Our Home is Girt by Sea

As the national anthem affirms, our home is girt by sea. The first Governor of New South Wales was a naval captain and was followed by a string of others. We have always been among the world’s great travellers by sea or by air. We celebrate Flinders, Shackleton and Kingsford-Smith as much as any inland explorer. Most of us are descended from immigrants from all corners of the globe. Our national wealth is, and always has been, built on foreign trade.

There have been great debates on tariff protection but they are over. Australia is fully integrated with the global economy and financial system. It also has a multi-ethnic population. Ironically for Evans’s thesis, the farmers and miners who lived and worked in the continental hinterland spoke up loudest for an outward-looking national vision. The outward orientation is at the core of the long boom that John Edwards says has transformed Australians’ vision of their country. Professor Evans quotes several different views on how this transformation is progressing and comes down on the side of the sceptics, particularly with regard to defence strategy.

In support of his scepticism Professor Evans seeks to categorise Australia’s past military strategies as continental and expeditionary in nature and thus incompatible with his postulated maritime strategy. He should brush up on Australian military history.

The Australian army was in Egypt in 1915 in support of a maritime objective: to secure the Suez Canal as a vital trade and military link. The Australian navy and its fledgling air service were there as well. They attacked Gallipoli in support of another maritime enterprise: to deny the Ottoman empire control of the Dardanelles. The three services were in Egypt again for the same reason in the 1940s, culminating in the battles of El Alamein. And they were in Malaya in an attempt to secure the channels of trade through the Indonesian archipelago and the South China Sea.

Australians of my vintage will never forget the strategic realities of the war in the Pacific. Battles like Singapore, Darwin, Rabaul, Sunda Strait, the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, Milne Bay, the Bismarck Sea and Lingayen Gulf are engraved on our memories. But more than that, we remember that war as a combined-arms maritime operation. Naval forces secured enough ocean to enable land forces to invade and secure bases for land-based air forces to project power and cover further advances. We never imagined the surrounding seas as “drawbridged moats for physical security”.

If Professor Evans examines Australian military campaigns over the last seventy years he will see that many of them took place in and around the Pacific and Indian oceans, including Korea, Vietnam, the Malayan counterinsurgency, Konfrontasi in Borneo, and East Timor. Those campaigns were also multi-service ones. To the extent that we have been involved in campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan these were in reaction to direct attacks on the world economic and financial systems in which Australia is now integrated.

Because of this experience, the ability to operate far to the north has been a critical element in the design of Australian naval vessels. It has always been a blue-water navy. Similarly, operations away from the Australian continent have been the norm for the army and air force.

Our national strategy has long been whole-of-government. For the past seventy years there have been sustained diplomatic initiatives to strengthen Australia’s security, diplomatic, cultural and social links with Asia and the Pacific. Examples are the Colombo Plan from 1951, the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation from 1954, the establishment of Association of South-East Asian Nations in 1967 and Australian dialogue partnership with ASEAN in 1974. In 1989 Australian Prime Minister Hawke inspired the formation of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum. APEC now has twenty-one members and is the primary organisation supporting economic growth and prosperity in the region.

There are many more examples of aid given to strengthen internal security and promote the social cohesion and economic growth of countries in the region. These include support for internal security in Papua New Guinea and the Solomons.

Professor Evans is dismissive of the army for “converting itself into an amphibious force”. He does not see the role that such a force can play in such operations or in natural disaster relief, as shown in the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. This is an aspect of a whole-of-government maritime strategy.

The vast growth in Australia’s Asian trade did not happen by accident. It grew from the seeds planted by Australian government and business missions half a century ago. Australia has promoted wider ASEAN and trans-Pacific partnerships for decades. The Australia–Japan Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation dates from 1976 and the Joint Security Pact was added in 2007. After many failed attempts to encourage global trade liberalisation through the World Trade Organisation, Australia has negotiated free-trade agreements with China, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN as well as the USA.

An outward-looking economic strategy is not for the faint-hearted. It will inevitably suffer setbacks from international disturbances like the Asian financial meltdown and the Global Financial Crisis. So there have been dissenting voices. But those voices have lost the policy battle. There will be politicians who will seek to turn the national vision inwards when trouble strikes but in my view they will fail. Like Humpty Dumpty, insularity has fallen from the wall and all the king’s horses …

As to the future, to find out whether enterprising young Australians are insular and continental in outlook one should go and talk to them. They can be found pursuing their own visions of Eldorado from Jakarta to Seoul, from Mumbai to New York and all stops in between.

