No longer a bit player, Australian leaders and public need to step it up

There is no doubt that the last few years have been truly transformative for Australia’s place and stature among world powers, not just in the Indo-Pacific, but more broadly across the global halls of power.  

Multilateral agreements like Australia’s leading role in the AUKUS trilateral agreement, the Quad, bringing together Australia, Japan, India and the United States along with the nation’s longstanding commitment to multinational institutions including the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund have reinforced Australia’s growing stature on the global stage. 

This rising prominence isn’t without its challenges, in particular, Australia’s leading role on the international stage in countering Beijing’s campaigns of economic coercion and requesting a forensic investigation into the origins of COVID-19 have also both propelled the nation’s stature on the global stage but also drawn the ire of one of the world’s rising superpowers: the People’s Republic of China. 

However, the rise of Beijing isn’t the only factor reshaping Australia’s position on the global stage. The rapidly deteriorating nature of the post-Second World War order, particularly the declining dominance of the United States and its position as the world’s unrivalled economic, political, and strategic power relative to other established and emerging powers, serves to reinforce the rise of nation’s like Australia. 

Recognising this, former Australian high commissioner to the UK and federal attorney-general, George Brandis, KC, has called for Australia’s leaders and public to prepare for this growing position of prominence to only increase, and most importantly, to prepare to face the hard choices in life. 

“Next month, Anthony Albanese welcomes the President of the United States Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Japanese PM Fumio Kishida for the first leaders-level meeting of the Quad hosted by Australia. He will also attend the G7 meeting in Hiroshima to which Australia has been invited — along with fellow ad hoc members India and South Korea. Albanese has also been invited to the critical NATO summit on Ukraine in July; it would be a serious mistake not to attend,” Mr Brandis said, setting the scene. 

Going further, Brandis added, “Those international engagements, together with last month’s announcement on the AUKUS acquisition program and the coming release of the Defence Strategic Review, all focus attention on the challenging strategic position which Australia now faces as the democracies come to terms with the belligerence of the world’s two great authoritarian states, Russia and China.”

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We face an existential threat

The world, has in many ways, been slow to accept the gradual “end of history" as was expected in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. 

Australia is no different. We have been very slow to accept that the world around us is evolving and has indeed been changing for a very long time.

While this has largely been away from the prying' eyes of the fourth estate of the Western World, the slow, gradual reassertion of great power competition and the ensuing shift in the global balance of economic, political and strategic power is well and truly underway. 

This shift in the global power dynamics has shifted Australia’s traditional geographic isolation and the protective moat provided by the “tyranny of distance” with a “predicament of proximity”, something Australia has not truly experienced the negative repercussions of since the Second World War. 

Brandis explains, “The war that followed [World War Two] was the only time that Australia has felt existentially threatened. While we now know from archival research that Japanese policy was not to invade Australia but to isolate it, that was not how it seemed at the time — particularly to those who lived in northern Australia.

“There are few still alive who remember the Pacific War; every generation since, from the Baby Boomers onward, has grown up in a sense of relative security. Even Vietnam, the most serious war in our region which many Australians remember, was not accompanied by widespread fear of communist invasion if South Vietnam fell,” Brandis said. 

Despite this, successive generations of Australians, from the Baby Boomers on, have broadly had a very tenuous understanding or relation to the level of existential threat and challenge the nation now faces. Instead, these generations have enjoyed life in a complacent utopia, shielded from the harsh realities of the predatory plains, by our relationship with the world’s apex predator: the United States. 

“Australians’ sense of security has been buttressed, in particular, by two assumptions. First is our belief that we live in a peaceful corner of the world, sequestered from great power conflict historically centred on the Euro-Atlantic," Brandis pointedly explains. 

This sense of insulation has translated to an incredibly ingrained sense of national complacency, both in the Australian public, and more broadly in our political class which now has its chickens coming home to roost. 

Brandis explains this, stating: “Allied to our sense that we live in a peaceful part of the world, deep in the national psyche, has been the belief that we are a small nation; if not irrelevant to global affairs, then at least of marginal significance to them: a kind of subtropical Scandinavia. (During the Whitlam government, that comparison was sometimes made.)

