March 11, 2022
Standing up to bullies: The lessons from Australia
Speech to the Henry Jackson Society in London
Friday 11 March 2022
Thanks very much, Sam. I am delighted to be here at the Henry Jackson Society today, a think tank whose work I have admired for so long.
I am particularly pleased to be here at the end of a fascinating fortnight leading a delegation of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to our AUKUS partners – first in Washington D.C. and New York, and now London. The committee has met with our parliamentary counterparts, been briefed by your agencies and held discussions with policy officials.
At the end of my trip one thing is readily apparent – our three countries have never been working this closely before, but the future opportunities for even greater alignment and integration are considerable.
I speak here today with a heavy heart, following the tragic and untimely death of a dear friend to many of us and the cause of freedom, Kimberley Kitching. Kimberley was a fellow IPAC co-chair, Wolverine and fellow traveller in this fight, and the cause is much poorer without her. She would poke and prod and badger us all to do more for Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans and other oppressed people around the world. I will miss her deeply.
When I first started thinking about this speech it had the working title, “Standing up to bullies: the lessons from Australia”, and it stuck. But the closer this event approached the more it seemed that “Standing up to bullies: the lessons from Ukraine” would be appropriate.
Of course, I would not be as qualified to deliver that speech, but like everyone else I am full of admiration for President Zelensky and the people of Ukraine for their remarkable courage and bravery in standing up for their sovereignty and right to determine their own future free from coercion.
The role of the Chair of Australia’s Intelligence and Security Committee is not the sort of job that lends itself to a sunny disposition, particularly not in what our Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called the most dangerous and uncertain strategic environment since the 1930s. But thanks to the Ukrainians, I find myself more cautiously optimistic today about the prospects of the free world than I have been for some time.
Their determination to resist Putin’s aggression and their unwillingness to fold even in the face of his brutal tactics has rallied the world to their cause.
Who would have thought, even a month ago, that Germany would ditch decades of defence policy and double their military budget? Who would have thought both Sweden and Finland would be lining up for NATO membership? Who would have thought Switzerland would ditch decades of neutrality to join in sanctions?
The free world has shown more unity of purpose in enacting the highest possible costs for Putin than any of us would have dared hope for before this crisis. We have taken unprecedented actions on SWIFT and with central bank sanctions that go far beyond just punishing the oligarchs and kleptocrats, and I hope and expect there will be more to come.
We moved quickly from non-lethal medical aid to providing the weapons the Russian army fears the most with deadly effect, blunting the advantage they would have hoped to obtain with armour and air-superiority.
We are finally tackling state-sponsored disinformation in our own democracies head on, and most effectively returning fire in the information war by getting truth into the public domain about our adversaries plans and intentions, robbing them of their false narratives of justification.
For many years we wrongly believed information operations were the home turf of authoritarian states taking advantage of our open societies, when we actually have a profound edge here – we are robust enough to tolerate dissenting voices. But authoritarian states are fragile and vulnerable to counter narratives, particularly truthful ones. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a dictator more than their true selves being revealed to their own people and we must continue to ratchet up this pressure.
This relentless focus and close coordination on finally imposing real costs for authoritarian regimes has come just in time.
Because we not only owe it to the people of Ukraine to punish Russia for its aggression, but to free people around the world who face the same threats to help deter it from ever happening to them.
And the truth is we have not always done enough to punish this sort of dangerous conduct in the past. I’m afraid the lesson Putin and his ideological bedfellows took from the relatively muted response to Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 – or even Hong Kong in 2019 – was that beyond rhetorical condemnation, we were not serious about imposing meaningful costs for this malign behaviour.
This time must be different.We can be absolutely certain that others are watching these events very carefully and are calibrating their own plans in response. While there are many lessons for us from Ukraine’s experience, we must also ensure that others learn the right lessons from this crisis too by sending the clearest possible message about our resolve.
This afternoon I want to share with you the success Australia has had over the last five years hardening our systems and making our society more resilient against grey-zone threats that fall short of war but still have the potential to do great harm to our national interest – threats like economic coercion, foreign interference and espionage, and cyber-attacks.
It’s these steps which have allowed us to resist attempts from our largest trading partner to bully us into submission. They have ensured that it is Australians - and no one else - who determine our future.
And many of the policies we have adopted are now being considered here in the UK and around the world as templates for your own actions to safeguard your democracy.
Ukraine reminds us, however,that while these policies are necessary, they are not sufficient on their own to secure our democracy, sovereignty and freedom. Because the threats we now all face are not just in the grey-zone. Any of us could be on the receiving end of very traditional forms of hard power as we were in the 20th century. And only hard military power of our own – as well as strong alliances with our closest like-minded friends – will protect us from that.
