It’s Wonderful To Read A Real Expert When They Show Us What A Mess We Are In.

This revelatory article appeared last week:

We wasted a $400b windfall, and now we’ll all have to pay

An audit of federal finances finds Australia has never seen rivers of gold like this, but the hangover will be brutal.

Chris Richardson Economist

Mar 16, 2025 – 12.59pm

Paul Keating famously declared that you change the country when you change the government. Yet, while that might have been true when he fought Fightback! a third of a century ago, these days elections are solely about style rather than substance: our politicians stopped challenging us decades ago.

Our oppositions complain loudly but only pretend to oppose, essentially adopting the policies of the government of the day and relying on its unpopularity to win power.

The proof? Follow the money. Although dollars aren’t a perfect yardstick of policy differences, they are an arms’ length one. Australia has budgeted $6 trillion across the next four years: half as spending going out, and the other half as taxes coming in.

Yet, with big-ticket items such as nuclear power plants and extra fighter jets sitting mostly some years away, the difference between government and opposition policies in this election will be comfortably less than 1 per cent of the amounts we’re set to tax and to spend in the next four years.

And yes, that’s typical. For decades now our oppositions have promised their taxing and spending to be more than 99 per cent matching those of the government they’re campaigning to replace.

In the election campaign both sides are therefore promising Australians that they’ll remain mediocre.

I believe them, and you should too. This article spells out why.

Our national social compact

We tax workers and businesses so we can spend that money – more than a quarter of all national income – on the young, the old, the sick, the poor and a defence force.

That makes the federal budget our national social compact. It’s marvellous when we get it right, disastrous when we get it wrong.

The good news is there’s lots to like about our Australian federal finances: debts and deficits here are a fraction of those in many nations.

The bad news is we’ve done well thanks to luck rather than good management. And the worse news is that, despite the luck that’s come our way, our social compact isn’t delivering prosperity: Australian living standards stood still over the past decade.

What’s that about luck?

Budgets move because of two things – the decisions of politicians, and “everything else”. The latter category – luck – often plays a bigger role than policy.

And recent times saw our biggest ever surge of budgetary luck. Wars pushed up the price of what Australia sells to the world, and we got tax windfalls from that. Many migrants meant more people to tax. And inflation took money from families and handed it to the taxman.

Politicians who live through a phase of budgetary luck tend to claim that their budgetary success was due to their superb management. Yes, Peter Costello, I’m looking at you.

Yet the windfalls of the current government dwarf those Costello benefited from. And as the noted budget economist Cyndi Lauper points out, Money changes everything.

The government’s own figures estimate that, since its election, revenue revisions dropped an extra $85 billion into the taxman’s pocket in 2022-23, followed by another $102 billion last year.

Adding my own estimates of yet more luck of late (including commodity price strength and a weaker Aussie dollar), that windfall eases to a still remarkable $89 billion next year and $85 billion the year after.

Remember, those revisions weren’t due to any policy change by any politician. Rather, they came via the combined impact of war and migration adding to the size of the pie we tax, plus inflation giving the taxman a bigger slice of that pie.

That surge in luck is unprecedented. Last year’s windfall more than paid for nine of the 20 largest federal programs – more than all of the cost of unemployment benefits, plus childcare subsidies, the capabilities of each of the army, navy and air force, federal subsidies to state schools, as well as our support for carers, fuel tax credits, plus spending on public sector superannuation.

Please read that last sentence again. And marvel. Australia has never seen rivers of gold like this. Never. Yet although luck’s a fortune, it isn’t a strategy. The glory years of luck are fading, and the challenges are rising.

The key challenge is that we took our luck to town. Spending was 24.4 per cent of national income in 2022-23, but it’ll be 27.2 per cent next year. That’s the fastest and largest increase in the size of the federal government since Whitlam’s expansion half a century ago.

Luckily, that lurch coincided with our luck, so we still saw surpluses. Yet luck is temporary, whereas the promises we’re making to ourselves are permanent.

Why has spending gone up so much?

The government didn’t plan to drive a major expansion in the size of government. Yet that’s what’s happened.

The key driver wasn’t pre-election promises. It was Australia’s fight against inflation.

The Reserve Bank’s famous “narrow path” saw them reduce inflation with a much smaller increase in the ranks of the unemployed than earlier such fights. But the winners in a slow fight against inflation – those who don’t become unemployed – don’t realise their good fortune. So they don’t thank either the government or the RBA.

Yet a slow fight against inflation is one in which wage earners and borrowers and taxpayers all lose out for longer. And they sure as hell know they’re hurting.

Although overall living standards in Australia have stood still for a decade, that hides the recent pump-and-dump. Living standards were making modest progress before hitting an artificial peak as the then government handed us money during COVID.

As of today, however, they’re down 9.9 per cent from that peak. That’s why polls have narrowed and the punters are cranky: with its small number of ungrateful winners and its many losers (wage earners, borrowers and taxpayers), the RBA’s fight against inflation was an economic success but a political minefield.

No wonder, then, that state and federal governments have spent a fortune. And the federal surplus made it harder to ignore those insistent calls for more spending – after all, the punters could see that they didn’t have money, so how come the government wouldn’t hand over its surplus?

What next?

But you needn’t worry: the government is promising to go on a diet in the next three years, with its spending growing just 1.8 per cent faster than inflation. Even better, federal spending in a decade is promised to be a smaller share of national income than next year.

Phew ... Except there’s no actual details of that diet. Worse still, those official forecasts of a diet pre-dated the phoney war election campaign now under way, where the pace of new promises has accelerated towards an extra half a billion dollars of spending every single day.

So we’re promising to go on an unspecified diet while busily still stuffing our face with Doritos.

A promise to spend is a promise to tax

Even those vague promises of a switch to a harsh spending diet aren’t enough to generate official projections of an eventual narrowing in deficits. To get back close to a balanced budget in a decade, the official forecasts also have to assume the tax take reaches its highest recorded share of national income.

Yes, you read that right: the official figures say the tax take will leap, and they do so by assuming there won’t be another personal tax cut in the next decade. That means bracket creep will get decidedly creepy, with average full-time wages busting into the 37 cent tax bracket halfway through the coming decade.

Mistakes – we’ve made a few

Can we do better? You bet. Much of our spending is stupid, much of our taxing is terrible.

Let’s start with the WA GST deal. The federal budget tries to deliver fairness across states, but the WA GST deal works to neatly undo those, meaning we spend $5 billion a year to worsen fairness.

And while there may be dumber things you could do with taxpayer money, they’d probably involve smoking $100 notes.

Or what about the NDIS? It should be a triumph of targeted support for those who need it, but it was littered with poor incentives from the get go. The upshot is that one in every seven (14.2 per cent) boys aged six in this nation are in the NDIS, and 69 per cent of those entering it are aged under 15.

To its credit, the current government – having blocked the modest reform efforts of the previous government – realised the need for change. But although Australia needed leadership, most of what we got was creative accounting: moves that pushed more NDIS costs on to the states and set up a new scheme specifically for kids.

Yet that came at the cost of further bribes to the states, reducing federal NDIS spending but at the cost of raising a bunch of other federal spending.

Or how about student debt? The government recently announced some good changes, but threw in a $20 billion clanger – forgiving student debt.

Why is that bad? Because students end up earning more than the average, meaning that forgiving student debt means lower taxes on those who’ll eventually be better off. That comes at the cost of everyone, including those who aren’t well off.

Worse still, our budget accounting standards are so broken that, because student debt is off budget, that debt forgiveness magically costs nothing in terms of bigger deficits.