A final word. Professor Evans seeks to contrast his postulated Australian continental insularity with a British maritime strategic outlook. I seem to remember that Britain also has a deep strategic interest in Continental Europe. Wellington ranks in the British military pantheon with Drake and Nelson. In my book, Dowding would belong there as well.

Fred Bennett
via e-mail

SIR: I wonder whether Michael Evans has really thought through the implications of Australia’s 36,000-kilometre coastline. His assertion that we fail to fully appreciate our geographical situation surrounded by three oceans is beside the point. Most of Australia lives along a narrow strip of land on the east coast, the majority within ten kilometres of the sea. This was forcibly brought home during the Second World War when long-range, but antiquated, Japanese submarines shelled Sydney’s eastern suburbs and Newcastle and people fled inland beyond the Blue Mountains.

The question Evans should have asked is whether a navy, big or small, represents the most effective deployment of scarce defence manpower. A rough calculation indicates that it requires at least twelve days to get a naval task force into position. Relying on an orbital highway set back at least 100 kilometres from the coast, the time is reduced to six days. If Australia was to adopt the Swedish strategy of hardened roads at strategic locations which could operate as runways available for immediate operation by heavy-lift, fighter/interceptor, and naval warfare anti-submarine aircraft, the response time to an emerging threat would be far shorter. The Williamtown RAAF base is extremely vulnerable to attack from the sea because of its close proximity to the coast and this applies to many of our defence facilities which could be knocked out quickly by a surprise attack. The Falklands War demonstrated how vulnerable surface ships are, and twelve submarines, whenever they become operational, are hardly likely to stop a determined assault on mainland Australia.

The crucial question should be whether we actually require a navy at all, and whether we can afford one capable of doing the job when we don’t know the nature of what such a threat might be or where it might come from. Isn’t it just a case of boys going down to the sea and playing games for the hell of it?

Philip Drew
Annandale, NSW

SIR: I am indebted to Paul Monk (June 2016) for squaring his shoulders, taking a deep breath and embarking on what he felt would be an exercise in futility in attempting to explain to me what Roberto Unger was on about in his book The Religion of the Future. The good news for Mr Monk is that his labours have not been in vain.

Enlightened by the lucidity of his exegesis, I am now in a position to have a sufficient understanding of Unger to be able to say with a fair degree of confidence that Unger is talking through his hat.

Unger sets the criteria for success and then proceeds to make judgments using those criteria. I think it is called fudging. While Unger may have been dissatisfied with the criterion set by the founder of Christianity, it takes a certain self-confidence to say that Jesus didn’t know what He was talking about when He revealed to us what it was all about.

Perhaps it was remiss of Jesus not to have twigged (for the benefit of Unger), that His religion should be about “the origins of the cosmos, the nature of life, the history of humanity or the workings of the world”. Maybe, though, in fairness to Jesus, He probably thought that His followers would have enough on their plates in measuring up to “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another as I have loved you”. And history has proved His judgment sound in this regard.

I don’t want to go all preachy in addressing the question of the way Christians, from St Paul onwards, have used words identifying their beliefs as “foolish” in worldly terms. Just ask the Corinthians. Suffice to say that Mr Monk does not need to be reminded that the letter killeth but the spirit quickeneth.

Frank Pulsford
Aspley, Qld

SIR: Paul Monk might consider investing in a few of the many books written in response to the polemics of Richard Dawkins and other new atheists. In his letter Monk repeats the following misquotation which is often attributed to Tertullian in secondary writings: “I believe because it is absurd.” Alister McGrath in his book Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (2005) indicates that Tertullian never wrote these words.

What Tertullian did write was: “He [Jesus Christ] was buried, and rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.” McGrath notes:

In this passage … Tertullian is not discussing the relation between faith and reason, or the evidential basis of Christianity … It has been known since 1916 that Tertullian is playing around with some ideas of Aristotle in this passage. James Moffat, who pointed this out, notes the apparent absurdity of Tertullian’s words: “This is one of the most defiant paradoxes in Tertullian … He deliberately exaggerates, in order to call attention to the truth he has to convey” … The point being made is that the Christian gospel is profoundly counter-cultural and counter-intuitive at this point. So why would anyone want to make it up, when it is so obviously implausible, by those standards of wisdom? Tertullian then parodies a passage from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which argues that an extraordinary claim may well be true, precisely because it is so out of the ordinary. It was probably meant to be a rhetorical joke, for those who knew their Aristotle.

