Letter to the Editor: A question of sovereignty lost

DEAR News Of The Area,

THE growing calls from eminent and expert Australians for an urgent review of the AUKUS strategic defence pact and issues over sovereignty are sadly 50 years too late.

The recent US Administration pressing Australia to up our defence spending and make a pre-commitment to engage in conflict with our major trading partner raises significant questions regarding the extent to which Australian sovereignty has been compromised under the auspices of ANZUS.

The sad truth is we indirectly ditched our sovereignty in 1975 when a younger Murdoch press ran its successful anti-Whitlam campaign and we voted to oust the then government.

Much to the relief of the CIA; this resulted in the US retaining their Australian based intelligence gathering and communications facilities (Pine Gap and North West Cape) which Whitlam had been intent on closing down.

Whitlam had at least managed to confirm a ‘full knowledge and concurrence’ agreement, which is still in place and is supposed to keep the Government (and the people) in the loop.

Good luck trying to find out what communications these facilities have made with recent governments, or what involvement they have had in the recent US bombing of Iran, for example. Successive Australian governments, a complicit public, and a defence department seemingly devoid of any alternative national security strategy have since dutifully enrolled us in costly and disastrous US led wars, so consolidating US military presence here was always on the cards, despite Sovereignty concerns.

This came with the Abbott Government’s 2014 Force Positive Agreement which further relinquished time honored restrictions on the deployment of foreign troops on Australian soil.

This has led to a multimillion dollar expansion of our military base infrastructure to house US personnel and materiel.

AUKUS and further compromises with the inclusion of nuclear capable subs and basing infrastructure has simply ‘sealed the deal’.

To suggest that this doesn’t negatively impact on our relations with our near neighbors, make us a target, and/or, that we are somehow able to remain non-complicit in US actions; or remain neutral; or can opt out; or simply wind back these major concessions if the US behaves badly or declares war is a nonsense.

The US is not the nostalgic ‘big bro’ of 1945 that ‘has our backs’, and for that matter China is not the Imperial Japan of the 1930s, despite US war mongering.

Regards,
Dave WOOD,
Boambee East.