I could go on. Whyalla … why? Or fossil fuel subsidies masquerading as electricity cost-of-living relief. Also why? Or bulk billing incentives that put three dollars in the pockets of doctors for every dollar they put in the pocket of patients. (You’d have a bigger impact on our health – and definitely on fairness – if we followed the recommendations of the Economic Inclusion Committee.)

And tax? I’m sad you asked

Australia may be a first-world nation, but we increasingly have a third-rate tax system. It last got a spit and polish a quarter of a century ago, with the subsequent neglect leaving it ever more reliant on a handful of increasingly damaging taxes.

In the meantime, we’ve built a system with:

• Superannuation taxes that raise next to nothing (less than the sector takes in fees) while busily shovelling money from poorer Australians to richer Australians.
• Taxes on our gasfields that also raise next to nothing – we built that tax with oilfields in mind, and it’s been an epic disaster when applied to gasfields.
• A fringe benefits tax that began as a force for good but is now so riddled with loopholes that it has become a force for evil.
• A levy on banks that massively undercharges them for their “too big to fail” insurance.
• Perhaps most spectacularly, we raised cigarette taxes through the roof, but didn’t match that with better enforcement. That blew a huge hole in the tax take, while simultaneously making smoking cheaper for most Australians and underwriting the rise of the most lucrative (and least risky) market that organised crime in this nation has ever had.

This isn’t the Deep State. It’s the Dumb State.

Then there are the taxes we don’t have but should, including everything from a carbon tax through to a wealth tax. Hate me.

And the poster child for tax reform in the current election campaign? If you wait two years, a pint in a pub will cost five cents less than otherwise. Here’s cheers to that shattering reform …

A more dangerous world is a more expensive world

As Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.

Recent weeks saw decades happen, as the Trump administration beat a retreat from the world stage rivalling that of Milli Vanilli.

Key nations are now run by old men with big agendas and poor impulse control. And, like it or not, that says Australia will need to spend more on defence. Worse still, the reliability of the US as a defence supplier also took a hit in recent weeks, as Ukraine can attest.

That backdrop says a whole bunch of budget trends are not our friend:

• We’ve wasted a blinding burst of budgetary luck, making permanent promises to ourselves off the back of temporary gains, generating a worsening structural budget deficit;
• That’s left our budget absolutely covered in barnacles – terrible taxing meets stupid spending;
• Yet a bunch of expensive challenges are rising fast, not least on the geopolitical stage; while
• There’s a looming hung parliament, suggesting we will struggle as a nation to take the rapid and decisive action we need.

Poor fellow my country.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/we-wasted-a-400b-windfall-and-now-we-ll-all-have-to-pay-20250314-p5ljjv

This really is a terrifying condemnation of Governmental waste and a total real lack on insight on just how things work!

This litany of errors and mistakes identified here is both epic and shameful. There is great and penetrating insight here!!!

I will follow up Mr Richardson’s finale with one of my own…

“God help us all”!

David.

I Feel This Is A Topic We Need To Think About Every Few Years….

This appeared last week and reminded me of the importance of having a thought through view on the topic:

‘We’re going to talk about death today – your death’: a doctor on what it’s like to end a life rather than extend one

I used to focus on maternity and newborn care, but when Canada legalised assisted dying in 2016, I began helping people with a different transition

By Dr Stefanie Green

Sat 15 Mar 2025 22.00 AEDT

The patient referral comes through my reliable old fax machine on a single sheet of paper. “Thanks for seeing this 74-year-old gentleman with end-stage liver failure. He’s been following the news carefully and is eager to make a request for an assisted death. I hear you’ll be providing this service here in Victoria – courageous! I look forward to your assessment. Summary of his file is below.” I read it twice to myself before sharing it with Karen, my office manager. We look at each other for a short moment before I break the silence. “His name is Harvey. I’m going to need a chart.”

While Karen makes a chart for Harvey – demographics on the front sheet, blank request forms in the back – I dial his number. His wife, Norma, answers. As Harvey isn’t mobile, I agree to meet them at their home.

Three days later, I stand in my bathroom brushing my teeth and practising what I will say, the tone I want to set. If Harvey meets all the criteria, he will be the first patient to whom I will offer medical assistance in dying (MAiD), following its legalisation in Canada just a few days earlier, in June 2016.

At the time I had been practising medicine for more than 20 years, trained as a family physician, and focused on maternity and newborn care, preparing women and their families for the profound transition a new baby would bring to their lives. But when it became clear the law was about to change to allow MAiD, I changed course with it, learning everything I could about this newly emerging field so that I could support people with their final wishes and their transition at the other end of life.

When I arrive at Harvey’s home for the assessment, a man in his 70s with a bushy grey moustache opens the door and smiles sadly as he extends his hand. “Hi, thanks for coming. I’m Rod, Harvey’s brother-in-law.”

I cross the threshold and am ushered upstairs, where I see a man in a bathrobe and a woman sitting close together on a couch. “Hello, Doctor, thank you for coming,” she says, smiling. “I’m Norma.” Her hands fidgeting, she appears slightly nervous, or maybe just awkward. I recognise the same feeling within myself.

Dressed in grey pyjamas and covered with a warm blanket, Harvey looks years older than Norma. I notice his protuberant, fluid-filled abdomen and papery, yellowed skin, signs that his liver failure is advanced. I see his frail hands and gaunt, unshaved face. He likely has only weeks left to live.

“Good to meet you,” I say as I give his hand a squeeze. It is cool and bony, mottled with purple, and has little musculature left, but he holds on a little tighter and just a moment longer than I expect, slowly shifting his gaze to look me straight in the eye before letting go. I sit down in front of Harvey and ready myself to begin what I have been practising all morning. “I’d like to start by breaking the first rule of medical school.”

Harvey musters a sly grin, intrigued, but doesn’t say anything, which I take as an invitation to continue.

“In medical school, they taught me that when I meet a new patient, I should let them speak first … But I want to start by telling you something about myself. I want to tell you that I am pretty direct,” I say.

Harvey is egging me on with a slow, wobbly nod.

“We’re going to talk about death today, and we’re going to talk about dying,” I continue. “We’re going to talk about your death, and we’re going to talk about assisted dying. We’re also going to talk about what’s important to you. I’m going to talk about these things frankly. I’m not going to use euphemisms or talk about ‘passing over meadows’.” I pause and lower my voice, addressing Harvey directly. “You OK with that?”

I am relieved to see he is smiling. “Yes, that’s exactly what I hoped for,” he says. “No more bullshit.” His voice is a bit gravelly, but this last word comes out strong, emphatic. “We’re going to get along just fine,” he adds.

What to wear? All black seems morbid, bright colours too festive. I want to look professional but not cold, casual but no jeans

I get down to the essentials. “Why do you want to die?”

Harvey smirks. “I don’t! I’d rather live. I’ve had a great life. But it seems I no longer have much say in the matter.”

It’s my turn to nod.

“I’ve got great friends, great kids, we’re blessed with family all around us. I know I’m lucky. I’ve been married to this gal here for 52 years … ” He trails off, holds Norma’s hand, shakes it at me a bit and swallows some emotion before continuing. “I really wanted to make it to 52 years, and I did.” He’s quieter now, his energy already drained. “Now I’m ready.”

Harvey is straightforward with me. He knows he is dying, that it will not be long, but he wants to control the how and the when.

“I want Norma and the kids with me at the end,” he says with a flash of spirit, “here, in my home, in my own bedroom … I want to do it my way. I want to have my friends over this weekend, have one last bash, maybe even sneak a sip of a beer.” He smiles at the thought. “I’ve seen friends linger on at the end … in bed … out of their minds. I’m not interested in putting myself or my family through that.”