Per Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker in their book Answering the New Atheism (2008): “The point of what Tertullian did say was that since the resurrection was an impossible event, [for a Christian] it must (as faith maintains) have been a miraculous event.”

Chris Hilder
Queanbeyan, NSW

SIR: I enjoyed reading James Allan on cultural relativism (March 2016), but he could have been blunter.

Cultural relativists claim that all moral opinions are true for those who hold them, and that it is wrong to suppose one’s own moral opinions truer than anyone else’s. But one logical axiom states that propositions which contradict each other cannot all be true. Moral opinions are propositions which contradict each other. So the claim that all moral propositions are true is illogical. It does not make enough sense even to be false. Like a round square or straight curve, it is nonsense.

The phrase “true for those who hold them” is self-contradictory. The English word true does not describe all the moral opinions which people hold; some of those opinions are true and others false. Every speaker of English knows this. I doubt that these relativists can express their views logically and in English.

Cultural relativists say that all moral opinions are true, but they mean they are all false. They are painfully monocultural people who can survive only in long-standing democracies. At the great banquet of humanity they offer nothing and learn nothing, but they do love to pose.

Plato’s Socrates exposed these flakes again and again: Protagoras, Thrasymachus, Callicles, Gorgias. Their foolishness has reappeared among us as those dialogues are forgotten. The matches between that ancient demagoguery and the academy’s discourse now are evidence of our dysfunction. Stephen Balch (April 2016) will find his Cognoscendancy has its precursors in late fifth-century Athens.

Roger Sworder
Bendigo, Vic

Sir: Jenny Stewart (June 2016) made her usual thoughtful contribution about the public sector. Having been a public servant myself for nearly all my working life I could see some merit in her observations.

Having been exposed to local, territory and federal government bureaucracy and being in policy roles I could also see an element of “the good old days”. As a junior public servant in the 1970s I would have described the APS bureaucracy as oppressive (remember seniority not merit), and a large disconnect between policy and results (which program budgeting has significantly remedied).

The atrophying Jenny identifies is of the decline of face-to-face service delivery, not of policy and program delivery. Public servants now, much more so than in the past, are involved with higher value work than the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES), or ATO assessors were involved in in the past. The demise of the CES and creation of Centrelink is a considerable improvement in service delivery to the public.

Perhaps having studied economics and being well-read I wondered why there was so minimal a focus on value for money in delivery in the public service of old, as well as this oppressive and often stupid environment (an example was harassing small businesses in a global recession!). As a taxpayer I think the adoption of businesslike practices and flexibility is sensible and rational and improves the quality and quantity of service.

As regards places such as hospitals, most members of the public have no idea of the real cost of the “free” services; if they did they might be surprised how much they actually cost. The fact that people are shielded from this sort of information is unhelpful in terms of rational public decision making. An informed populace—what a dangerous concept!

Whilst Jenny’s observation about the failure of Whitlam to take Sir Frederick Wheeler’s advice about the loans affair is a good illustration, I would suggest that the long-standing culture of bureaucracy is a “no” culture. This is evident in things from local government planning to higher levels of government, where some simple bureaucratic advice to applicants would facilitate a “yes” answer rather than a “no”. The ideological inclinations of some bureaucrats stand in the way of such a business-friendly and consumer-friendly approach, but in time such a change may come.

Notwithstanding my criticisms, public service is a much under-rated and worthy role.

Martin Gordon
Dunlop, ACT

Sir: I have read Tanveer Ahmed’s article (June 2016) with great interest. He raises many cogent points, yet the problems of Islam lie squarely in the Koran, Hadith, sharia law and the findings and pronouncements of countless Muslim clerics over the centuries since Mohammed died.

Since the Koran in its present form wasn’t written down until hundreds of years after Mohammed’s death, how do people know that the words of Mohammed weren’t varied by scribes who wanted to put their personal “imperfect” thoughts into Mohammed’s “Holy Scriptures”, the Koran.

Why is it that in Mecca Mohammed was comparatively peaceful, yet when he went to Medina his whole outlook changed dramatically? Did Mohammed’s biographers get it wrong or was Mohammed schizophrenic?

The West should not in any way try to convince Muslims to reform their religion; that must come from within Islam itself. However, that does not preclude Western thinkers from stating the obvious, that many of the problems within Islam lie in the Koran and related texts.

John R. Bicknell
Bargo, NSW