Sky News and the rest of the News Corp empire who have admitted under oath in the US Supreme Court that they openly lie for profit, are joined by the howling chorus of idiots at the Sydney Morning Herald, Nine Ent Co, and Seven West Media; singing from the same song sheet which has been distributed by the same kinds of people who stand to profit from this largesse of public monies. I note that Xinhua for its part has made exactly zero comments on the AUKUS arrangements surrounding submarines. Quite rightly this doesn't even so much as register a titter in the Chinese popular press, although given that Xinhua is a state broadcaster is like looking at a Pepper's Ghost trick, perhaps that should be expected.
This does highlight the moral bankruptcy at the heart of this policy. Governments have the ability to spend the public coin on pretty well much anything within their remit and defence is certainly within the remit of the Commonwealth. A person once wiser that I once said that "where your treasure is, there your heart will lie also" and the spending of public coin on the toys of war is a practical demonstration of where the heart of politics lies. Nevermind exactly how the faith and credit of the nation is spent to produce the coin to buy these things but when we have a brewing housing crisis, wages falling in real terms, and cost pushed inflation which is caused by cynical price gouging by very big firms, then spending public coin on submarines of all things seems very much like a personal slight against the poor and vulnerable. Keep warm and well fed, you dirty plebs!
This $368bn isn't really expansionary investment in the economy, in the way that health care, education, or direct subsidy payments to industries that employ people are, as the number of actual jobs created from this will be minimal. Mr Albanese spruiked that 3500 jobs would be created in Australia; which is not even 5% of the number of jobs that a similar magnitude of public coin would have bought in the motor industry. We absolutely could not afford to build cars in Australia but we absolutely must pay protection money to some of the biggest bullies in the schoolyard for reasons which are nonsensical on inspection.
If you even think about this in a hyper-caffeinated testosterone rage-fuelled state for a minute, then it stands to reason that if Australia were to be invaded, then we'd want planes and tanks and guns and soldiers. We are not buying those things. No. Australia is buying submarines; which has about as much credibility in logic as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. We may as well be spending public coin on a skyscraper made of Paddle Pop sticks, or a 10 kilometre wide magnifying glass, or a 507-storey escalator to nowhere, for all the net good it will do us. We must be seen to be doing something; this is something; therefore we must do this. As long as spend public coin on war toys, we can feel better, yeah?
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