Harvey ticks every box of eligibility. He is capable of making his own decisions, he is making a voluntary request, and he has a grievous and irremediable condition. He will need to sign an official request form, and Norma assures me it will be completed by the end of the day, witnessed by two independent people. After that, a mandatory 10-day reflective period can begin. The law also requires a second clinical opinion, so I will call a local colleague to see if he is available.

The next few days are busy. As is expected with his liver failure, Harvey continues to decline cognitively. If he declines too much, too quickly, he won’t be able to give his final consent immediately before the procedure, which is required. Because the second doctor and I agree this risk is imminent, we are allowed to shorten the waiting period. Harvey chooses a date three days out.

True to his word, two days before his scheduled death, Harvey and Norma host an open house for friends and neighbours to celebrate his life and say goodbye. Meanwhile, I review all the practicalities and guidelines. I am keenly aware that if I get anything wrong, I could be liable for criminal charges. The words “up to 14 years in prison” keep flashing in the back of my mind. No one yet has a sense of the mood of the prosecutors. Are they waiting to meticulously comb through each case and make an example of a clinician who makes a mistake? I’m not willing to leave anything to chance. Harvey isn’t just my first assisted death. His is the first on Vancouver Island and among the first in Canada. I am aware that I need to get this right – for myself, for the MAiD programme but, most important, for Harvey.

---

It’s 16 June 2016, the day Harvey has chosen to die. This is all about him, but it’s momentous for everyone involved. This morning I stood in my bedroom, staring into my closet, considering choices and discarding them immediately. What does one wear to a scheduled death? All black seemed morbid, bright colours too festive. I wanted to look professional but not cold, casual but no jeans. How could this be the hardest part of my day? I’ll  be picking up the medication at 10am, I’m expected at Harvey’s by 11 and I suspect he’ll be dead before noon.

I pull up outside, close enough to have arrived, far enough that no one from inside can tell I’m here yet. I take a deep breath. In medical school, the saying was “see one, do one, teach one”. But in this case, there has been no way for me to “see one”. The law changed only a few days ago. I am about to take a big, blind step.

I leave the car and stride to the door. Once inside, I head upstairs. I catch Norma’s eye from across the room, but before I can get over to greet her, I meet Jessica, the nurse practitioner who will assist me, standing at the top of the stairs in her scrubs and stocking feet. All I can think of is that I do not want the family to suspect we have never actually met. I don’t want to do anything that might remind them I have never done this before.

There are eight close family members in the house. I ask to speak privately with Harvey for a few minutes and am told he’s in his bedroom, so I head there. Sitting in the chair by the bed, I begin, “How was your night?”

“It was what it was,” he replies. “I’m ready to go. I need this to be over today.”

The official purpose of this talk is for me to verify that Harvey is still clear of mind, that he still wishes to proceed and, if so, to obtain his final consent.

“Are you having any second thoughts?”

“No, none at all.”

Harvey reassures me that his affairs are all in order; his funeral plans have been made, the names of his lawyer and his accountant have been written out for the family. He expresses some concern about those he will be leaving behind. I try to reassure him I will provide them with some resources.

“Thank you for making this possible.”

I don’t recall who reached out first or when we began holding hands, but, once again, he is holding mine a little longer and a little tighter than expected.

“You know, I’m a little scared.”

“Of course you are … that’s OK.”

We talk, take the time we need. No one is in a rush.

“What do you think comes next, Dr Green?”

“I really don’t know, Harvey. What do you think?”

“I’m not a religious man, not even very spiritual. But I do not believe this is the end. It just can’t be.”

‘I join the family in the living room, explain the order of events, the number of syringes.’ Photograph: Rachel Pick/The Guardian

“OK. But what if it were, Harvey?” I ask. “What would you change, do differently?”

He continues to hold my hand. I hear his regrets – there are few – and of what he is most proud. I learn so much from Harvey. I am already grateful that he is my first MAiD patient.

At some point we both fall silent. I explain that I will go speak with his family about what to expect. By now I’ve reassured myself that he is still capable of making this choice. I hand him the required form and watch as he scratches out an unsteady version of his signature, then I join the family in the living room. I explain the order of events, the number of syringes – Harvey has chosen the intravenous option for his final medications – and the time for last words. I ask if there is any ritual or ceremony they’d like to incorporate, then I get down to the details. “The first medication is an anti-anxiety drug. It will make Harvey relax, feel pretty good, pretty sleepy. He’s already quite weak, so I expect he’ll fall quickly into a nice light sleep. We might hear him snore; that’s one way you’ll know he’s truly comfortable.”

I am trying to be as transparent and informative as I can.

“The second medication is a local anaesthetic to numb the vein. It may not be necessary if he is sleeping already, but some of the other medications can sting a bit, so I’ll use this to be sure he won’t feel any discomfort.”

I notice involuntary nodding from Harvey’s brother, his son. I recognise relief on Norma’s face and see blank stares on the others’ … the reality is starting to sink in.

“The third medication is the stuff we would normally give someone for an operation, except it’s a much larger dose. With this, Harvey will go into a much deeper sleep, down into a coma over the course of a couple minutes. If you’re looking carefully, you might notice his breathing begins to space out with this medication.”

I am using my hands now to gesture what is going to happen. “His breathing will become more shallow and will most likely stop.”

I am looking around, trying to judge reactions.

“Even though I expect Harvey will die with this third medication, I will go ahead and use the fourth in our protocol, which ensures there is no muscular movement in the body. I will let you know when his heart has stopped. This whole process is likely to last between eight and 10 minutes.” I lower my voice a little. “I do not expect you will see any gasping or twitching or anything unsettling. My goal is to make this as comfortable and as dignified as possible. But there is a real possibility his breathing will stop before his heart does. If that’s the case, you will likely see a paling of his face, maybe a bit of yellowing. His mouth might drop open slightly. His lips may turn a bit blue. If you find yourself uncomfortable at any time, please feel free to step back, sit down or step out. There is no medal for staying in the room. I will be focused on what I am doing, so I’ll need you to take care of yourselves in those few moments, if necessary. OK?”

Muted nods. A few people breathe out as if they hadn’t realised they were holding their breath.

“That’s the nuts and bolts of it. I expect it’s all feeling a bit real right now. Any questions?”

There’s a pregnant pause, then a previously quiet man in his mid-70s asks, “You got any extra of that anti-anxiety stuff, Doc? I could use a dose myself right now.”

Harvey’s wife tells him to let go. As on most nights of his life, hers are the last words he hears as he falls asleep

Back in Harvey’s room, he is calm, he is smiling, and he appears certain. His love for family has been evident from the start and they are all here with him now. We are huddled in closely around his bed. I ask if anyone has anything left unsaid. Harvey’s son reaches out from beside me and places his open palm directly on Harvey’s chest. He repeats that he loves Harvey and thanks him for being such a great dad. Harvey reminds them all that this is what he wants and asks them not to be sad.

I take hold of Harvey’s left arm. Only after he looks me in the eye and thanks me one last time do I think to begin. When I announce I will start, I sense Jessica reach out from behind me. I didn’t realise how tense I was until she put her hand on my back. I feel myself relax as I push the first medication through the syringe.

“Maybe now is a good time to think of a great memory,” I begin, “doing something you loved, with someone you loved … Go to that place now, feel that moment again … If you feel sleepy, go ahead and close your eyes, you’ve earned it. We’re all here with you.”