In 2014 Ukraine got the most powerful warning possible about Russia’s plans for them. The annexation of Crimea was swift, and from a strictly military point of view for Russia, a highly successful operation.
What we see today in a so-far much more challenging invasion for Russia is the fruits of Ukraine’s response to 2014. They used their time well to reform and rearm their military to put them in a much more effective position to resist further incursions. While they still face a much more conventionally powerful foe, and one without the ethics to restrain them from the most cruel tactics, it is fair to say they have caused havoc for Russia’s arrogant war-plans.
The fear I have for all of us is that we will not have a warning as stark as 2014, and we certainly do not have eight years to get ready. Given the lead times involved in acquiring new military capability, none of us have a moment to waste.
Ultimately, our objective is to deter conflict to prevent it from ever taking place. Deterrence requires not just clearly communicated intent – but the potent military capability to back it up.
I am pleased that our government is already spending well over 2 per cent of GDP on our defence and it is rising fast, including $270 billion over the next decade on new capability alone. On Thursday, our government announced an increase in the number of Australian Defence Force personnel to the highest levels since the Vietnam War, when Australia had conscription.
For Australia, AUKUS is a game-changer for delivering this upgraded capability with increased potency.
It is also a measure of how far we have come. Our domestic security agency, ASIO, was established with the help of your MI5 in 1949 in response to American fears about our ability to keep secrets in the Cold War. We would later learn those fears were well-founded, as the Venona intercepts of decoded Soviet cables showed the existence of a spy ring in at least our then Department of External Affairs.
Today, we are part of the world’s most intimate and powerful intelligence sharing alliance in the Five Eyes, and AUKUS, to share your most sensitive military technology.
While there has been understandable focus on the nuclear propelled submarines capability to be delivered next decade, the asymmetric deterrence capabilities we will acquire in the short term will be at least as significant, including the acquisition and manufacturing of precision guided munitions which will allow us to hold our potential adversaries at risk and at distance and hopefully discourage military adventurism in the region, as well as enhanced cyber warfare capabilities.
AUKUS will not only assist us to defend our shared values and interests in the region, but to support the sovereignty of all states and help maintain the peaceful status quo which we have all prospered under in the post WWII liberal order.
And let’s be clear – there are revisionist, rising powers who are trying to disturb that status quo and reform the current order in their own interests and at the expense of ours.
The stakes are high.
As Andrew Shearer, Australia’s Director-General of Intelligence said this week, we believe the Chinese Communist Party’s current ambitions for regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific are just a “base camp” or “way-station” for their global ambitions to displace the United States as the pre-eminent world power.
Make no mistake, the challenge we face is systemic and existential. It is a fight for nothing less than the world our children and grandchildren will grow up in.
The 14 demands, delivered by the Chinese Embassy to an Australian journalist in November 2020, was one of the many wake-up calls we have had in the last decade.
The Chinese government has made it very apparent that the price of normal relations and of ending their economic coercion campaign is that we fundamentally change who we are as a nation.
They’ve asked us to silence our free media and our democratic parliament to stop criticism of their manifest human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other ethnic minorities.
They’ve demanded we surrender our digital sovereignty by reversing our decision to keep Huawei, ZTE and other high-risk vendors out of our 5G network.
They’ve said we must give up our political sovereignty by repealing our foreign influence transparency laws,which apply equally to all nations and without which they would be able to covertly influence our public debate.
They want us to scrap our scrutiny of foreign investment proposals so they can again buy up strategic assets against our national interest.
They say we must turn a blind eye to their illegal militarisation of disputed features in the South China Sea.
They object to our Foreign Relations Bill which prevented them from going around our backs to state governments and other sub-national entities to undermine our national cohesion on the Belt and Road Initiative.
The 14 demands was really an invitation from China to Australia to become a vassal state. It’s an invitation we have politely but firmly rejected.
It puts a lie to the claim made by many so-called China experts that the Chinese Communist Party does not seek to export its ideology. On the contrary, it is happy to use its economic weight to try to impose its governing philosophy on anyone who trades with them.
And if you ask Tibetans, Uyghurs,Hong Kongers and Taiwanese they will tell you that the CCP has been trying to and often succeeding in imposing its ideology on unwilling people for decades.
