Welcome.
Thank you for coming to what I trust will be a fascinating conversation on the sovereignty and security of our nation.
This conversation, and many others like it, are urgently needed.
Today we will be confronting tough realities that, regrettably, both sides of politics in Australia presently prefer to ignore.
For eighty years we have regarded our great ally, the USA, as having shared values and shared interests. Well, not all interests were aligned all the time, but certainly we felt values were.
It is very hard to say that today.
Donald Trump plainly does not believe in the international rules based order.
He has sought to reconcile with Vladimir Putin to the point of temporarily cutting off military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine. He has used the vast might of the United States not to pressure the invader to come to the negotiating table, but rather to kneecap the ability of the heroic, wronged victim of aggression to resist.
At the same time he has imposed, or threatened to impose, crippling tariffs on Canada with the express stated purpose of compelling Canada to become the 51st State of the United States. He has said, repeatedly, that Canada should not exist as an independent country.
Canada has been a loyal ally, peaceful neighbour of the US. It is, thanks to a free trade agreement renewed by Trump in 2017, thoroughly integrated into the North American economy. It is a member of NATO.
Trump’s claim to Canada and his effort to annex it sounds far too similar to Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real country, that its border is fictional and so on.
In response PM Mark Carney said that Canada's old relationship with the United States, "based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over".
And if that were not enough Trump has threatened to annex Greenland “one way or the other” despite it being a dependent territory of Denmark, another NATO ally.
I could go on.
We cannot allow our affection for America and Americans, our long shared history, to blind us from the objective reality that the President of the United States has political values more aligned to the “might is right” world view of Putin than they are to ours, or indeed to any of his modern predecessors - Republican or Democrat.
Now participants can obviously say what they like, but I haven’t asked you here to discuss a performance review of President Mr Trump. We can’t change him. He was chosen by Americans and he has more political power over the Congress and his Party than any President in my life time.
So we are like the tourist lost in the country lanes of Ireland who pulls into a pub and asks for directions to Dublin only to be told - If I were you I would not be starting from here.
But we are starting from here.
Some people in this town, speaking from their heart more than their head, will tell you that this is all just froth and bubble and normal transmission will resume if not soon, certainly in four years.
We should not be so sure - look at the young men including the Vice President said to be the future of the MAGA movement.
We should not assume that America First, Trump style, is going to evaporate any time soon.
So if Trump’s America believes might is right and will use its economic and military power to advance America at the expense of others, whether they are allies or adversaries, what should we in Australia do?
Trump makes it very clear he is both a less reliable and a more demanding ally.
How do we in Australia recalibrate? Certainly we need to do more, be more resilient and independent. And yet with an exquisite bad timing decisions in recent years have made us far more dependent on America just as America was becoming less dependable - not through weariness or neglect but now by deliberate design.
To set the scene we will first discuss the threat we face. What is “the other” from which we hoped our great ally would defend us.
Then we will discuss AUKUS and examine the question both sides of politics refuse to countenance - what do we do if we end up with no submarines at all, an outcome contemplated by the parties, reflected in legislation but to date ignored if not denied by both sides of politics.
And if I may add a touch of reality here. The transfer of a Virginia Class submarine to Australia depends, among other things, on the President certifying to Congress that the sale will not degrade the undersea capabilities of the US Navy and that the US submarine industrial base has the capacity to build sufficient submarines for the needs of the US and Australian navies.
The US Navy maintains it needs the submarine industrial base (being substantially General Dynamics’ Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls’ Newport News Shipbuilding) to produce 2 Virginias a year and three years ago set the target of reaching 2 per annum by 2028 (the level needed to meet the USN’s needs) and 2.33 a year by 2030 (the level needed to meet the additional needs of the RAN).
The current rate of production is 1.1 per annum, confirmed only a few weeks ago by the Department of the Navy to the Congress. In fact it has been flat for years - and has never reached 2 boats per annum. So the ramp to double production in just three years is as steep as it is unlikely.
This despite more than $US9 billion additional funding contributed to the industrial base since 2018.
These blunt realities are not acknowledged by our Government which insists, as does the Opposition, that the Virginias will arrive from 2032.
I hope in this forum we will have an honest and intelligent discussion about what our Plan B should be - or how we live without any submarines at all.
Following lunch we then discuss how we can defend ourselves without America, and finally we discuss how we can advance our national interest in a might is right world.
The conversation today is on the record, it is not as we advised one where the Chatham House rule applies. We are recording the proceedings and while it is not being streamed live we plan to make it available as four podcasts because this conversation today is too important to be had in a room of just 100 people.
The Australian public deserves a better level of debate and discussion on matters that are fundamental to the security of our country.
To LISTEN to the forum in full, please go to Defending Democracy with Malcolm Turnbull podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/defending-democracy-with-malcolm-turnbull/id1674095396
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