Then Harvey dies exactly as he wished: being held by his children and gazing into the eyes of his wife as he begins to feel sleepy. They connect, forehead to forehead, whispering to each other as I continue. She holds his face in her hands, strokes his head and tells him it’s OK. She tells him she loves him, that she will miss him, but that she is all right. She whispers inaudible words, evoking private memories, and he smiles. The intimacy of this moment is so absorbing that I struggle to focus on what I’m doing. She tells him to let go, that she is here with him, and as on most nights of his life, hers are the last words he hears as he falls asleep.

Harvey musters a light snore. Norma recognises the sound and dabs at her eyes. I continue with my protocol, and Harvey soon stops breathing; no one says anything, but I am certain we all take notice. I understand in that moment that I am witnessing this event as much as I am orchestrating it. I continue on to the final medication and immediately notice it doesn’t flow as smoothly as the others did. I have an instant of panic, wondering if my IV line is blocked, but it takes only a moment for me to understand it’s because Harvey’s blood is no longer circulating. I am certain his heart has stopped, but I continue nonetheless. Only after the last medication is delivered do I cap and lock the IV. Only after the empty syringes are resealed within the plastic container do I reach for my stethoscope. And only after I listen for a complete 60 seconds do I announce, “He’s gone.”

Only then do his family members allow themselves to be overcome by their loss. There are sobs, tight-clenched hugs and flowing tears. To my utter astonishment, there is also an immediate outpouring of gratitude for what I have just done, and for this, I’ll admit, I was unprepared.

---

By February 2017 I’d gone from being a beginner in a new field of medicine to feeling more certain of what I was doing. I was becoming known among local family practitioners and specialists for my work in assisted dying, and the number of referrals to my office continued to climb. The latest concerned a patient called Edna, whose worsening multiple system atrophy was affecting every aspect of her life. Two weeks earlier, her palliative care physician, Dr Vass, had been visiting when she’d asked him for MAiD by scratching out letters on a whiteboard. It was one week after her 77th birthday, just after she’d returned home from a hospitalisation, and she had repeated her plea several times since.

Edna managed a slight smile upon my arrival at her home a few days later, but her eyes seemed locked in a blank gaze. I noticed her frail body was strapped into her padded chair to stay upright. Before I even began, Edna was already scratching on the whiteboard. I waited for her to finish, three letters that said it all: “D-i-E”.

I was surprised and thankful she was still able to write. She looked up and I thought she was done. She uttered a sound I didn’t understand, then brought the marker down forcefully, drawing my attention to her message. “D-i-E P-L-S-!”

Request received.

Edna was close to her sister, Mindy, from whom I learned that Edna had been a pioneer for most of her life, one of only two women to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biology from her college back in 1960. She taught high school science for two decades, did a few stints as the principal of two schools, then retired from her post as superintendent of the school district at 68. An avid hiker and a supporter of women’s rights, Edna had remained active and involved in various volunteer positions until her diagnosis overwhelmed her.

Edna was now unable to walk or talk, and had become dependent on others for care. Recently, she’d been losing the ability to swallow, and had landed in hospital last month after aspirating food into her lungs. There was talk of inserting a feeding tube into her stomach. She didn’t want that. She saw no reason to prolong her life as it was, but did not wish to starve to death.

I spoke again to Dr Vass and two weeks later I returned to Edna’s bedside with the news that I was convinced she was eligible, and I was willing to help her. She drew a happy face … no eyes, just a smile. We then turned to practical matters. Edna had been raised in a religious home and still had family who were deeply faithful. She’d been worried about their reaction, so she’d kept much of the decision-making to herself. Now she would share her choice, and hoped they’d be willing to join her on the day of her death. With Mindy’s help, we discussed some of the obstacles she foresaw, and I arranged for a hospice counsellor to facilitate what everyone expected would be a difficult conversation.

It didn’t go well. The counsellor said she had encouraged people to express their feelings and listen to others’ points of view, but much of the meeting had felt like a sermon: “As her brother was talking, she took the time to write out ‘CHRiStN ANtAgONiSM’. I’d say she’s determined to proceed.” When I returned to talk about choreographing the day of her death, Edna informed me that her relatives would not be joining us.

On the afternoon of Edna’s scheduled death, I arrived at her home expecting it would be a quiet affair. Instead, I walked into a chaotic scene. I could hear a man’s voice yelling as I opened the front door. Edna’s nephew Andrew and his wife were standing at the foot of her bed, pleading with her to reconsider.

“They have poisoned your mind!” Andrew thundered. “The church will never condone this. Your soul will never rest.” His anger was mounting. “We will never condone this!”

“Good afternoon,” I announced loudly. The yelling stopped immediately. “I’m Dr Green.”

Edna looked calm, but her face was hard to read. I asked Andrew and his wife if we might talk in another room. I told them I respected their position, but it really didn’t matter what they wanted or believed: “This decision is Edna’s and Edna’s alone.”

Andrew lapsed into silence. He stood up abruptly, then sat back down. “How can it be possible that, as a close family member, my arguments won’t be taken into account?” he asked.

I assured him his arguments were important but only in relation to his own healthcare and no one else’s. “This is unconscionable!” he began ramping up again. “If you proceed, I’ll call the police. In fact, I’ll call them anyway. This must be stopped. You cannot just kill my aunt.”

I was concerned to see him so upset, but Edna’s diagnosis was clear and she had made a voluntary, formal request. I felt sorry for her family, I understood they would need support, but I would not be bullied out of my responsibilities, nor would I let them bully Edna.

“You can call,” I said. “I suspect they will be helpful in enforcing the law and escorting you out of this house.” Then I checked my tone and took a breath. “It would be a shame if that were Edna’s final memory of you.” We stared at each other in silence.

“I see,” he said, and stood up once more. “Alice, we are leaving. We’ve done what we could. Aunt Edna will pay the price. I will not attend her murder.”

And with that, they walked out. Mindy was just arriving, but they did not stop to talk. I was saddened to see them go, but I was also relieved.

In an odd twist of fate, I was alone at this procedure. There had been a conflict in scheduling, so Jessica had come by earlier to start the IV, then left. In the end there was just Edna, Mindy and me in the bedroom, and Edna used the whiteboard to provide her consent. When I asked if she was ready to begin, she grunted and nodded slightly, then grabbed my hand and squeezed firmly, three times. I didn’t really know what her hand squeezes meant, but they felt like a thank you to me. For a woman who couldn’t speak any more, I thought she’d communicated beautifully. I began.

Later, alone in my car, I ran over the events in my mind. Andrew referring to Edna’s death as a murder had been upsetting, even though I knew it was purposeful hyperbole. I had to remind myself it was Edna’s disease that was killing her and my role was only to facilitate her free will. Afterwards I asked colleagues if they’d ever encountered such resistance, and I’m sorry to say I wasn’t alone. Much more common, though, were friends or family members who declined to attend, citing differences in values, but remained respectful of their loved one’s right to do as they pleased.

I spent several weeks worrying about whether Edna’s event might lead to a complaint to the professional licensing body. I was confident of the outcome, but dreaded having to go through the process. I took comfort in the fact that, in the end, Edna died with dignity, holding the hand of a person who loved her, confident in her decision and empowered by a rights-based legal system. I’m happy to report no complaint was made.

This is an edited extract from This Is Assisted Dying: A Doctor’s Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life by Stefanie Green, published by Simon & Schuster on 27 March at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/15/were-going-to-talk-about-death-today-your-death-a-doctor-on-what-its-like-to-end-a-life-rather-than-extend-one

I thought this was an excellent discussion of a topic which I still find somewhat unsettling. At an intellectual level I am comfortable in easing severe unending suffering when it is needed but I still have a concern about the mechanics and actuality of the process and think careful reflection upon actions in this domain is vital.

