John Lander is right! In a 27 May, post-election interview on the Australian Citizens Party’s Citizens Insight YouTube program, Australia’s former Ambassador to Iran and deputy ambassador to China issued a stark warning that despite the election returning Anthony Albanese, who has successfully stabilised Australia’s relationship with China, Australia is actually edging closer to war with China. Lander’s reasoning, elaborated in the interview, is that Australia’s continued military build-up with the United States, to the point where the USA now effectively occupies Australia militarily, is pushing us relentlessly towards war with China, no matter how politely the Australia-China trade relationship is managed. In less than a week, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles confirmed John Lander’s warning.
At the annual Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, Marles may as well have genuflected to US Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth, the former Fox News TV host who sports tattoos of insignia of medieval Christian crusaders dedicated to vanquishing infidels. Hegseth launched into an incendiary but typically ignorant attack on China in his speech: “We know that Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027”, he claimed. “Let me be clear: any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world. We are not going to sugarcoat it. The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.” He then met with Marles and demanded Australia increase its military spending from the current level of 2 per cent of GDP, or $56 billion per year, to 3.5 per cent of GDP, which would be $90 billion per year. (As a percentage of the federal budget, the current spending is 6.5 per cent, while the higher level being demanded would be more than 10 per cent).
To be clear, at no time has China or its president Xi Jinping ever said China will invade Taiwan by 2027, or will be ready to invade. This is entirely a US “intelligence” construct, like Iraqi WMDs. Even the US magazine Defence News devoted a report on 7 May 2024 to the origins of the claim that China is preparing to invade by that date, acknowledging that Xi didn’t set such a deadline. So how did the deputy PM of Australia, for whose country China is the most important trading partner and which stands to lose the most from a war, respond to the tattooed ex-TV host’s baseless claims and demands? Exactly as John Lander predicted: Marles demonstrated Australia was in lockstep with the US escalation.
Marles claimed to reporters at Shangri La that “what we have seen from China is the single biggest increase in military capability and build-up in conventional sense, by any country since the end of the Second World War. … What we want to see is strategic transparency and strategic reassurance be provided by China, and an understanding of why it is needed to have such an extraordinary military build-up.”
Marles is pretending China’s military build-up is proactive, when in reality it is reactive. How else is China supposed to respond to America and its allies after they’ve lied to invade countries and wage wars for 20 years, killing millions of people, and are now obsessing about China as their next and greatest “threat” while heavily arming hundreds of military bases surrounding it?
In terms of military spending, Marles said that “we are calibrating our defence spending to the strategic moment that we need to meet, so we are up for the conversation, and the American position has been clear and it’s understandable, and that’s a conversation that we will continue to have with the US”. PM Anthony Albanese later contradicted Marles, but this episode shows the US anti-China war agenda is still driving policy in Canberra.
If we hope to avert what should be an unthinkable war, Australians should hear, and heed, John Lander’s warning.
