There is an American, an Indian, a Japanese and an Australian… it seems like a joke, but it makes sense of the meeting that was held on September 21st in Wilmington, in the State of Delaware, at Joe Biden’s home. A native of the otherwise anonymous town, the US president opened the doors of his Georgian-style villa to prime ministers Narendra Modi, Fumio Kishida and Anthony Albanese. The occasion of the meeting was the annual meeting of the Quad, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue: an informal strategic alliance stipulated between the four countries with the aim of containing Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific.
The participation of the island continent should not be surprising: Australia is in fact a fundamental node in the network with which the United States wants to harness the Dragon. In addition to the quartet with the two Asian powers, Canberra and Washington also work together in a trio with the ancient colonial “patron”, the United Kingdom. This is the Aukus, a trilateral security pact signed three years ago to strengthen the Western deployment of nuclear-powered submarines in the turbulent quadrant that China wants to transform into home waters. The Australian Navy has thus committed to purchasing three Virginia-class units (basic cost: 5.8 billion dollars) from the USA over the next decade. In the meantime, it is working together with the British on the development of a joint model which should enter service in about fifteen years. The initiative infuriated Beijing’s leaders, who opposed the agreement from day one, amid propaganda campaigns to question its legality and accusations of a “Cold War mentality” and “new risks of nuclear proliferation ».
In addition to the Aukus, Australia is also part of an intelligence alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand called, significantly, “Five Eyes”. It is also active in bilateral military collaboration with other powers in the region: in the last two months alone, it has struck defense agreements and held joint exercises with Indonesia, India and Japan. However, not everyone in the country in the other hemisphere shares this enthusiasm for politics in camouflage. The signing of the Aukus, which actually preceded the formation of the current government, was criticized by several leading figures in Australian politics, such as former prime ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull and former foreign minister Gareth Evans, and by the media. This triple alliance is accused of increasing the possibility of a war with China, of making neighboring states more anxious, of aligning Canberra too supinely with the Anglo-American axis and above all of costing state coffers an exorbitant sum. The latter is an objective observation: the estimate is between 268 and 368 billion Australian dollars, between 163 and 224 billion euros. To deal with such a colossal outlay, the Albanese government is implementing record increases in the defense budget, which is expected to reach one hundred billion Australian dollars a year within ten years, expectedly reaching 2.3 percent of the GDP.
As well as making ends meet, the top brass of the Australian Defense Force they must then resolve the human resources problem: today the armed forces have 58,600 men and women in uniform, while 63,000 would be needed. Indeed, the ranks continue to impoverish, for two main reasons. The first is that there is no shortage of civilian work in the country, and it usually pays better and requires less effort than military work. The second is a generational change, which sees young people from Gen Z much less sensitive to wanting to fight in the name of the State. But it’s not just internal issues. The Australian Prime Minister must then deal with an even more relevant foreign factor: Australia and China are political rivals as well as business partners. The Asian giant is the island-continent’s first commercial partner, with a turnover that grew by 10 percent in 2023 alone, exceeding 300 billion Australian dollars. Businesses benefit greatly, so much so that exports to the People’s Republic grew by 18 percent while the turnover of the tertiary sector, including tourists and Chinese students away from home, made a real leap forward, with growth by more than 50 percent. Rosy figures in the eyes of Canberra and destined to grow further, given that trade is recovering after a gray period.
In 2020, Beijing had in fact issued a series of duties on some of Australia’s most profitable agricultural exports, from wine to barley to beef, to punish the country. The latter, in Xi’s eyes, was guilty of “lèse majesté”, having dared to call for the establishment of an international commission of inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. What followed was a period of frosty relations, between mutual accusations of human rights violations and torn memorandums of understanding, but the rift was eventually progressively mended and the sanctions gradually lifted. The companies aussie they were thus able to restart the climb to regain the top of some segments of the rich Chinese market. In addition to the fruits of the earth, among the strong dishes of Aussie exports to the Dragon there are also those contained in the soil, such as coal, ferrous minerals and lithium, the latter being fundamental for making the batteries of the electric vehicles of which China is, famously, the world’s largest producer.
However, one issue on which the flourishing economic relationship with Beijing could soon prove to be a double-edged sword for Australia is the Taiwanese one, in which the former is deeply involved. «Australia’s relations with Taiwan, which it does not officially recognise, are very different from those of other global players: together with the United States it is the only other nation in the world to have an existential function for the island nation» analyzes Stefano Pelaggi , researcher at Geopolitica.info. «Canberra covers between 75 and 85 percent of the energy needs of Taipei, which has no fossil energy sources of its own and must satisfy the demand of an extremely advanced industrial sector, including the crucial semiconductor sector. Australia is therefore exposed to the risk that in the future Beijing, on which it is economically dependent, may force it to pull the plug on what it considers the province to be reconquered.” Finally, China and Australia are increasingly closely linked also from a demographic point of view: per capita, the former British colony has more citizens of Chinese origin than any other state in the world outside of Asia. Almost one and a half million people out of its 26 million inhabitants, equal to 5.5 percent of the population. After the English and the Irish, they constitute the largest ethnic group by descent.
Furthermore, the land of kangaroos continues to be a sought-after emigration destination for citizens of the People’s Republic: arrivals have returned to pre-pandemic levels and concern all social groups. From the wealthiest immigrants, who have been able to enjoy benefits and have made massive real estate investments in the country, to those fleeing poverty and debt generated by the very harsh restrictions imposed by Beijing in the Covid era. The latter group also included the illegal Chinese immigrants who, last April, were shipwrecked on the northern Australian coast, aboard a vessel that left from the Indonesian coast. Seeking help, they had inadvertently breached the perimeter at Truscott Air Force Base in the north of the country before being intercepted, causing considerable embarrassment for senior military officials. A prelude to more dark landings in the future or just a tragicomic episode? It will depend on the Australian kangaroo’s ability to continue jumping with one foot in the American amphibian and one in the Chinese shoe.
