By any measure, Geoffrey Blainey's recent piece in The Australian is a sobering assessment of our nation's unreadiness in a world teetering toward great-power conflict. He traces how, over a century, we've allowed our defence capability to hollow out even as threats multiply. But while Blainey is right to highlight the strategic missteps and bureaucratic sclerosis, he stops short of naming the deeper malaise at the heart of our predicament: the cultural collapse of the Australian spirit itself.
More than missed procurement targets or misjudged alliances, it is the loss of the ANZAC ethos—a hard-edged, self-reliant, sacrificial courage—that most imperils Australia today. We have become, quite simply, too soft for the storm ahead.
In 1914, a nation of fewer than five million was willing to raise a citizen army, fund a dreadnought, and teach its young men how to march, fight, and endure. It did so not out of bloodlust or imperial duty alone, but because it understood something we no longer do: that national survival is not a given. It must be prepared for in peace and paid for in vigilance.
Compare this with today's Australia—a country where the average voter is more likely to know the price of smashed avo than the name of their nearest military base. We are a nation of privileges and entitlements, of welfare dependency and instant gratification. From the suburbs of Sydney to the laneways of Melbourne, we have traded grit for comfort, discipline for indulgence, national service for Netflix.
At the root of this softening is the great demographic shift of the last century. In 1914, Australia was still a largely rural nation, tied to land, labour, and weather. Such conditions bred toughness, practical skill, and self-reliance. Today, with 90% of our population clustered in urban centres, we have become disconnected from the raw realities that once forged the national character.
Urban life, with its bureaucratic layers, HR departments, and therapeutic language, does not encourage sacrifice. It produces managers, not warriors. It grooms influencers, not defenders. The spiritual cost of urbanisation is not merely that we don't know how to fight—but that we no longer believe we might need to.
The ANZAC spirit was not a myth—it was a moral framework, rooted in mateship, endurance, and duty. It asked for service before self, country before comfort. It is the same spirit that kept Tobruk from falling, Kokoda from collapsing, and Australia from becoming just another outpost of empire.
Today, that spirit is more likely to be celebrated in vague platitudes at dawn services than embodied in policy or lived reality. Defence recruitment is in crisis, physical standards are declining, and patriotism itself is treated with suspicion by the intelligentsia.
Yes, we should be alarmed by the sale of Darwin Port, the dwindling fuel reserves, and the glut of generals who lead shrinking battalions. But those are symptoms. The deeper disease is spiritual: we are no longer a people ready to defend what we have, because we no longer remember what it took to build it.
Australia will not be saved by spreadsheets or summit communiqués. It will be saved—or lost—on the question of whether its people can once again become hard enough to face a hard world.
And if we cannot recover the ANZAC spirit, if we cannot reforge a culture of resilience, sacrifice, and seriousness, then no amount of nuclear submarines will save us. For in the end, a nation is defended not only by weapons, but by will.
"From squandering money on over-paid generals to handing over the Port of Darwin, Australia – one of the world's oldest continuing democracies – is not ready to defend itself. We should all be asking why.
Our nation is not ready to defend itself at this time when a third world war is widely feared. Our military strength has declined just when the danger has increased. Australia was better prepared for the outbreak of World War I in 1914 than it is now prepared for almost any kind of international war.
In 1914 our nation held just under five million people, and if their leaders miraculously were alive today they would be astonished that we – with more than five times as many people – field armed forces so inadequate. Yet this is probably the world's most perilous time since the end of the Cold War in 1990.
In 1914 a mass of Australian boys and young men had already received some military training: such training was compulsory. In contrast our armed forces today have trouble in recruiting volunteers. The percentage of the male population with any kind of military training is tiny compared with the situation in 1914. At that time most citizens and the major political parties emphasised the need for a strong army and navy.
They were willing to pay for the most expensive item in the list of the world's major weapons – the massive dreadnought battleship. Australia even placed an order for a fast dreadnought: built in Scotland, it was christened HMAS Australia. Most maritime nations could not afford even one such ship.
My calculation is that Australia had invested, in proportion to population, more money in buying a major warship than did most of the world's naval powers. We were more adventurous than France, Russia, Italy and Austria-Hungary. What excitement when HMAS Australia – the most powerfulship in the southern hemisphere – steamed into Sydney Harbour on October 6, 1913.
A year later it led a force that captured the German harbour and wireless station at Rabaul in the present Papua New Guinea.
