Sea Control - Sea Control 531 - Girt by Sea with Dr. Bec Strating and Dr. Joanne Wallis

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Links1. Girt By Sea: Re-Imagining Australia’s Security, by Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis, La Trobe University Press, 2024.2. Sea Control 430 - Australian Constabulary Missions with Sean Andrews, CIMSEC, May 11, 2023.3. Sea Control 508 - Australian Capabilities in the Littoral with Jennifer Parker and Peter Jones, CIMSEC, April 6, 2024.4. Statecraftiness: Mapping Competition, Cooperation, and Coercion in the Pacific Islands.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Drs. Beck Stratting and Joanne Wallace to discuss their new book, Gert by Sea, Reimagining Australia's Security. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are Dr. Rebecca Stratting and Dr. Joanne Wallace. We're going to be discussing their new book, Gert by Sea, Reimagining Australia's Security. Beck, welcome. Could you please tell the audience a little bit more about your background? Sure. Thanks for having us on, Jared. My name is Bec Strouding.

I'm the Director of La Trobe Asia, and I'm a Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. And I'm also a fellow at the Royal Australian Navy's Sea Power Centre. Well, thank you and welcome. Joanne, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, please? Hi, Jared. I'm Professor of International Security at the University of Adelaide, where I also direct security in the Pacific Islands Research Program in the Stratton Institute for Public Policy. And I'm a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Well, thank you. As a reminder, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. I'm going to deviate slightly and ask, where does the title Gert by Seat come from? that's a great question it comes from the australian national anthem okay yeah that's that shows how much i uh how much i know about the australian national anthem okay you were doing a book on maritime and then you know it saved an appropriate way to capture it i think it's an excellent title it's very striking i just wasn't sure where it came from so

um the sum total of my knowledge of australia is like largely derived from uh my children are watching Bluey. And that's a good thing, I think. There's other cultural texts that we probably wouldn't want to be quite as influential as Bluey. So that's good. But you're definitely not the first person to ask us where the title comes from. It's an unusual term. But as Joanne said, it is a part of our national anthem and reflects, I guess, Australia's very significant maritime geography. Yeah, so let's talk about that. What is the extent of Australia's maritime domain and why did you decide to divide the

book geographically? And for the listeners, if you don't know, they've broken up the book by the different seas surrounding the continent. Please go ahead. Yeah, I think sometimes Australia is actually accused of being sea blind, which is quite a curious thing, I think, a bit of a puzzle for trying to understand how a country that is this island continent that is surrounded by three oceans, the Pacific, the Indian and the Southern Oceans, as well as a host of seas, how could this kind of country possibly

be sea-blind or accused of being sea-blind. It's not only that Australia is the world's largest island, it is also there are a number of other kind of maritime facts that is quite interesting and important for understanding Australia's security. A lot of people don't know, for example, that it has 8,222 islands within its maritime boundaries, although whether the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea agrees that they're all

islands is a bit of a different story. But some of these are very, very far away. Heard Island and Macdonald Island, for example, are 4,000 kilometres away from Perth in Western Australia. And yet Australia generates an exclusive economic zone around these islands. and Australia has the world's third largest exclusive economic zone. It derives, you know, significant benefits from its EEZ and from continental shelf entitlements under UNCLOS. It also has the world's largest search and rescue zone. I don't think a lot of people realise how big this is.

It's 53 million square kilometres and that is around a tenth of the Earth's surface that Australia is responsible for coordinating search and rescue efforts in. So part of the interest, I think, for me in thinking about Australian foreign and defence policy has always been how have we managed to ignore or kind of neglect our maritime geography and our significant maritime interests. So framing the book in terms of oceans, so we look at the ones

that I just mentioned, the Pacific, South Pacific Ocean, Western Pacific. We look at the South China Sea. We look at the Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, as well as the North Seas, some of the seas in Australia's north that are very important for its security. And that actually came about from a book project that actually preceded this project.

