Russia-Indo debacle reveals Australia is incompetent and racist

According to Peter Dutton, the government not knowing about a Russian request to Indonesia to station military aircraft in Papua was a “catastrophic failure”. His shadow foreign minister David Coleman — a frontbencher so low-key he’s spent the entire election campaign under a doormat — agreed: “We should have known about it.”

The opposition leader went on the ABC on Tuesday to go harder, claiming the request had been “publicly announced by the president of Indonesia”, even in the face of host Patricia Karvelas questioning whether that was actually the case. Of course, there’d been no such announcement (you’ll never guess, but the transcript of that exchange has somehow failed to make its way out of the normally assiduous Coalition campaign media team). By last night, Dutton was admitting he’d stuffed up.

What was missing from much of the coverage — both initially and after it became clear Dutton had verballed Indonesian President Subianto Prabowo — was the very short memories of the ranks of the Coalition and its media enablers.

In late 2014, when Tony “Shirtfront” Abbott was prime minister, a flotilla of Russian warships made it to Papua New Guinea before the ADF knew they were there, forcing the Royal Australian Navy to urgently dispatch Australian vessels to watch them.

In late 2017, ADF forces were placed on heightened alert when Russia and Indonesia conducted joint exercises, including in Papua. That included the flight of two Russian strategic bombers within just more than 500 nautical miles of Darwin. A defence and foreign policy commentator lamented in 2021 that “Australia’s government appears blissfully unaware and/or unconcerned” about Russia’s presence in the region.

One can only assume Dutton was apoplectic about such “catastrophic failures” while in the Coalition cabinet at the time (as he was presumably when Chinese warships appeared off Australia’s coasts during his time as defence minister).

Another element absent from the coverage was the extraordinary hypocrisy underpinning the assumption that the Indonesian government should be keeping us fully informed of all its defence considerations — even requests it had no interest in agreeing to.

In 2021, Australia didn’t bother giving Indonesia a heads-up on the biggest change in the regional defence environment in decades, our embrace of nuclear submarines. Indeed, pointedly, the Morrison government scheduled its regular 2+2 meeting just a week before the AUKUS announcement, keeping our most important neighbour in the dark and surprising them mere days later. Hardly the act of a friend.

Peter Dutton, who was at that meeting with Indonesia, thus knows a thing or two about failures of communication with the nation.

There’s a fundamental racism under all this, and it’s not just a reflection of Dutton’s own racism. Much of Australia’s governing class assumes that as the largest Western — read white — nation in our region, we have the right to be informed about what everyone in the region is doing, and that any failure to be informed is a sign of weakness. But we have no interest in keeping our neighbours informed of major changes in Australian policy. They can find out in the papers, like everyone else.

This mentality, and Dutton’s posturing and verballing of a major regional leader, are reflective of how ill-equipped we are to deal with the challenges of a global environment now bereft of the stabilising influence of the US, and its security guarantee for countries like Australia.

Neither side is willing to even acknowledge that this challenge exists, let alone bring voters into their confidence about how they’ll respond. Both sides agree that we need to increase defence spending, but with no explanation of the strategic goals such spending is aimed at, and certainly no explanation of how it will be paid for.

The Russian airbase-that-never-was has been the first time that these strategic questions have intruded directly into the election campaign. The reaction spoke volumes for how immature we are, and how unready and perhaps even unable we are to pursue a strategy every bit as crucial as enhancing our defence capability — engaging more effectively and productively within our region both with other US allies like Japan and South Korea and with Southeast Asian countries directly affected by both the continuing rise of China and Donald Trump’s tariff madness.

Paul Keating’s maxim of “security within the region, not security from the region” is still a foreign language to many of his successors.

What do you think of our leaders’ response?

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