It also exposes the intellectual weakness of those who argued that economic engagement with China was the best protection we had against finding ourselves on the wrong side of their rise. For China, their economic power is just another tool of state craft to be deployed against anyone they have leverage over, just like Russia uses energy dependence to weaken Europe’s resolve in confronting its malign activities.
The answer to this dilemma is not endlessly more engagement but de-leveraging and de-risking our exposure to authoritarian states by diversifying our international trade and establishing trusted supply chains with reliable partners we know we can always count on.
The good news from Australia is that we can resist this. Not only has China’s campaign failed to achieve its principal objective of changing our domestic public policy settings, but our overall international trade has proven remarkably resilient.
It is true some sectors have fared better than others, and some firms have experienced more painful adjustment than others, but there is no doubt that we have found it easier than we feared we would to find other markets for our high-quality resources and produce around the world.
If even Australia, as trade exposed as any western nation to China, can resist this bullying, any nation can.
We were only able to do so,however, because of conscious, deliberate steps we took over the past five years to build resilience and harden our systems against these coercive tactics.
Starting in 2017 we systematically addressed weaknesses in our political and economic systems to make ourselves a harder target. We did so in response to an intelligence community assessment that attempted foreign interference in our democracy was at levels not seen even at the height of the Cold War. In 2022, the Director-General of ASIO confirmed it was now Australia’s principal security concern, supplanting terrorism.
So, what have we done?
Our Espionage and Foreign Interference Act 2018 criminalises covert and deceptive activities of foreign actors that intend to interfere with Australia’s democratic institutions, or that support the intelligence activities of a foreign government.
To protect our political sovereignty, our government has banned foreign donations to political parties.
The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, introduced in 2018 provides the public with visibility of the nature, level, and extent of foreign influence on Australia's government and politics.
In 2018, the Australian Government secured our digital sovereignty by banning Huawei and other high-risk vendors with close connections to the Chinese Communist Party from providing 5G mobile network technology in Australia
The Foreign Relations Act 2020 empowers the federal government to terminate arrangements it deems to being inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy entered into by state governments, public universities and local councils like the Belt and Road Deal, to seek to divide us internally between different levels of government.
Our Critical Infrastructure Act grants the Australian Signals Directorate the power to defensively act on behalf of a critical operator to intervene as a last resort in the event of a national emergency, as well as mandatory reporting obligations.
In a world-first, Australia can now target malicious cyber-hackers with our newly passed Magnitsky-style sanctions regime. It’s an important measure within our sanctions framework to discourage cyber criminals, along with human rights abusers and corrupt officials from causing harm to us.
We are diversifying our international trade with free trade agreements concluded or under way with major trading partners like the UK, EU, India, Japan, South Korea and the CPTPP to reduce our dependence on China as our largest trading partner.
Of course, there is still yet much to be done, for example, to address vulnerabilities in our higher education sector. We cannot and must not permit or condone the transfer of critical research – much of which has dual-use applications – to foreign powers, nor can we tolerate the harassment or intimidation of students of all nationalities seeking to better themselves at our premier education institutions. My committee has been investigating this area of vulnerability and I look forward to handing down clear recommendations for change very soon.
We have known for some time that Australia’s immediate region – the Indo-Pacific – is the centre of strategic competition, which is marked by autocratic expansion, military modernisation and the undermining of the liberal democratic order. But the new danger is that if Putin is allowed to succeed, his conquest of Ukraine could inspire the ambitions of autocracies in the Indo-Pacific.
There are obvious differences between Ukraine and Taiwan. For one, as part of their policy of strategic ambiguity, the United States and its allies have never taken the military option off the table, and have made it very clear they oppose anything other than the peaceful resolution of cross-straits tensions.
We must always put the self-determination of the Taiwanese people at the heart of any resolution to China’s ambition to unify with this liberal democracy of 23 million people.
My hope is that China will learn the right lessons from Ukraine in relation to its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. My hope is that China has noticed the world’s incredible resolve,and its extraordinary determination to enact a very high cost against Russia for what it has done.
Australia’s vision in this security environment remains consistent, as it always has been: that of an open, inclusive and resilient Indo-Pacific that embraces cooperation over coercion, and protects the rights and respects the sovereignty of all nations –regardless of their size.
Our countries have not changed. Our values have not changed. The circumstances we find ourselves in and the challenges we face most certainly have, however. And we have responded accordingly.
Friends, we have reasons to be cautiously optimistic. While we cannot ignore the complex challenges we face today, and we will not win this contest if we stand on our own, the good news is we do not. The vast majority of nations share our vision for sovereignty and peace.
I am confident that we will rise to meet these challenges, and I know that together, we will prevail.