And here I would like to thank Professor Brendan Taylor who was the one who actually suggested initially that it might be good to think about Australia's maritime security strategy in terms of these ocean regions. And when Joanne and I were talking about putting together a book that focuses on how Australia views its security and its security interests, and Joanne is an expert in Australian foreign and defence policy, particularly

in relation to the Pacific, and I'm someone who's interested in maritime, we thought it would be a really interesting approach to use these maritime domains as a lens through which we can grapple with these really big questions of Australia's security, how it conducts its relationships within these domains, how its interests and priorities and activities actually differ across these domains. Sometimes we can think of the ocean as kind of one big interconnected space, but I think

one of the things that our book demonstrates is that Australia has quite different ways of approaching these maritime domains, which is in itself interesting if we're thinking about how we conceive of the oceans as separate regions. How has Australia viewed its security situation traditionally? Has that view changed recently? We argue in Gert by Sea that there's actually a lot of continuity in how Australia has viewed its security situation, tracing all the way back really until the first European settlement, the British colonisation of what would become Australia in 1788. And a lot of that is to do

with our geography. Now, of course, every country in the world will argue that its geography shapes its security situation. But a unique part of our geography in Australia, at least from the settler colonial state's perspective is that Australia is very distant from initially from our colonisers, the British, who of course were providing our security, and then later from the Americans who are now our major security ally. And that sense of distance has guided, it's been the through thread to all our foreign and strategic policy. So the first dynamic that we identify in Gert by Sea is that Australia has always believed that it needs security guarantors, but it's separated by the tyranny of distance from those guarantors,

any guarantors that it could reasonably expect to play a security guarantee role. The second one is that Australia constantly fears being abandoned by security guarantors. Initially, that was the UK and there was a sense of disappointment with how the British responded, particularly during the Second World War and then the turn to America. and now the constant anxiety about will the US be there if we need them. The third characteristic we identify is that Australia is uncertain about whether it should seek security from its region or from within its region.

So this relates a lot to our geography. A very famous description of Australia as a liminal state, and it's this sense that we don't really know our place in our region. Are we part of Asia and the Pacific? Are we neighbours to it but separate from them, from Asia and the Pacific? And there's this constant kind of paradox in that even though we have extended our security relations into Asia and the Pacific and we now have strategic partners galore in Asia in particular but also

in the Pacific Islands as well, even though we've grown those security relationships, there's this constant undercurrent that actually the greatest threats to us also come from or at least through Asia and the Pacific. So there's that uncertainty about our place in the world and our relations with our neighbours. And the fourth thread is that particularly after Federation in 1901, which is when the Australian colonies came together in one state,

and particularly after the Second World War when Australia began to play a more active role on the international stage, that stepped out from being guided primarily by the British foreign policy is that we've always valued a liberal or so-called liberal international rules-based order. And in the book, as you would expect for a book focused on the maritime, we particularly focus on the law of the sea. But that as a middle power that doesn't have the weight,

the strategic weight to dictate the rules, we've always seen the rules, if they protect our interests as being extremely valuable. So these are the sort of four dimensions, and you can trace them through. Obviously, the emphasis ebbs and flows at different times, but those four characteristics are present throughout Australian security policy since 1788. How has Australia prioritised its surrounding regions and its services? I know in the notes, you know, I've mentioned the military services, but if you want to talk about the Border Force or anything else there that I'm unaware of,

Please feel free. Yeah, I think it comes back to this kind of the concept of sea blindness. And one of our friends, Captain Sean Andrews, thinks that the term is kind of juvenile and it is in some ways, but that has been the accusation that has been levelled at Australia. So there's a bit of a tension running through Australia's historical foreign and defence policy in the sense that while, as Joanne says, and as we argue in the book, geography is a really important part

for how Australia thinks about its security, maritime aspects of that geography haven't always been the strongest feature in how defence planning and prioritisation happens. So in terms of the kind of the history or the sense of nationhood, You know, we can look at which battles tend to get commemorated and those are the ones that tend to involve the land forces. You know, we know, I think, a lot more about Gallipoli than we know about the battle for the Coral Sea, for example. And we also see in the Defence Force the leadership has tended to come more from Army, although that is not true at the moment with a new chief of the ADF

