Australian Army moves north to confront China. Why?

So under this scenario we spend $30 billion a year to protect our trade with China from China? Doesn’t that strike anyone as being odd? – Bob Stitch, Utopia.

In the early 1980s Townsville was an AJ* town. Soldiers brought with them: pornography, prostitution, social problems, domestic violence, rape and murder … Australian soldiers did plenty of that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Queensland and the Northern Territory is where the Australian government is going to send hundreds of soldiers to stave off the Chinese threat (said ironically). Nothing good came from Howard’s army intervention in the Northern Territory so why would anything good come from Labor’s move? Paul Keating didn’t mince words about the strategic review of Australia’s defence policy: “Signing the country up to the foreign proclivities of another country—the United States, with the gormless Brits, in their desperate search for relevance, lunging along behind is not a pretty sight.”

Those soldiers and their technical cohort will need houses.

Is the Australian government worried that the United States military will bring back the Brisbane Line as General MacArthur did during World War II? MacArthur was prepared to sacrifice the top part of Australia to the Japanese imperialists. Both Darwin and Townsville were bombed by the Japanese Air Force.

Even Bob Stitch’s satire does not bring home fully the stupidity of Australian government’s military policy. What are all these tanks in Townsville going to do? Townsville whose port is on the Ross River which empties out onto the Great Barrier Reef. I wouldn’t want to be on a naval vessel trying to take army equipment at through the barrier reef. You’d be a sitting duck for missile attack from submarines.

My solution is, instead of deploying military to the north, make economic moves which enhance Australia’s importance to China – the undisputed economic giant in the region. By developing our own economic base including a manufacturing potential we will ensure that China will respect our sovereignty. Australia’s future lies in Asia, neither in Europe nor across the Pacific.