The AUKUS spectre

By August I will be 85. I came here 64 years ago on a Colombo Plan Scholarship to what was God’s own country, my childhood imagination inspired by the ever-joyful matronly Methodist missionaries from Southern America.

In 1984 Professor Geoffrey Blainey would blast me out of that reverie.

Since then, I have become less of an unthinking citizen and at times discordantly critical of my adopted country, the homeland of my grandchildren.

I would feel much more at ease if I knew how AUKUS was conceived, midwived and childcared.

The continuing sufferings of the “Vietnam vets”, an entirely avoidable national disgrace inflicted through the Red Peril paranoia and the USA sycophancy of Sir Robert Menzies, are etched in my mind. The most brilliant student in my cohort at Melbourne University got drafted into that American war and lost his mind whilst undergoing military training.

Could AUKUS turn out to be another national disgrace we got into haphazardly? I dread the spectre of my grandchildren being drafted into another American war, this time in the South China Sea. It takes three generations for a migrant (Asian, ethnic) to establish their cultural roots in the new land.

Was AUKUS integral to or a happenstance evolution from Obama’s Pivot to Asia? Julia Gillard blissfully signed up to it in 2011, beginning with American troops rotating through Darwin. It has since been upgraded now to having American nuclear subs stationed in purpose-built bases on our shores.

Did Boris Johnson play a catalytic part, sinking the French subs contract to exact revenge on Macron?

Was Morrison’s hitch to AUKUS his prayer for a second miracle? Or was he encouraged by American operatives who by then might have progressed to getting Australia tied to the Pivot to Asia “for 40 years”, as Kurt Campbell, Joe Biden’s Asia policy chief is said to have told European officials privately in 2022?

Did Morrison lie to Biden regarding AUKUS being a bi-Partisan undertaking? It was said that Albo only had 12 hours’ notice before Morrison announced his AUKUS pact. Was that an ambush that got Albo into embracing AUKUS with alacrity?  It reminds me of our journey into the Vietnam disaster: Robert Menzies, to the surprise of almost the entire Parliament, announced the sending of fighting soldiers to Vietnam on a Thursday night in 1965 when Opposition leaders Arthur Caldwell and Gough Whitlam had already left Canberra for their homes in Melbourne and Sydney. Some said that Menzies was worried about communism spreading to Malaysia and Indonesia, and that he had done the right thing to encourage the Americans to remain all-powerful in Asia. As we now know the domino theory attached to the Red Peril has not come to pass.

When the truth is out, there should be no need to tell ourselves stories, of ever-changing hue as time goes on. The terra nullius saga that went on for so long is a salutary tale in point.

As a Chinese Australian I believe that it is hallucinatory not to think that AUKUS is a nightmare that could invade our dreamscape of a wonderful homeland for our heirs.