Despite knowing this is a desired outcome by a clearly well supported and genuinely requesting patient at the practical end of their life one still has to take careful pause….

I am not at all sure I could be an active participant in delivering such care, although I am sure knowing the patient, their circumstances and the degree of their suffering would make such action far easier

How do you feel about personal involvement in such processes?

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 785 – Results – 16 March 2025.

Here are the results of the poll.

Are The Terrible Floods In Northern NSW Being Managed Reasonably Well By State And Commonwealth Governments?

Yes                                                                    26 (90%)

No                                                                       2  (7%)

I Have No Idea                                                   1 (5%)

Total No. Of Votes: 29

A clear outcome with most feeling Government is actually helping. This would make a change!!!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

Fair voter turnout. 

1 of 29 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

Will Australia Ever See An AUKUS Submarine? I Think Not!

This appeared last week:

Aukus

Surface tension: could the promised Aukus nuclear submarines simply never be handed over to Australia?

The multi-billion dollar deal was heralded as ensuring the security of the Indo-Pacific. But with America an increasingly unreliable ally, doubts are rising above the waves

Ben Doherty

Fri 7 Mar 2025 01.00 AEDT

Maybe Australia’s boats just never turn up.

To fanfare and flags, the Aukus deal was presented as a sure bet, papering over an uncertainty that such an ambitious deal could ever be delivered.

It was assured, three publics across two oceans were told – signed, sealed and to-be-delivered: Australia would buy from its great ally, the US, its own conventionally armed nuclear-powered attack submarines before it began building its own.

But there is an emerging disquiet on the promise of Aukus pillar one: it may be the promised US-built nuclear-powered submarines simply never arrive under Australian sovereign control.

Instead, those nuclear submarines, stationed in Australia, could bear US flags, carry US weapons, commanded and crewed by American officers and sailors.

Australia, unswerving ally, reduced instead to a forward operating garrison – in the words of the chair of US Congress’s house foreign affairs committee, nothing more than “a central base of operations from which to project power”.

Reliable ally no longer

Officially at least, Aukus remains on course, centrepiece of a storied security alliance.

Pillar one of the Australia-UK-US agreement involves, first, Australia buying between three and five Virginia-Class nuclear-powered submarines from the US – the first of these in 2032.

Then, by the “late 2030s”, according to Australia’s submarine industry strategy, the UK will deliver the first specifically designed and built Aukus submarine. The first Australian-built version will be in the water “in the early 2040s”. Aukus is forecast to cost up to $368bn to the mid-2050s.

But in both Washington and Canberra, there is growing concern over the very first step: America’s capacity to build the boats it has promised Australia, and – even if it had the wherewithal to build the subs – whether it would relinquish them into Australian control.

We cannot assume that the Americans will always turn up

Malcolm Turnbull

The gnawing anxiety over Aukus sits within a broader context of a rewritten rulebook for relations between America and its allies. Amid the Sturm und Drang of the first weeks of Trump’s second administration, there is growing concern that the reliable ally is no longer that.

With the casual, even brutal, dismissal of Ukraine – an ally for whom the US has provided security guarantees for a generation – the old certainties exist no longer.

“I think America is a much less dependable ally under [president] Trump than it was,” the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull tells the Guardian this week. “And this is not a criticism of Trump, this is literally a feature, not a bug: he’s saying that he’s less dependable.

“It may be that – regrettably – we do end up with no submarines. And then we have to invest in other ways of defending ourselves. But the big message is that we are going to have to look at defending Australia by ourselves.

“That’s really the issue. We cannot assume that the Americans will always turn up.”

Trump can hardly be accused of hiding his priorities. If the 47th president has a doctrine beyond self-interest, “America First” has been his shibboleth since before his first term.

“Our allies have taken advantage of us more so than our enemies,” he said on the campaign trail. He told his inauguration: “I will, very simply, put America first.”

‘The cheque did clear’

On 8 February, Australia paid $US500m ($AUD790m) to the US, the first instalment in a total of $US3bn pledged in order to support America’s shipbuilding industry. Aukus was, Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles said, “a powerful symbol of our two countries working together in the Indo-Pacific”.

“It represents a very significant increase of the American footprint on the Australian continent … it represents an increase in Australian capability, through the acquisition of a nuclear‑powered submarine capability … it also represents an increase in Australian defence spending”.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth – joking that “the cheque did clear” – gave succour to Aukus supporters, saying his country’s mission in the Indo-Pacific was not one “that America can undertake by itself”.

“Allies and partners, technology sharing and subs are a huge part of it.”

But, just three days after Australia’s cheque cleared, the Congressional Research Service quietly issued a paper saying while the nuclear-powered attack submarines (known as SSNs) intended for Australia might be built, the US could decide to never hand them over.

It said the post-pandemic shipbuilding rate in the US was so anaemic that it could not service the needs of the US Navy alone, let alone build submarines for another country’s navy.

Under a proposed alternative, “up to eight additional Virginia-class SSNs would be built, and instead of three to five of them being sold to Australia, these additional boats would instead be retained in US Navy service and operated out of Australia along with the five US and UK submarines that are already planned to be operated out of Australia”.

The paper argued that Australia, rather than spending money to buy, build and sail its own nuclear-powered submarines, would instead invest that money in other military capabilities – long-range missiles, drones, or bombers – “so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States”.

On some forecasts, the US is projected to have half the working submarines it needs in 2032 and is building new boats at half the rate it needs to.

Trump believes it can be fixed. He told an address to Congress-cum-campaign rally this week he would “resurrect the American shipbuilding industry” by establishing a new “office of shipbuilding” inside the White House.

“We’re going to make them very fast, very soon.”

A sunken history

Submarines have long presented logistical and political turmoil for Australian governments.

The country’s first submarine, HMAS AE1, hit the sea floor near Papua New Guinea in September 1914, barely seven months into service. All hands were lost. The second was scuttled by its crew the next year after five days of operations during the Gallipoli campaign.

In 1919, Australia was “gifted” six obsolete J-class submarines by Britain. They were sold for scrap within five years. Subsequent decades brought persistent issues with costs and crewing and difficulties simply keeping boats in the water.

The nation’s current submarine fleet, the Collins-class fleet, was built over two decades from 1990, with the first boat put to sea in 1996.

But to replace that now-ageing class, three different submarine designs have been pursued by successive governments, with boats to be built by Japan, France and now – under Aukus – the US and UK.

Indecision has brought delay, and with it, a capability gap: a vulnerability exposed in recent weeks when a flotilla of Chinese warships – perhaps accompanied by an undetected nuclear submarine – circumnavigated Australia, and undertook allegedly unforecast live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea.

‘They have no obligation to sell us a submarine’

In 2016 then prime minister Turnbull signed a $50bn deal with the French Naval Group for new diesel-electric submarines to be built in Australia.

That agreement – which had subsequently encountered delays and cost over-runs – was unilaterally cancelled by his successor, Scott Morrison, who, in 2021, dramatically signed Aukus with US president Joe Biden and UK prime minister Boris Johnson. None of these men are in office any more.

Turnbull argues pillar one of the Aukus deal was a “catastrophe” from conception, and its liabilities “are becoming more apparent every day”.

“We are spending a fortune vastly more than the partnership with France would have involved. We’re spending vastly more and we are very likely, I would say almost certainly, going to end up with no submarines at all.

“We’re giving the Americans US$3bn to support their submarine industrial base, but they have no obligation to sell us a submarine.”

He says Morrison’s agreement to Aukus “sacrificed Australia’s honour, sovereignty and security”.