coming from Navy. But there's a sort of status that's accorded to land forces and certainly in terms of personnel. You know, the Royal Australian Navy has quite a significant personnel issue. That is particularly true in terms of retention, keeping people in the Navy. We're about 900 personnel short at the moment, and those shortfalls in workforce are only going to get more pronounced as we embark on an ambitious, you know, nuclear-powered submarine plan and a new plan to grow the surface combatant fleet. So there has tended to be more personnel in the land forces than the Navy in Australia

by a significant margin. And this is really linked, I think, to the types of campaigns or operations and conflicts that Australia is involved in. So if we think about the major conflict that Australia has been involved in in the 21st century, it's been in the Middle East and it's been associated with the US alliance. So Australia's commitment to conflicts associated with the United States has also, I think, shaped and driven the priorities in terms of defence planning and spending. But despite all of that, there's, you know, as I mentioned before, there are plans for nuclear-powered submarines through the AUKUS agreement. There is also a recently released review into surface combatant fleet

and with a very sort of ambitious recommendation to more than double that. At the moment, Australia's surface combatant fleet is just 11 vessels, which, you know, try and match that with the size of the exclusive economic zone that I mentioned before, 8 million square kilometres and, of course, significant coastline and significant search and rescue responsibilities. So we are seeing, I think, a shift towards more recognition

of Australia's maritime geography in the Defence Strategic Review and in the Defence Strategy that was released earlier this year. But there are still real question marks about whether or not we're going to be able to deliver on those ambitious plans. Okay. Just a couple of things. You did name drop. I'm sorry, Sean Andrews. So the listeners want to hear Sean.

He was a Sea Control guest, Sea Control 430 on Australian constabulary missions. And then you mentioned the defense review came out two days after we recorded it. but Sea Control 508, Australian Capabilities in the Literal with Jennifer Parker covered a lot of that as well. Then the final question, and we'll start with you, Joanne, is how is Australia approaching the South Pacific and what do you believe it should be doing differently there? The South Pacific, which we call it the South Pacific

because, of course, our book is focused on ocean regions, so it is described as the South Pacific as an ocean region, but more typically we would call it generally the Pacific Islands region. So I'll lapse into Pacific Islands region, although we don't use that in our book, but that's my comfort zone. And the Pacific Islands region has really occupied a lot of Australian attention, particularly over the last, gosh, remembering we're in 2024, seven years, because there has been increasing anxiety about the visible presence, the much more visible presence of China in

the Pacific over this period. China has been in the Pacific Islands for a long time. Chinese migrants have been in the Pacific for more than 100 years. But since about 2017, 2018, there has been a much greater perception that China's interest in the Pacific Islands region had a strategic edge. Historically, it had primarily been interested in its diplomatic competition with Taiwan. As that kind of cooled for a period there, as the Taiwanese domestic politics

ebbed and flowed, people became much more concerned about the potential for a Chinese strategic presence. This really came to the fore in 2018 when there was rumours that China was in talks with the Vanuatu government to establish a base in Vanuatu. And as mentioned, our geography is critical to Australia's security because, and this is what our book argues, is we are a maritime nation and I hardly need to tell the listeners of this podcast

how important air and sea lines of communication are. Many of our most important air and sea lines of communication go through the Pacific Islands region. So a potentially hostile presence there is of great concern to us. And we had already seen during the Second World War with the Japanese advance through the islands what that could look like. So when this rumour of the interest in Vanuatu came to light, it was kind of a real wake-up call for the Australian government,

which had already been growing anxious, but it was kind of this existential moment. And then although both governments denied that was going to happen and nothing has happened in Vanuatu, in 2019 both Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched their diplomatic recognition to China. Now, Kiribati is interesting because of where it's located, quite strategically located relative to Hawaii. So it is that China, you know, was growing that relationship,

was very concerning particularly to the US but also to Australia. and Solomon Islands, given its proximity to Australia, it was a concern for us. This wasn't helped by the fact that China then attempted to lease an island in Solomon Islands that had been home to an old Japanese base during the Second World War and it's offered to upgrade strategically located airstrip in Kiribati that's I think about only a few thousand kilometres