Nothing to supply our war machineAustralia in other ways was more prepared in the era of iron and steel than it is today. On the eve of World War I our first steelworks were busy at the NSW town of Lithgow, while nearby stood the small-arms factory that manufactured rifles, pistols, bayonets and ammunition. It was to employ 6000 people – mostly women – in World War II: today, however, a modern version of Lithgow, ready to supply our war machine, does not even exist.
Darwin is the star harbour on our northern coast and potentially crucial for our armed forces and perhaps one day for America's too. A leading Chinese commercial and logistics organisation must have been amazed that it acquired the right in 2015 to operate there for 99 years. What a prize! Beijing surely would not dream of allowing the US, Australia or Japan to gain control of a strategic harbour on a vital stretch of China's coast.
The decision was made by the Northern Territory government in return for a lump sum of money. But should a minor branch of the nation's political system – not even a state – be allowed to make such a strategic decision? At the time the NT government urgently needed the money. Moreover, the Chinese firm – with Australian staff – has since conducted a loss-making operation that otherwise would have been conducted annually by the NT government at a loss. Inside the same harbour since January 2022 an American firm has been spending at least $270m on gasoline storage for its nation's needs. At East Arm, not far away, is a base for our own navy's patrol boats.
Not up to the challenge of ChinaOn Darwin's future an emphatic warning has just been published by three experts who argue that our defence system is full of holes and patches. Peter Jennings, Michael Shoebridge and Marcus Hellyer are Australian strategic experts. Published by the Institute of Public Affairs under the title of No Higher Priority, their book warns in its first sentence: "Australia is facing its most challenging security environment since the Second World War." The main challenger is China, but the Albanese government so far is not up to the challenge.
No Higher Priority makes the patient comment that our Defence Department refuses to admit that it "mishandled the issue". When Anthony Albanese in November 2023 discussed the possibility of forthwith cancelling the Chinese lease of the port, his department advised him to take no action. He himself was content to do nothing . As it was, the Prime Minister's announcement of election day postponed the matter. The authors conclude that Albanese wished "to avoid a difficult conversation with Beijing". The evidence suggests that he overall hoped to remain a favoured acquaintance or even a friend of President Xi Jinping. Yet the Chinese know that their presence in Darwin will prevent Australia's allies from making full use of it.
For the Chinese at the moment, Darwin is not yet as valuable as Taiwan. That island guards one of the world's most important shipping lanes. It is the hub of the most sophisticated semiconductor factories in the world.
Xi has announced that one day Taiwan will fall into his hands. According to various experts the likelihood of war will continue to grow. They add that such a war, if it involves China versus the US and Japan, could be "horrendous". One of Japan's duties might be to provide the hospital ships if a sea battle or blockade occurs.
Who is to blame?Are our ever-changing political leaders or the heads of our armed forces or the platoons of Canberra bureaucrats mostly to blame for our military weaknesses? Australia is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world, and therefore we as citizens and voters have also to share the blame.
The three strategy experts admit that many mistakes have been made by Canberra. A too-frequent mistake is a failure to tackle problems that can easily be solved.
One simple recommendation is to build up reserves of transport fuel on our shores so fighter aircraft can continue to fly and warships continue to ply even if our overseas supply lines have been threatened or severed by China or another antagonist.
Three of our remote air bases each have reserves of aviation fuel that would last only about 10 days "for a single squadron of aircraft flying combat missions". One such West Australian base is at Learmonth, where a fresh supply of aviation fuel from Perth requires truck journeys of 1700km.
Meanwhile, the drone is an urgently needed weapon. Oleksandra Molloy, in her Australian Army paper called Drones in Modern Warfare, has plucked lessons from Ukraine where drones in mid-air shocked the Russian invaders and even sank some of their ships seemingly safe in the Black Sea.
A municipal worker climbs stairs backdropped by a mural depicting a Ukrainian soldier carrying a Shark military drone.
All in all, the latest drones "are becoming stealthier, speedier, smaller, more lethal and easily operable". In the Middle East the drones and short-distance missiles sometimes serve as a land-based navy, and the terrorist group known as the Houthi occupies shores near the Red Sea and destroys or endangers ships on one of the world's main shipping routes.
One US admiral declares that his nation has not fought such unexpected sea battles since World War II.
Squandered on generalsThe three experts make 36 recommendations, each calling for immediate action. For example, money had been squandered by the boom in well-paid Australian generals, their numbers having doubled in the past 20 years: "Defence suffers from way too many chiefs and not enough Indians." We are told that Britain, by contrast, has fewer generals and many more privates. The "Canberra bubble" – to use their phrase – has to be pricked.