“Australia has to be sovereign. It has to have sovereign autonomy. We need to be more self-reliant. Unfortunately, the problem with Aukus was that it made Australia much more dependent on the United States at a time when America was becoming less dependable.”

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, now serving as ambassador to the US, said from Washington DC this week the Aukus deal has been consistently reaffirmed under the new Trump administration, including by the defence secretary, Hegseth, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

He said Aukus would equip Australia with the “most advanced weaponry in the world”.

The submarines “will have … a lethality and utility across the Indo Pacific, which will make Australia more secure in the decades ahead”.

“This is a multi-decadal, multi-billion dollar investment by the Australian government.”

And Rudd told a University of Tennessee audience last month that Aukus was in the interests of both the US and Australia.

“The strategic geography of Australia is quite critical to America’s long-term strategic interests in the wider Indo-Pacific. It’s good for us that you’re there,” he told his American audience, “it’s good for you that we are there”.

This is a key argument behind the Aukus agreement, bolstering the belief of those who argue it can and will deliver: Aukus is a good deal for America. Bases on Australian soil – most notably Pine Gap and HMAS Stirling (as a base for submarines) – are critical for US “force projection” in the Indo-Pacific.

But the same argument in favour of Aukus is also used by its critics: that Australia is being exploited for its geo-strategic location – as an outpost of US military might.

‘Almost inevitable’

Clinton Fernandes, professor of international and political Studies at the University of New South Wales and a former Australian Army intelligence analyst, says the Aukus deal only makes sense when the “real” goal of the agreement is sorted from the “declared”.

“The real rather than declared goal is to demonstrate Australia’s relevance to US global supremacy,” he tells the Guardian.

“The ‘declared goal’ is that we’re going to become a nuclear navy. The ‘real goal’ is we are going to assist the United States and demonstrate our relevance to it as it tries to preserve an American-dominated east Asia.”

Fernandes, author of Sub-Imperial Power, says Australia will join South Korea and Japan as the US’s “sentinel states in order to hold Chinese naval assets at risk in its own semi-enclosed seas”.

“That’s the real goal. We are demonstrating our relevance to American global dominance. The government is understandably uneasy about telling the public this, but in fact, it has been Australia’s goal all along to preserve a great power that is friendly to us in our region.”

Fernandes says the Aukus pillar one agreement “was always an article of faith” based on a premise that the US could produce enough submarines for itself, as well as for Australia.

“And the Congressional Research Service study argues that … they will not have enough capacity to build boats for both themselves and us.”

He argues the rotation of US nuclear-powered submarines through Australian bases – particularly HMAS Stirling in Perth – needs to be understood as unrelated to Aukus and to Australia developing its own nuclear-powered submarine capability.

“Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-W) is presented by the spin doctors as an ‘optimal pathway’ for Aukus. In fact, it is the forward operational deployment of the United States Navy, completely independent of Aukus. It has no connection to Aukus.”

The retired rear admiral and past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, Peter Briggs, argues the US refusing to sell Virginia-class submarines to Australia was “almost inevitable”, because the US’s boat-building program was slipping too far behind.

“It’s a flawed plan, and it’s heading in the wrong direction,” he tells the Guardian.

Before any boat can be sold to Australia, the US commander-in-chief – the president of the day – must certify that America relinquishing a submarine will not diminish the US Navy’s undersea capability.

“The chance of meeting that condition is vanishingly small,” Briggs says.

It now takes the US more than five years to build a single submarine (it was between three and 3.5 years before the pandemic devastated the workforce). By 2031, when the US is set to sell its first submarine to Australia, it could be facing a shortfall of up to 40% of the expected fleet size, Briggs says.

Australia, he argues, will be left with no submarines to cover the retirement from service of the current Collins-class fleet, weakened by an unwise reliance on the US.

The nuclear-powered submarines Australia wants to buy and then build “are both too big, too expensive to own and we can’t afford enough of them to make a difference”.

He argues Australia must be clear-eyed about the systemic challenges facing Aukus and should look elsewhere. He nominates going back to France to contemplate ordering Suffren-class boats – a design currently in production, smaller and requiring fewer crew, “a better fit for Australia’s requirements”.

“We should have done all this 10 years ago. Of course, it’s too late, but the alternative is no submarines at all … that’s not a good idea. They give us a capability that nothing else does.

“It’s worth the hunt.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/07/surface-tension-could-the-promised-aukus-nuclear-submarines-simply-never-be-handed-over-to-australia

It looks like all the nuclear sub options are fantasy and we really should get into an agreement with Japan for 3-4 modern conventional boats to replace the Collins Class boats. I suspect that is the best we can do! Anything else looks like a fantasy.....

David.

Trump Is Working On Economic Self - Destruction And We Will Probably Get Caught Right In The Middle!

This appeared last week:

Trump’s tariffs up-end world economic order

Updated 1:46 AM March 08, 2025

When the stockmarket is buoyant, Donald Trump likes to claim it is a sign of his policy success. After the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 650 points on Monday following the President’s announcement that he was hitting US trade treaty partners Mexico and Canada with 25 per cent tariffs, it was clear that turmoil would be part of his promised “golden age” – in the US, for economic allies including Australia and for potential adversaries such as China. Australian investors are being affected, too, with local markets jittery.

After overturning the post-World War II strategic order that served the free world well for 80 years, the Trump regime seems intent on embracing 17th-century mercantilism, in which European nations sought to build wealth through favourable trade balances. That regressive ideology ignores the practical advantages of freer trading, achieved through decades of painstaking international negotiations. It also ignores the fact economic and strategic uncertainty fosters bear markets.

We can only assume, however, that some of the absurd statements coming out of Beijing and Washington about fighting to the end in a trade war, or any other war, are hot air. Likewise White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comment that Mr Trump “felt strongly” that it would be beneficial for Canada to become part of the US. “They wouldn’t be paying for these tariffs,” she said, suggesting the idea of national sovereignty had gone by the board in some spheres.

Aside from populist “bring jobs home” rhetoric, Mr Trump’s motivation, Adam Creighton writes, is revenue raising to offset the $US2 trillion ($3.1 trillion) in annual fiscal deficits Washington has recorded for years. But to the detriment of US consumers, business and the economy, the tariff war will not be one way. And it will come at a high price. Cost-of-living pressures were a key issue at the 2024 US election but economists warn that sweeping tariffs on American imports are likely to increase inflation, not reduce it, in the near term and could slow down growth.

As a trade-exposed economy, Australia also has a lot at stake, Jim Chalmers said this week. “We’re already in one way or another impacted by the substantial slowing in the Chinese economy,” the federal Treasurer told the ABC. “And what we’re seeing around the world risks slower global growth, it risks higher global inflation, and that’s why it’s of concern to us.”

Despite the Australia-US free trade agreement in place since 2005 and Australia making a good case, time is running out for the Albanese government to secure exemptions before US tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium are imposed next week. Australia’s direct exposure to US tariffs levied on our exports is limited. The greater risk for the national economy, Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser said this week, would occur if US tariffs on third countries triggered a global trade war that impaired our trade and financial links more broadly: “As Australia’s long history has shown, we thrive when trade, labour and assets flow freely in the global economy, but we suffer when countries turn inward.”