from Hawaii. So this has been this growing concern. That concern has grown even further because in 2022, China entered into a security agreement with Solomon Islands. Now, the full text of that agreement has never been publicly released. There's just been a change of government in Solomon Islands. It may come to light now. A leaked version by a friend of Bec and I's at a polls from Massey University in New Zealand,

she obtained a version and was able to leak it. That was interpreted by some commentators in Australia as providing the pathway for a military presence, a Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands. This was really this kind of hold on to your hats moment for Australia. So Australia, and, you know, although the Solomon Islands government at the time, you know, noting it just changed, denied that it was ever the intent, just the possibility of it is enough to make Australia anxious because it is so important to us.

So Australia has been doing a lot in the Pacific. Since 2018, we've been implementing what was described under the last government as a Pacific step-up and huge focus on development, on diplomatic relationships, but also if we think about the maritime domain, enhancing maritime domain awareness in the Pacific. So Australia now funds the Pacific Fusion Centre, which is in Vanuatu, and it is focused on maritime domain awareness,

information sharing amongst Pacific Island countries and Australia and New Zealand because we are members of the Pacific Islands Forum, which is the peak regional security and politics organisation. And we've also been rolling out the Pacific Maritime Security Cooperation, which has upgraded patrol boats that we have given to Pacific Island countries. We have been donating patrol boats to them since the late 80s to help them patrol their EEZs. These new Guardian-class boats are much bigger. So in accompaniment to that program, we've been upgrading a lot of port facilities. Now, the one that gets the most attention is Lombrum, which is in Monas Island in Papua New Guinea, because we're doing that in cooperation with the US.

and there is the view now that the US has its security and defence cooperation agreement with Papua New Guinea that that might pave the way for some kind of US naval presence or at least more visible US presence at Lombrum in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. So it is occupying a lot of Australian attention, the maritime space in the Pacific. Having said that, you know, it's not been without issues

Australian policy. And this is linked to the dynamics that I described before about our security policy generally. We do have a lot of anxiety about the Pacific because we do feel quite vulnerable as we are so distant from our security guarantors. We have traditionally pursued a policy of strategic denial, therefore, in the Pacific Islands. That's becoming harder to maintain now that China is more present in the region. So we're having to negotiate at the moment or what does it look like if we can't maintain strategic denial in the Pacific Islands? And I don't think that we have yet a solid answer on that. Our current answer is we just have to try and do everything we can to get it back. Whether that is sustainable is

another issue. But the second dynamic we identify in Gert by Sea and we discuss in the chapter on the South Pacific is that Australia has often misunderstood its capacity to influence Pacific Island countries in pursuit of strategic denial, we have often assumed that we have much more power over them than we actually do. So we're facing this dilemma in that we really need strategic denial. We see that we need strategic denial in the Pacific much more than we ever have in recent times, yet our capacity to achieve strategic denial by influencing our Pacific partners is much lower. So it's a challenging period for Australia and the Pacific. In terms of what we could do differently, I mean, we address this in Gert by Sea, but I'd probably expand that more in my own work.

My main argument, and it's through a different project called Statecraftiness, if anyone wants to see how we have a story map where we've mapped all the different tools of statecraft that different partner countries are deploying across the Pacific Islands, except for aid and loans, which are done by the Lowy Institute on their Pacific aid map. And we've also got a podcast, State Craftiness, where we go, our host, Dr. Gordon Peake, goes and talks to people across the Pacific about what it's like to be the target of all these influence attempts. And one of our major findings is that Australia, the US, France, New Zealand, Japan, we are all over the Pacific. Yes, China is there. Yes, China is visible and making itself, deliberately making itself visible.

but when looked at relative to what other partners like Australia and the US are doing, China is not in any way about to take over and win the Pacific inverted commons. So we argue that actually Australia, the US and other like-mindeds can be much more, can afford to be much less reactive to China. I do feel as a commentator on Pacific security that a lot of what Australia and the US in particular do is quite reactive. China does something they immediately counter.

