Submarines or not, Aukus is already costing us our sovereignty.

(First Published in the New Daily 25 June)

Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash

Australia doesn’t even need to wait until it receives the AUKUS submarines to hand sovereignty to the United States.

The response to the America’s “unilateral” action in bombing Iran – with no acknowledgement of legality or adherence to the “rules-based order” we hold “threats” to – shows it has already been ceded.

Speak to Albanese government MPs privately and they’ll reveal one simple truth – Australia is unwilling to criticise the US while the AUKUS deal remains so precarious.

And so, the best the Prime Minister can come up with is that the US acted alone – “unilaterally” – a loaded word Anthony Albanese mentioned five times in under four minutes in his Monday press conference, but of course, Australia supported Trump’s action.

The safer zone is to sermonise against Iran retaliation, but any question of whether the US, and indeed Israel in its self-designated “pre-emptive” attack, have acted legally is a complete no-go zone.

To question the legality of the attacks is to question Trump and that is not allowed in this new-world order.

Australia is in the pathetic situation of not being able to criticise or publicly separate from its key ally because that key ally and security partner might renege on a deal it made.

And that’s the landscape for the next 10 years. As Malcolm Turnbull recently lamented, “the government sacrificed sovereignty to get security & it looks like we’re going to lose both”.

None of this is new – since World War II, Australia’s default position has been to prostrate itself in front of America, a position the political and media class have largely accepted as “sensible” and “strong”.

To question whether that position benefits Australia in any way – or indeed makes us safer, or even, goodness forbid, matches our values, is seen as the worst kind of activism – not just naive, but potentially traitorous.

That position has left us with a media that doesn’t think to ask whether Australia’s leaders think an action from an ally was legal, but instead asks whether or not we were part of the discussions America had ahead of dropping bombs on another country.

It is also what drives a senior politician, in this case the Liberals’ Andrew Hastie, to announce he thinks “this is a world governed by might and not right and anyone who talks about this rules-based global order is really being nostalgic” in the same interview where he criticises Russia, China and Iran for being “revisionist”.

“They want to revise the rules and bend them through their own rules.”

And nobody blinked.

Mike Pezzullo is quoted as an independent expert, despite being sacked by the government after an independent inquiry found he had broken the public service code of conduct on at least 14 occasions, including using his duty, power, status or authority to seek to gain a benefit or advantage for himself and failing to maintain confidentiality of sensitive government information.

The government has been criticised for not backing in the US quick enough, with no reflection on whether any of this is even in our interest.

It would be a brave analyst who could even pinpoint who is at war with whom, which country Iran is supposed to “unconditionally surrender” to, or whether or not the countries involved even agreed to the alleged ceasefire Trump boasted about, but we are expected to kowtow immediately because the US says it is OK.

In this environment, international law and norms are just quaint concepts – unless countries we consider threats break the same rules.

The rules only matter when America says they matter and Australia falls into line, aided by a cowed political class and an indoctrinated media who mistake proximity to power to power itself.

And now we are tying ourselves in knots trying to pretend you can bomb your way to peace because a dangerous tyrant said it on his social media site and we’re desperately trying to maintain closer ties with the country, regardless of what it means for our own nation’s sovereignty.

You can bomb your way to peace as effectively as you can drink your way to sobriety. Security ultimately rests on law.

That’s not nostalgia, but a fundamental rule of international behaviour.

The UN Charter remains in force and was created because of the mass suffering of the Second World War, showing the need for enforceable rules. Again, not nostalgia. History. Fact.

Those beating the drums of war ignore the screams and grief from innocents – and those we send to the frontlines in our name – that sits beneath their deafening chorus.

Australia’s leaders are going to have to decide whose interests they put first. If they continue to place AUKUS at the heart of that decision then we already have the answer.