The Trump team is especially focused on China’s $US295bn trade surplus with the US, the widest of any US trading partner. The “America first” policy calls for dismantling the norms set up by the World Trade Organisation since 1995, under which China has been able to flood the world with cheap exports while limiting access to its own markets. The world’s two largest economies are locked in tit-for-tat economic hostilities. On Tuesday, after Mr Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports by a further 10 per cent, China responded with 10 to 15 per cent tariffs on US agricultural exports such as beef, wheat, corn and soybeans. That could open opportunities for Australian exporters, though experience of recent years shows our interest is best served by a diversity of markets.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/trumps-tariffs-upend-world-economic-order/news-story/61405875dd209f9223795b5e564be6b3

Sadly because of our size and open trading positioning we could be hurt pretty badly if Trump pushes on with his economic plans. Frankly thinking he will be kind to us as he beats up on the rest of the world is a fiction. We are in the firing line, I reckon, just as much as Europe, the UK Asia and so on!

Just wait and see how all this plays out! Badly I fear.....

David.

This Is An Excellent Clear-Eyed Analysis Of Our Strategic Positioning – And It Is Not Great!

This appeared last week:

David Kilcullen

Trump’s gift to the world: a wake-up call to geopolitical reality

Updated 12:02 PM March 08, 2025

About a fortnight ago a Chinese naval task group led by a Renhai-class guided missile cruiser, one of the most powerful surface combatants in Beijing’s fleet, passed well within cruise-missile range of the Royal Australian Navy’s Fleet Base East in Sydney, then conducted an unannounced live-fire drill in the Tasman Sea, disrupting commercial airline traffic, before turning west into the Great Australian Bight.

Australian aircraft and warships shadowed the task group and Foreign Minister Penny Wong challenged her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, at the Johannesburg G20 summit that both were attending. Questions were raised at Senate estimates and a political debate broke out. In normal times, this incident would have dominated national-security news for days. These are not normal times.

The task group’s transit overlapped with a visit to Australia by US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo – but neither the White House nor the Pentagon issued a statement on the Chinese warships. Instead, anyone watching the American media last week would have seen US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as a US-Ukrainian minerals deal fell over amid sharp recriminations.

After his shouting match with Trump, Zelensky flew to London for crisis talks with European leaders. That same weekend, Russian forces captured two more villages in Ukraine’s east and a Russian missile strike killed up to 150 Ukrainian troops and 30 foreign instructors near the town of Dnipro. The next day Washington suspended all military assistance to Ukraine with immediate effect and two days later cut all intelligence support, damaging Ukraine’s air defences and hampering its ability to launch long-range missile strikes.

Vance mocked an Anglo-French peacekeeping force proposed during Europe’s talks with Zelensky, on the basis that a US minerals deal would have been “a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. French forces fought in Afghanistan, of course, and British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; both committed forces for the campaign against Islamic State, and all NATO nations contributed to at least one of these wars.

Given all this, it may surprise some readers to hear that I consider Trump to be a valuable gift.

Trump is a gift because his brash, mercurial demeanour – unpleasant though it may be – is a blessing in disguise. His abrasiveness scrubs away the veneer of fine words that often obscures the nature of America’s relationship with allies.

For Americans, phrases such as “the free world”, the “rules-based international order” or the “shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific” help soften the transactional reality of US global primacy, which – while also benefiting others, including Australia – was set up by Washington primarily in America’s own interests.

For Australians, this reality is sometimes shrouded by sentimentality about ANZUS or AUKUS, a supposed alliance of democracies, the memory of America “saving” Australia from Japanese invasion during World War II, or the belief that a common language and shared cultures somehow outweigh national interests. They do not.

Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary in 1848, famously argued that “we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

Seventy years later, US president Woodrow Wilson told a British audience “not (to) speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither … There are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests.”

Australian governments, whatever their declared policies, have always understood this, recognising that our prosperity and safety depend on a stable, peaceful global environment that historically we have been too small to secure on our own. Australian strategists must therefore reckon with the real-world mismatch between our vast territory, our globally connected, trade-dependent economy and our small population.

As the planet’s sixth-largest country by area, Australia has the world’s 12th-largest economy by nominal GDP but only its 54th largest population. We are separated by sea from trading partners, and our national survival depends on lengthy maritime supply chains. In consequence, we have followed what I once called the “forward school of Australian statecraft”, in which we partner with whatever great power, or group of powers, comes closest to sharing our values while also being able to secure the global environment.

By contributing to a stable, secure, connected international system underwritten by a friendly power, we advance our own interests.

For 40 years, from 1901 to 1941, that friendly power was the British Empire. Australia’s strategy was to support the empire economically and militarily, participating in free trade within (but not outside) the empire and contributing to expeditionary operations – from Sudan to South Africa, Gallipoli to the Somme – in return for the security and prosperity only a friendly, world-spanning empire could provide.

To be sure, the imperial defence relationship was more than merely transactional: there were (and are) strong ties of blood and affection between Britain and Australia – and, of course, we share a head of state.

But in 1941, when the empire proved unable to deliver, Australia immediately and unceremoniously pivoted to the US. As prime minister John Curtin wrote three weeks after Pearl Harbor, “without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”. Since then, and especially since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in September 1951, Australia has looked to the US as our principal partner.

Bipartisan support for the alliance, real friendliness between our two peoples and the democratic ideals that both governments profess should not blind us to the underlying hard-power reality of Australia’s relationship with the US. We partner with Washington not for sentimental reasons but because we need an ally powerful enough to stabilise the global system, yet friendly enough to do so without harming our interests or limiting our local freedom of action.

Academic and former Australian Army intelligence analyst Clinton Fern­andes has called Australia a “sub-imperial power”. One may quibble with his choice of words but this is precisely the point: underlying realities, not surface sentiments, are what matter in geopolitics.

Even with America’s recent run of internal instability, external defeats and failures of deterrence, no other global power currently is strong enough and friendly enough to fit the bill. If one were to emerge and the US ceased to hold up its end of the bargain, one may imagine a future Curtin – equally without pangs or inhibitions – throwing in our lot with that other power.

No such power exists. But what if Washington were simultaneously declining in relative military strength, lacking in national will to secure the global system, moving out of alignment with our values, damaging our trade, bullying partners and becoming unreliable as an ally? What if, at the same time, no other power were strong or friendly enough to take America’s place? In that case, 124 years after Federation, we would have to stand on our own feet and, finally and fully, grasp our independence. That would be hard and very costly, but it might still be the right thing to do, to serve our interests over the long term.

We would have no choice but to spend significantly more on defence and, importantly, to stop thinking of national security as a specialist skill practised by a small cadre of professionals on behalf of the rest of society. We would have to be “all in” as a nation, putting mobilisation, resilience and self-reliance – in defence, yes, but also in energy, industry, technology, education, health and agriculture – at the heart of all aspects of policy. We would need to focus on national cohesion, political will and shared culture. We would have to treat neighbours as more important than distant allies, however friendly.

In such a hypothetical scenario, where our traditional nuclear-armed ally was no longer reliable, Australia might need its own sovereign nuclear deterrent, or at least an extremely capable array of long-range non-nuclear strike assets. We would certainly need powerful theatre-level missile defences to compensate for loss of US extended deterrence. We would need a much larger and more powerful navy, and an army and air force capable of projecting substantial forces at scale, over long duration and alone, if necessary, across our region. All of this would cost more for our economy, and demand more of our people, than a policy of outsourcing security to distant allies. It would be costly and controversial – and pursuing it would demand considerable political will and leadership skill.

Paradoxically, Australia’s increased capacity and self-reliance in this scenario would make us much more valuable as an ally. We could contribute more – and could expect greater consideration of our national interests – in any alliance effort we chose to join. Rather than being taken for granted, Australia’s voice would carry more weight in any council of war, as well as in peacetime deliberations. Australia would be, in short, an adult among adults, a regional great power in our own right.