And actually we argue in the State Craftiness Project that we can actually afford to be the ones that take the initiative. Instead of reacting to China, let China react to us. Let's roll out our big picture, our big ideas, and China can find its way around instead of giving them the initiative, which is what I feel has happened in recent times. And that has happened because, as I said before, there's such heightened anxiety that people aren't perhaps feeling that they can pause,

they just feel that they have to react. Bec, anything you'd like to add on the recommendations front before I close? Yeah, I do realise that you asked me in your previous question about Australian border force and other sort of non-military, I guess, elements of maritime security. And I did want to speak to that a little bit in that when we think about maritime security, often there's this binary between traditional security challenges that are, you know, really focused on military threats and military responses to those threats. And that's when we talk about, you know, things like navies. But we've also got this other, you know, maritime security dimension in its civil sense, where it's

about maritime law enforcement, it's about dealing with other sorts of challenges such as, you know, illegal fishing or piracy or terrorism and these sorts of threats that might be supported by state actors but are often also generated by non-state actors. And then you have a range of other sorts of challenges that don't fit in with traditional or non-traditional around things like environment, environmental challenges, climate change, sea level rise, or even things like pandemics, as we've seen, you know, over the last four or

five years, the effects that a pandemic can have on things like shipping and trade and safety of maritime workers. So part of the issue in thinking about Australia's maritime security is it doesn't have a strategy that really brings together these parts. And in fact, I don't think many states do. Some states have a maritime security strategy that they advertise publicly, like New Zealand or the UK. These are both, from what I believe, generated by the Department of Transport and don't have a lot to say about more conventional national security challenges. And Australia has a civil maritime security strategy. And if you read it, I'll be frank it's not much of a strategy really um it's more of a you know perhaps a kind of outlook

um but there's also no blending of the the the military or defense um uh dimensions of of maritime security in that document either and it strikes me that you know we we exist in a world where grey zone challenges are becoming more pronounced. You know, we have the country that Australia is sort of most afraid of at the moment, China, is using maritime militia and Coast Guard and a host of other non-military vessels for strategic ends. And so part of what we argue in the book is that it's time

for a more coherent approach to maritime security challenges that reflect the complex integrated and interrelated nature of threat, but that also this applies more generally to Australia's foreign and defence policy planning. It's still very siloed. There is still a sense in which Australia's foreign and defence planning is very much led by military approaches, more conventional approaches to security.

So we argue in the book that what we need is a national security strategy that broadens out our understanding of security and can deal with, grapple with, what are extremely complicated challenges. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Bex Stratting and Dr. Joanne Wallace. Joanne, where can we find you online

and what are you working on next? You can find me on Twitter, but also on my University of Adelaide website where we have the Stratton Institute for Public Policy the research program on security in the Pacific Islands. All our projects are available there, including the State Craftiness Story Map, if you're interested in the geopolitics of the Pacific Island,

and as well as our State Craftiness podcast, which is also available on all good podcast platforms. Yeah, we'll post a link to State Craftiness in the show notes as well for the listeners. You'll be able to find it there a little more easily. Bec, same questions to you. Where can we find you and what are you working on next? Well, I'm on Twitter at Bex Strading and you can also find me

at the La Trobe Asia page on the La Trobe University website. But one of the projects that I'm leading at the moment is a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funded Blue Security project. So this is Blue Security is a consortium of six universities and, well, five universities and one think tank organisation in Australia who are producing and publishing works on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region. So we have a Blue Security publication series that is available online

and we have produced easy-to-read and good-looking publications on a range of issues, including things like Australia's maritime security approach in Southeast Asia. We've published on the effects of sea level rise in Southeast Asia. This is a topic that gets a lot of attention in the Pacific, but much less so in Southeast Asia. And we've also got upcoming publications on issues to do with lawfare, as well as coordinating maritime security governance within Southeast Asia. Thank you, Lady Jep.

You highlight all those things. I have to say that Australia, while geographically large, has a relatively small population and you are producing a lot of really good maritime content. So, you know, thank you. Thank you all for what you've been doing there. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.