In an age of digital echo chambers and cancel culture, the Oxford Union stands apart, refreshingly upholding freedom of speech and the contest of ideas. I was therefore pleased to receive your kind invitation to address you, as so many of my antipodean Prime Ministerial predecessors have done before me. It is an honour for which I’m grateful.
This evening I want to discuss our global rules based order that favours freedom, why it matters, how it is being threatened and what we must do to keep it.
Russia’s invasion and war against Ukraine is a crime, not only against the people and legitimate government of Ukraine, but against our global rules based order that favours freedom. The signals sent by the free world’s collective response to Russia’s invasion will have a significant impact on the calculus of other autocracies that aspire to challenge their status quo.
As Prime Minister of Australia at the time of Russia’s invasion, I ensured our response was swift, significant, meaningful and instinctive. It must remain so, as must our embassy be reopened in Kyiv as soon as possible. It is true that Ukraine is a long way from the Indo-Pacific and the shores of Australia, but we are not so naive to think our geography will shield us from the far reaching impacts, should Ukraine fall.
If Russia withdraws, the war is over. If Ukraine falls, then not only is Ukraine over, but autocracy has gained a further foothold in its bid to change the rules of our global order, in their favour. Russia is not alone in this objective.
That is why it is essential we all continue to stand with Ukraine. I therefore want to especially commend the UK Government today who have been a mainstay of the free world’s response.
Two years ago, as Prime Minister of Australia, I accepted Prime Minister Johnson’s invitation to participate in the G7+ dialogue at Carbis Bay. It was my third such invitation to attend the G7. The G7 remains an important grouping of the world’s leading democracies with market based capitalist economies.
For several years prior to this meeting Australia took a series of decisions to stare down the coercion of the Chinese Government. In response, the Chinese Government doubled down, cutting off diplomatic engagement, applying illegal trade sanctions and engaging in a concerted public and diplomatic campaign to denounce and undermine Australia. In November 2020, the Chinese Government’s embassy in Canberra released a list of 14 points, summarising their grievances with Australia.
They included denying foreign investment in critical assets and infrastructure under our foreign investment laws, preventing Huwai and ZTE from involvement in our 5G network (Australia was the first country to do this), establishing laws to protect against foreign interference in Australia’s domestic politics and institutions, enforcing our espionage laws against Chinese nationals, calling out state sponsored cyber attacks, making statements critical of China’s actions in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan, supporting freedom of speech in our parliament, think tanks and media and calling for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.
We resisted. Beijing calculated we would succumb, trading our sovereignty and breaking with our allies, in return for continuing our economic and diplomatic relations with China. They failed. Had Australia relented, the Chinese Government would have had a successful game plan to split the west and their like-minded partners in the region. We called it out and weathered the blows that then came our way for standing up for our sovereignty.
At Carbis Bay I put it to the leaders assembled that Australia lived on the front line of the grey zone conflict in the Indo-Pacific, where the plates of freedom and autocracy were colliding. I paraphrased Benjamin Franklin, saying we had a global rules based order that favours freedom, if we can keep it.
I distributed to each of the leaders the 14 Points from the Chinese embassy and asked them which of these would they be prepared to concede or compromise. I argued that like minded countries that favoured freedom and their own sovereignty had to further reinforce their ties and boost their resilience against the growing assertiveness of autocracies.
I said this resilience required increasing defence and security cooperation; reinforcing and protecting trade, supply chain and financial linkages; coordinating diplomatic efforts to protect the integrity of global institutions and demonstrating domestically the effectiveness of liberal democracy and market based economies in action.
These were not just words from Australia. We had already stood our ground and worked closely with India, Japan and the US to establish the Quad Leaders dialogue. I was a founding member. We were advancing bilateral defence, security and economic partnerships with our Indo-Pacific neighbours, including Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, India and South Korea. Ours would be the first Government of any nation to achieve a comprehensive strategic partnership with ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations. We had also significantly lifted our investment and engagement in the South West Pacific.
All of this was positive, however, our actions were not confined to the diplomatic sphere. We required a transformational lift in our own defence posture and capability.
Our Government restored defence spending as a share of our economy to over 2%.
We embarked on an ambitious programme to expand and deepen our defence capability, particularly in the maritime domain. This included, in 2016, the decision to build 12 new conventionally powered attack class submarines. As Prime Minister it became clear to me, in late 2019, that these assets would likely become obsolete before they even got wet, such was the pace of Chinese militarisation, the development of their anti-submarine war fighting capabilities and the deterioration of the strategic environment in the South China Sea.
Australia needed the nuclear powered option. While this would mean ultimately cancelling our contract with Naval Group and disappointing France, our national security interests demanded it. That is why they call them hard decisions. Over the next eighteen months we worked with the United States and the United Kingdom to convince both that we could take on building and operating nuclear powered, conventionally armed submarines.