Some may argue the ANZUS alliance already gives us a security guarantee, offering such strong assurances of US assistance in the event of conflict that we would be foolhardy to abandon it. I agree wholeheartedly with the last part – it would be the height of folly to recklessly walk away from the alliance. I concur with Wong and opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, among many others, that ANZUS is a central pillar of Australia’s national security. But for anyone who thinks ANZUS gives us a guarantee of security, I have bad news: the alliance offers no such thing.

Articles II and III of the treaty commit the signatories to “maintain and develop their individual capacity to resist armed attack” and “consult together, whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific”. Article IV, the closest ANZUS comes to a security guarantee, merely notes that each party recognises that “an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes”.

Contrast this with article five of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, signed in 1949, two years before ANZUS. Article five makes no mention of “constitutional processes”. The signatories simply state that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and … if such an armed attack occurs, each of them (will) assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

ANZUS is far less direct, and much less of a commitment: American “constitutional processes” do not commit the US government to respond in kind to an armed attack on Australia: far from it. Rather, to paraphrase Wilson in 1918, there are only two things that might do so: community of ideals and of interests. All of this is obvious, of course, to anyone who thinks about this stuff for a living – it’s just that not many people do.

To the extent that ANZUS encourages us to outsource thinking on national security, trusting that somebody else has us covered, it can harm us by encouraging passive complacency. In this sense, over-dependence on the alliance could be considered a contemporary version of the Singapore strategy, the between-the-wars policy that allowed successive Australian governments to economise on defence spending as “successive British governments assured their Australian counterparts that, in the event of Japanese southward expansion, a battle fleet could be in Singapore within six weeks”.

In the event, as every schoolchild knows, no fleet materialised: Singapore fell and Australia found itself fighting for its life, largely alone, for the next year. Could we hold out against similar odds, without our major ally, for a similar time today? To take one example, could we secure the global petroleum imports without which Australia runs out of fuel in seven to eight weeks? A Chinese flotilla in the Tasman Sea, alarming Australians but largely ignored in Washington, underlines the urgency of that question.

A recent incident involving Chinese live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea has highlighted a concerning "failure" in communication between the Australian Defence Force and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

In the wake of last week’s events, Europeans are experiencing an overdue wake-up call as Trump not only continues demanding that NATO nations spend more on defence but also imposes tariffs on allies, while Vance mocks Europe’s military prowess and both Trump and Vance publicly scold Zelensky while cutting aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.

Former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has acknowledged this, writing in The Wall Street Journal on February 11: “The world needs a policeman – and since World War II the US has filled that role. But what if the policeman no longer exercises his authority over geopolitical gangsters – or becomes abusive toward the world’s most steadfast rule followers?” Rasmussen is not wrong, but it is a little odd to see European leaders now acting so surprised over a policy shift President Trump has been telegraphing for years.

More broadly, Trump is different in style but not necessarily in substance from previous US presidents. In his call for NATO to spend more on defence, he is using harsher language to make substantively the same request as his four predecessors. Presidents or policy advisers from both parties periodically make similar statements about Australia, though often conflating (as our own politicians also do) greater expenditure on weapon platforms with improved national defence capacity.

Australians should not make the mistake of focusing on Trump’s personality, thinking that Trump himself is the problem and that once he leaves the world stage things will somehow revert to normal. Rather, he represents the new normal for a global security environment that – as his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, noted in January – is increasingly multipolar and defined by great-power spheres of influence.

According to Rubio, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was ... a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.

“We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”

One might think that, if the new administration really regards the world as multipolar, it would perhaps be less dismissive of regional allies. Doing more in our own defence, agreeing when our interests align while being prepared to disagree when our values diverge, might paradoxically build respect in the relationship.

In an increasingly dangerous, multipolar and unstable global environment, Trump is a cold dose of reality. He offers us a valuable gift: a wake-up call, if we are willing to listen to it.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/trumps-gift-to-the-world-a-wakeup-call-to-geopolitical-reality/news-story/ae6cd3bcf40dab6b86d6a807c0bdb018

This all breaks down to two key points:

1. We live in dangerous times

2. We are going to have to work harder and spend more on defense.

Trump has given us fair warning and we need to get on with it! Thank you Dr Kilcullen for making the facts so clear!

David.

It Is Hard To Believe Any More In The American Alliance – We Are Really On Our Own.

To follow up from yesterday we have:

Cameron Stewart

Donald Trump’s AUKUS embarrassment shows insignificance of deal to the US President

Donald Trump has placed the AUKUS deal under threat.

Updated 5:30PM February 28, 2025

Donald Trump’s failure to recognise the term “AUKUS” was an embarrassment which tells us a few home truths about where this deal - which is central to Australia’s defence planning - ranks in the president’s head.

Trump’s amnesia might have briefly caused hearts to skip in Canberra, but it also won’t matter because in the end Trump is still likely to strongly support the nuclear submarine deal.

Why? Because AUKUS is a very Trumpian deal. Australia pumps an astonishing $US3bn into US submarine production with an expectation – which Trump will never have to honour because it will be beyond his term – that the US eventually sells us three Virginia-class submarines.

Why wouldn’t a transactionally minded American president like that sort of lopsided deal? Yet Trump’s inability to recognise the acronym AUKUS when asked about it in the Oval Office does tell us something about the different weight given to the importance of AUKUS in the US compared to Australia.

Donald Trump has asked what the AUKUS trilateral security partnership is in an Oval Office press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where both men talked about the prospects of securing a peace in Eastern Europe.

Yes, as Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton said, it is easy to trip over acronyms, and yes we shouldn’t read too much into it. But let’s be frank, any previous president would have done the basic preparation to understand the term AUKUS prior to meeting with British leader and AUKUS partner Keir Starmer. The fact that Trump didn’t even know the term suggests he has barely spent any time thinking about it or talking about it with his advisers.

That’s not great news for Australia. Yet that also will make no difference to whether or not Trump ultimately supports the deal. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says that Trump is fully aware of AUKUS and fully supportive of it, while Secretary of State and China hawk Marco Rubio has said AUKUS is “almost a blueprint’’ for how allied nations can work together to confront security challenges.

The Americans will almost certainly love AUKUS during Trump’s four-year term because they don’t need to make any hard decisions in relation to it. Until the end of this decade they just have to accept pots of money from Australia, which last month handed over a cheque for $800m as the first instalment of the eventual $US3bn to speed up the production of the Virginia-class submarines.

US President Donald Trump has remarked on the AUKUS alliance during his meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

It is the president who succeeds Trump who will have to make the hard decisions on AUKUS and this is where the issue becomes murky for Australia. At that point the then-US president will have the power to halt the planned sale of Virginia-class submarines to Australia from 2032 if it is judged that the loss of those submarines from the US fleet will undermine the fighting capabilities of the US military.

Given that the production of Virginia-class submarines is currently way behind schedule and unlikely to catch up by the 2030s when the sale to Australia is supposed to take place, it would be an easy argument for a president – backed by a hawkish congress – to make. That is when the going gets tough for AUKUS and for Australia. But not for Trump, who just has to kick back in the Oval Office and watch Australian taxpayers pour a small fortune into the US shipbuilding industry. Given that, why wouldn’t he support AUKUS, or whatever it’s called?

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/defence/donald-trump-will-come-to-love-aukus-even-if-he-cant-remember-its-name/news-story/96e43f9a0e5be2ebbabbd175f2df373c

I will stop chatting about this topic now as I believe the point has been made! There is nothing tat Marles or Albanese can say can change the fact that basically we are on our own in a way not seen since the imminent Japanese invasion of OZ in 1940/1.

Time to change a few spending priorities and shore up a few real alliances – like those with Europe and Asia. With Trump in charge I would not trust Trump as far as I could throw him!

David.