Australia was invaded last week. The invader did a lot of damage, similar to previous invasions over the past couple of decades. The invader took people’s homes; damaged the power grid; wrecked roads and bridges; and destroyed crops. All the things that invaders do.
And the invader will come again and again in greater force, destroying lives and property. The invader, of course, is the more violent weather caused by climate change. The same invader that killed 50 people in Texas last week.
This is the biggest national-security threat facing most countries.
This is the national-security threat that the nations of the earth should be spending 3.5 or even 5 per cent of GDP to address.
It provides the answer Australia should give to the preposterous US demand that we spend more on “defence” – a demand that really means wasting more money buying American weapons and adding to the $500 million already handed over to the Americans to bolster their shipyards to build submarines we will never get.
And what rent is the US paying on Pine Gap, the North-West Cape and the Darwin base, if anything? When are we going to question whether it is worth remaining such a close ally of the US?
What is the point of NATO increasing “defence” spending if NATO cannot use its undoubted force and ability to push the Russians out of Ukraine and arrest Putin to be tried for war crimes for which there is copious evidence?
The passing last week of the One Big Beautiful Bill reinforces the fact that the US no longer shares with us common values. The Bill slashes food, medical, and educational help from people who desperately need it to give money to the already wealthy who do not – in a way that runs counter to the Australian fair go. Just as the slashing of USAID is contrary to Australia values because it has killed innocent children.
Maybe we could ignore that. But, more profoundly, in the medium to long term, the Bill will likely damage the US and its position in the world so much economically that many American allies will question whether any alliance with them is worth continuing.
It is a tragic irony that President Donald Trump whose political success has relied on the slogan “Make America Great Again” has with this Bill and earlier actions attacked the two most important contributors to America’s historic greatness: the rule of law and technological superiority.
The rule of law provides the basis for economic strength. First, personal freedom (from arbitrary arrest and attack from government) nourishes individual economic activity. Secondly, the certainty that contracts will be impartially enforced; civil wrongs will be impartially addressed; and property rights respected underpins business confidence.
Without the rule of law, the risks cause investors to shy away.
Trump has undermined the world trading system and eroded the rule of law – bedrock Australian values – in America. Worse, the Supreme Court and the Congress have supinely allowed the erosion to go unchecked. Indeed, they have added to it. This is now not just a rogue President, but a nation that is losing any claim to holding the moral high ground.
The second, more corrosive, effect on American greatness comes with the Big Beautiful Bill’s attack on American technological progress. First, the Bill makes it harder for Americans to get a college education by slashing student-loan funding and direct funding to universities. This is slashing the arteries of American industrial and technological superiority.
Worse, the Bill removes tax incentives for electric vehicles and renewable electrification generally and provides more tax incentives for fossil vehicles and fossil industries generally.
In short, it hands to China on an electrolysis plate, all of the wealth and technological advantage of the energy revolution. China already manufactures 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels, 75 per cent of its batteries and 70 per cent of its EVs. The US is not even trying to catch up.
Developing nations are not going to waste their money and time transitioning through coal and gas as demand for electrical power rises. They will go straight to the Chinese renewable industry because the US has vacated the field.
It also hands to China the massive industry of making devices more electrically efficient: think LED light globes, induction stoves and the like.
Trump’s mad, ideological obsession against renewable energy has driven him to a position where his other obsession – the rise of China – is lost.
Hawks may well support an alliance with an immoral but strong nation, but surely they are misguided to so closely attach itself to a nation that sabotages its own economic and industrial strength?
Trump has also squandered America’s intelligence advantage, by surrounding himself with sycophants. Intelligence that tells a leader what he wants to hear is no intelligence at all. Who can forget the imagery of the sycophants who verbally told Putin that they agreed to his Ukraine invasion while their body language said it was mad.
US intelligence officials concocted evidence to say the illegal bombing of Iran neutralised the threat, when all it did was make Iran more determined.
And speaking of China and the rule of law, if the Chinese Communist Party wants to resume the civil war that ended in 1949, Australia should not get involved, even if the US does. We have wasted too much blood and treasure following the US into mad, bad and illegal wars: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. None of them achieved anything but death and destruction and more violence.
Taiwan is not a member of the UN. It does not even profess itself to be an independent nation. Yes, 20 million plus people are enjoying democratic rights which is terrific. But we should no more go to war with China to defend those rights than go to any of a score of African countries to do the same thing.
Where is the end game in all this sabre rattling? It is like the lead up to World War I. It will all be over by Christmas, they said, with more than four years of futile carnage before them.
And when will American jurists, legislators, and American people generally realise they are being led by an ignorant fool of an emperor who has no clothes?
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 8 July 2025.
Australia must hold at arm’s length the self-destruction path the US is pursuing. Albanese is following an interesting line in asserting a measure of Australian independent thought as regards Australian defence spending after the boorish demands from the US Defense Secretary at the Singapore Shangri-La conference.. Defence Minster Marle’s supplicant comment that ‘we’d be up or that’, .referring to the US demand to increase spending to 3.5% was rightly slapped down by the PM.
The ADF is in no way capable of becoming involved in a US-China confrontation over Taiwan. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review defines our Area of Direct Military Interest as the North East Indian Ocean, South East Asia and the South Pacific. It doesn’t include the South China Sea above the Philippines.
It is deeply disturbing that the (very small) Opposition considers we have no option but to join the US in a war over Taiwan. Yet a significant minority of Taiwanese votes for the Kuomintang, which supports closer relations with China. Why, then, would any sane government of Australia buy into another never-ending war alongside the US? The Taiwanese are in a sense more Chinese than the Chinese. It’s sad that they might lose their freedom, but as with Hong Kong, the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, or a US takeover of Greenland, our opposition should be limited to restating our values.
The media is partly to blame as it doesn’t report the issues or worse the public don’t read or view.
In the US most people get their news off Fox, a station that has denied climate change, glossed over the big new bill and it’s implications, supported tariffs even though it is a tax on the population.
Other US media outlets like the Washington Post seem to have ducked and weaved with the issues.
Yes news media is harder to get (pay walls), in Australia the nightly news only has about 10 minutes of news and 15 minutes on sport depending which station has the rights to that code.
There are still plenty of free news sites still out there, Abc, BBC, dw, cbc Canada,al jazeera, I do not include news.com.au in this as it’s constantly rehashed articles, lots of click bait and paid promotions and it always reloads its home page…..perhaps to appear it has more hits?
I cannot see how the issues you have mentioned will be bumped up the political agenda, it’s like we living in movie Idiocracy.
Planet Earth doesn’t care if US Republicans are back in power – any more than it cared to arrest “climate change” and go net-zero for Biden-Harris. In Labour UK too, the net-zero open-borders backlash is clearly on. But Labor Australia has utopian net-zero “law”, a footy-team of net-zero agencies, plus six more years of open-borders. With no effective opposition.
Australia should follow the example of Switzerland during any future wars that the USA will engage in. We will come out ahead, just like Switzerland did. We have no obligation to support USA in their military adventures, and we need to stay clear of such obligations that might be proposed. We may need to restructure our economy somewhat, find new trading partners, and become more self sufficient. If Switzerland, a small land-locked country can do it, then Australia can most certainly do it. At the moment there is the possibility for Australia to employ many of the highly educated Americans that want to leave USA as they prefer to live in a real democracy, not the autocratic dictatorship that the USA is becoming.