Stuart Munckton
On August 24, the Howard government announced that the military would be expanded by 2600 troops, at a cost of $10 billion. According to that day's Australian, the expansion will add two new battalions, bringing the total number to eight, with the first new battalion to be ready by 2008.
On top of the announcement last December of nearly 1500 additional troops, the latest increase will take the size of the army from 25,000 to 29,000 troops. Patrick Walters argued in the August 25-26 Weekend Australian that the expansion, "combined with at least $50 billion to be spent on new equipment — including the joint strike fighter and air warfare destroyers — as well as rising personnel costs, will dictate even higher defence spending than has been promised by Howard".
The tax-payer funded spending spree doesn't end there. The September 3 Sydney Morning Herald reported that the cost of a new military command centre in Bungendore, which will house 750 high-ranking personnel, is expected to blow out to $1.2 billion, with payments to the private sector of $39.99 million per year for 30 years.
With the armed forces struggling to meet their current recruitment requirements, the government is planning changes to make it both easier to join and more enticing to stay in the military. It plans to offer more generous retention bonuses for highly skilled personnel and additional incentives for highly trained reservists, who can be called on to join permanent military interventions.
Changes to recruitment requirements include accepting applicants who have tattoos, admit to having used illicit drugs, suffer from asthma, don't meet the current fitness standards and/or are older.
The government is also going in for some targeted recruitment. An article titled "Girls: your country needs you" in the August 8 SMH reported that the Australian women's basketball team and eight teams in the Women's National Basketball League will wear Australian Defence Force advertisements on their uniforms. The ADF clearly hopes to overcome its negative image after recent scandals about bullying and sexual abuse in the military.
More generally, the army recruiting changes are a recognition of the difficulty of convincing people to participate in unpopular and dangerous wars, such as in Iraq. According to defence minister Brendan Nelson, as reported in the August 25 Canberra Times, over the last six years the number of applications to join the military has dropped from 150,000, to 100 000. Nelson has promised to increase the ADF's advertising budget in an attempt to turn that around.
So what is the growing threat to Australia that urgently requires ageing, overweight, tattooed asthmatics to take up arms, and that justifies billions more being thrown at the military, while billions are taken out of higher education, resulting in degrees costing students up to $237,000?
The August 26 Age editorial points out that it actually has nothing to do with defending Australian territory: "The Government is responding to two main strategic trends: Australia's continuing involvement with the US in expeditionary ventures such as Afghanistan and Iraq; and, as Mr Howard said, 'increasing instances of destabilised and failing states in our own region'."
The latter is particularly important to the government. Announcing the military increase, an August 24 ABC Radio National report quoted Howard as saying, "I believe in the next 10 to 20 years Australia will face a number of situations the equivalent of, or potentially more challenging than, the Solomon Islands and East Timor". His comments echoed the racist "white man's burden" argument used to justify colonialism in the 19th century: "We are the biggest and wealthiest country in our own immediate region. Quite properly, the rest of the world will look to us to carry most of the burden ... But we can't do it without having, over time, a larger army."
This is none-too-subtle neo-colonialism, with the subtext that the "natives" need the paternalistic "protection" of a "civilised" power. It completely ignores Australia's role — as the region's dominant economic power — in creating the crises that then provide the pretext for Australian military intervention.
Australian corporations, with the backing of the government, exploit the weaker nations in the region, helping to create conditions that fuel instability. It is hardly surprising that East Timor, for instance, might suffer governance problems when, rather than offer assistance to build up this poorest of nation's economy, Australia violates international law to force a rotten deal on East Timor that hands the lion's share of its oil wealth to Australian corporations.
Not only does Australia bear much of the responsibility for the crises in smaller states in the region; its interventions are aimed, not at resolving such crises, but at entrenching Australian domination.
In April, Australia sent hundreds of troops, police and "government advisors" to the Solomon Islands in response to rioting by desperately poor islanders. This followed nearly three years of Australian control of much of the administration of the Solomons, a period that the January 18 Solomon Star described as resulting in "increasing poverty and unemployment, high school fees, a downward-spiralling economy, higher inflation and lower incomes, declining medical services, ongoing corruption in government ministries, lack of planning and implementation of how Solomon Islanders will competently run all parts of their own government, crumbling infrastructure, millions and millions of funds spent on Australians with the money going back to Australia with minimum cash benefit for Solomon Islanders".
The Howard government's neo-colonial plans are not playing well with some of Australia's neighbours. In an August 29 Radio National interview, George Bogiri, the first secretary to Vanuatu's Prime Minister Ham Lini, strongly criticised the military expansion. He said: "The Pacific region is not a threat military-wise to the Australian people or to Australia for that matter ... If he [Howard] is more interested about the Pacific region I believe that he should be looking more into the development aid and resources level, especially the economies of small nations."
The Howard government asserts that more military funding is needed because the ADF is "stretched" by its commitments to US-led interventions combined with the increasing "need" to intervene in our region. Australia's ability to dominate the South Pacific certainly is tied to its participation in US-led wars; in return for its support for US imperialism, Washington is willing to help Australia dominate its limited sphere of influence. In short, the Australian government's foreign policy means war, war and more war.