Likewise, closer relations with India and Indonesia and special relations with PNG are viewed as important. It is also recommended that our alliance with the US would also be tightened if 16,000 US marines were stationed in northern Australia, primarily in Darwin,.
When the voice referendum was held in 2023, Albanese made the staggering decision to give the nation's Aboriginal population a grip on political power denied to the other 97 per cent of the citizens.
This minority, worthy as it is, would gain the right to consider any major proposal – and how it might affect Aboriginal people – before parliament or the federal cabinet could reach a final decision.
In a grave international crisis, a decision of whether to wage war usually has to be reached by the nation's leaders with all speed. There is little sign that Albanese devoted thought to this challenge to true democracy.
Indeed, the impressive Aboriginal leaders – Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine – believe firmly in the nation's longstanding system of democracy.
Other Aboriginal leaders believe that Australian governments totally lack legitimacy. Such a belief, if affirmed publicly, is virtually an invitation for a foreign power to interfere; it is also a temptation for certain Aboriginal voices to exploit an international crisis as a bargaining opportunity. In so behaving they would have the backing of many academics.
There arrived an opportunity in 2024 – and again when election day was finally announced – for the Albanese government to allocate far more money for defence. Richard Marles as Defence Minister and as Albanese's loyal deputy wanted more, but he probably pleaded in vain. No doubt, amid the tsunami of welfare grants, the response to him by Albanese was predictable: where will we find the money for defence? But if Labor does not gain an outright victory in the coming election and has to rely on the Greens, its defence policy will wobble. Australia might have to abandon or moderate its present policy of buying nuclear-powered submarines. Even the US alliance could be in jeopardy.
The fact remains that Albanese was a failure in sponsoring the voice referendum. He eagerly spoke of uniting the nation but he divided it. The Uluru Statement from the Heart made valid complaints about the treatment of Indigenous Australian – for example, "our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers" – but interspersed these complaints with accusations that were dubious.
All the major universities fully supported Albanese but they failed to add that their own research contradicted some of his views.
Visiting Arnhem Land soon after he was elected, Albanese must have learned that most Aboriginal people had no faith in their own ancient religion, yet their clamour for permanent political powers was primarily based on that religion. The national census every five years proved that the overwhelming majority of Indigenous people, especially in the outback, were Christian. The Prime Minister's advisers surely had assured him that the ancient Aboriginal religion based on close affinity to the land had few real believers.
Likewise Albanese, before the referendum, did not tell voters that Aboriginal people now owned more than 54 per cent of Australian soil and that he hoped that eventually they should own far more.
Did the Coalition go far enough?Admittedly in recent years our defences have been temporarily resuscitated. The signing of AUKUS by the Morrison government in 2021, and the promise of nuclear-powered submarines arriving years later, offer us long-term hope. Even the Labor Party, then in opposition, instantly approved the deal.
But years before the first nuclear-powered submarines reach Australia, numerous less-expensive weapons of defence and attack are needed. Plans for specialist ships and aircraft have been devised and approved, but in 2024 the Albanese government decided to prune its more immediate defence needs. In the past decade the Liberals have mostly given a much higher priority than Labor to defence. This week, Peter Dutton affirmed that priority, but did he go far enough?
And now US President Donald Trump's speeches and actions have added another fear, though isn't it too early to blame Trump entirely for the economic mayhem and the sudden slump in the world's financial confidence? After all, he has probably forced the main European nations to take far more responsibility for their own defence – and for Ukraine's too. If so, he has achieved in his unpredictable way what could not be achieved by Barack Obama's oratory, Joe Biden's sad speechlessness and Vladimir Putin's aggression.
It is not an easy time to be our nation's leader. Albanese is entitled to feel quietly proud that, coming from a relatively humble background, he was elected Prime Minister. He is entitled to feel elevated if President Xi of China thinks well of him. But Albanese does not accord even a middling priority to what should be the leader's first duty – defending the nation in turbulent times. He trusts that defence will not be a major election topic.
For at least seven years, however, China has been provocative on sea and land, and one of its countless gestures of defiance was to send, early in 2025, war vessels far into Australian territorial seas without even notifying Canberra.
Albanese believes that if Australia is in peril he will summon the US for immediate help. Yet in some situations the US, with all the goodwill in the world, will be unable to help us at once or unable to help us at all. The case is almost overwhelming that Australia first has to help itself. Even talented scholars who believe we should not be the firm ally of even the US or China are convinced that we should vigorously re-arm.
In the present international situation, a strong defence is vital. The voters are entitled to their say."