Brandis adds, “and so a happy complacency has become our national mindset. It is captured in four words which are a national slogan: ‘She’ll be right, mate.’ It is the thesis of our most famous piece of social commentary, Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country”. This approach to national policy making and public consciousness presents Australia with a unique conundrum compared to our global counterparts, namely, while our counterparts were largely former imperial powers, now culturally tired and spent, Australia is the product of the age of empire and is, by comparison a relatively young, youthful country. 

In contrast, however, Australia like these counterparts, is beset by political and cultural malaise and atomisation like many nations across the Western world, which further exacerbates our long-identified culture of tall poppy syndrome. 

Shaking off our tall poppy syndrome 

For Brandis, this culture of tall poppy syndrome and the disconnection between both the Australian public and political class from the often-harsh realities of the fluid nature of global power competition, something he articulates exceptionally well, stating, “Yet complacency is dangerous. It dulls our appreciation of a rapidly changing world. It makes us reluctant to abandon the cosy assumptions with which we have lived and prospered for as long as we can remember. It is our national vice — the defect of our quality as an unpretentious, optimistic, comfortable, live-and-let-live, peace-loving people.

“Complacency is particularly dangerous today, because the post-war cross-generational assumptions are no longer the reality. We are not distant from the world’s most dangerous conflicts; our region is at the heart of them. Increasingly, analysts and military planners think that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is now only a matter of time. If that happens, it is fanciful to think that Australia can merely be a bystander,” Brandis states. 

Accepting these new realities mean Australia’s political class and the Australian public must confront increasingly difficult challenges across the Indo-Pacific, namely a rapidly deteriorating strategic environment and a progressively more competitive economic environment in a multipolar, post-globalisation world. 

This is where the growing international recognition of Australia’s stature in the world comes into play, something Brandis articulates, saying, “Just as we are no longer a sequestered nation, nor are we, in the eyes of our democratic partners, a small one — as Albanese’s presence at the big table of the major democracies demonstrates. We are, with Japan and South Korea, their key strategic partner in the world’s most dangerous region.

“Whether we like it or not, Australia is no longer a small player in global politics. Yet a habitually complacent public has still to fully appreciate that harsh reality, and the hard choices it may bring,” Brandis explains. 

This message correctly identifies the central domestic issue which is the root cause for most of Australia’s political malaise and lack of cultural ambition. It also, in some capacity, explains why campaigns of ideological, political, and societal subversion continue to gather pace undermining the national unity at a time when adversaries are increasingly unified by an ambitious, coherent, and unified image for their respective constituencies. 

Importantly, to overcome these challenges, Australia can set itself apart from the ailing West by knuckling down and consequentially prepare to face the world as it is, rather than as we wish it to be, and take the Australian people with us on a journey of immense opportunity to offset the challenges. 

Lessons for Australia’s future strategic planning

There is no doubt that Australia’s position and responsibilities in the Indo-Pacific region will depend on the nation’s ability to sustain itself economically, strategically and politically in the face of rising regional and global competition.

Despite the nation’s virtually unrivalled wealth of natural resources, agricultural and industrial potential, there is a lack of a cohesive national security strategy integrating the development of individual, yet complementary public policy strategies to support a more robust Australian role in the region.

While contemporary Australia has been far removed from the harsh realities of conflict, with many generations never enduring the reality of rationing for food, energy, medical supplies or luxury goods, and even fewer within modern Australia understanding the socio-political and economic impact such rationing would have on the now world-leading Australian standard of living.  

Enhancing Australia’s capacity to act as an independent power, incorporating great power-style strategic economic, diplomatic and military capability serves as a powerful symbol of Australia’s sovereignty and evolving responsibilities in supporting and enhancing the security and prosperity of Indo-Pacific Asia, this is particularly well explained by Peter Zeihan, who explains: “A deglobalised world doesn’t simply have a different economic geography, it has thousands of different and separate geographies. Economically speaking, the whole was stronger for the inclusion of all its parts. It is where we have gotten our wealth and pace of improvement and speed. Now the parts will be weaker for their separation.”

Accordingly, shifting the public discussion and debate away from the default Australian position of “it is all a little too difficult, so let’s not bother” will provide unprecedented economic, diplomatic, political and strategic opportunities for the nation.

As events continue to unfold throughout the region and China continues to throw its economic, political and strategic weight around, can Australia afford to remain a secondary power, or does it need to embrace a larger, more independent role in an era of increasing great power competition?

Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below, or get in touch This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..   

Stephen Kuper

Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.

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