The AUKUS spectre

The continual demonisation of China as the reason for AUKUS will have an effect on Social Cohesion. We should remember that blaming China for Covid had the effect of giving permission to the populace to treat Chinese Australians as suspects requiring social retribution.

Likewise, the demonisation of Muslims since 9/11 is likely to have contributed to the Bondi attack on Jewish Australians. And the unconscionable Israeli killing of women and children and the bombing to rubble hospitals, housing and infrastructure in Gaza, are likely to have played a big part in the rise of Antisemitism in Oz and elsewhere in the West. In times like this, Israeli crimes seem to have visited upon Jewish Australians.

How can we manage AUKUS without giving permission to the populace to vent its frustrations, built up by decades of social and economic abandonment, upon the enviable Chinese Aussies living on the fat of the land?

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?