This led to AUKUS, bringing together the US, UK and Australia, in the most significant defence agreement Australia had secured since our formal alliance with the US through ANZUS more than seventy years before.
At Carbis Bay in late June 2021, Prime Minister Johnson, President Biden and I met quietly to pull together the arrangement. AUKUS was then finalised and announced in September. This was the first time the US had agreed to share their nuclear submarine technology since 1958, with the UK. A second pillar of AUKUS was established to focus on the trilateral development of frontier defence technologies in areas such as quantum and AI, and to integrate our defence industrial bases to support them.
In a demonstration of the bipartisanship so essential for the success of AUKUS in each jurisdiction, in March this year the new Labor Government in Australia followed through on our AUKUS initiative, announcing with the US and UK the outcomes of the 18 month optimal pathway project for nuclear powered submarines we had initiated in Government.
The AUKUS agreement and the Quad leaders dialogue have been the most significant checks to China’s assertiveness in decades. This followed a period where the west had wrongly believed that China’s economic success would lead them to embrace freedom, liberal democracy and a market based economy.
As a consequence, we watched the Chinese Government turn disputed island atolls in the South China Sea into stationary aircraft carriers, build a substantial nuclear arsenal, establish a fleet of nuclear powered submarines and a soon to be commissioned second aircraft carrier. China has spread their financial net, signing up almost 70 nations worldwide to their Global Development Initiative, they have dominated critical supply chains for new energy technologies, especially in critical minerals processing, and steadfastly expanding their portfolio of global institutional bodies they chair or influence, especially standard setting bodies, through the United Nations.
In 2022, the Chinese Government launched their China Global security initiative, which effectively argues for hegemonic franchises. This would grant large powers, such as China and Russia, a veto over security arrangements in their regional neighbourhoods.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that the Chinese Government is not interested in maintaining their status quo. The Chinese Government seeks to exert itself not just in the Indo-Pacific region, but well beyond, especially in the developing world.
The Chinese Government seeks to alter the world order into one that better favours their interests, one that favours power over freedom. These aspirations are shared with like minded autocracies, such as Russia, Iran and North Korea who together with China, as Prime Minister, I referred to as the arc of autocracy. While these countries may have a history of antipathy towards each other, on this issue their interests are aligned.
We must not underestimate the appeal that China’s alternative presents to leaders and Governments in the non liberal world. The alternative being offered by the Chinese Government is a transactional one, devoid of common values, where finance, economic and security guarantees come without transparency or accountability, but for which there is a clear quid pro quo.
This constitutes a real threat to the global rules based order that favours freedom as we know it. This threat must be taken seriously and addressed.
Henry Kissinger recently argued in his 100th birthday interview with The Economist in May that preventing the catastrophe of a global conflict required preventing aggressors from imposing their will early enough, so that they could not achieve military dominance. He argued that deterrent and detente had been greatly underrated in their effectiveness to avoid war and sustain peace, noting it had prevented nuclear war for seventy five years.
Failure to provide a clear and credible deterrent can become an invitation for conflict.
This was the tragedy of the 1930s, which Churchill warned against. We cannot repeat that mistake. It will require the biggest shift in investment and cooperation of like minded countries since the second world war.
The good news is that this has begun. AUKUS and the Quad Leader’s Dialogue are prime examples. There are many others, but there is much more to do.
Reunification of Taiwan is on China’s critical path to assert itself beyond the second island chain and establish hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. This is the most likely flash point for conflict. I have no doubt that China does not wish to invade Taiwan, but it will do so if a) it becomes necessary due to the inability to achieve this goal by other means and b) the military calculus adds up.
There is time to prevent conflict. A successful invasion of Taiwan is beyond the PLA’s abilities at this point. This assessment will only have been reinforced by Russia’s experience in Ukraine, but time could be on their side. The calculus against an invasion will be directly assisted by a determined and coordinated effort to further enhance and maintain our credible military deterrent. In Australia I believe this will require a further lift in our defence investment to 2.5% of GDP by 2030, at the latest.
However, Beijing’s calculus on Taiwan will not just be determined by relative assessments of military capabilities and posture. It will be determined by Beijing’s assessment of what the response of nations might actually be. It will be determined by their
perceived assessment of the west’s resolve. While forced reunification of Taiwan may be rejected as a matter of policy by western and other like minded powers, passive acquiescence could deliver China the same result. If Taiwan is judged as too far away to risk transactional interests with China, there is great danger here.
The Chinese Government is counting on such a calculus, including from Europe and even the UK. A new Acheson style line that excludes the Indo-Pacific from Europe’s sphere of interest would be welcome news in Beijing. Thankfully, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell’s statement in April was a welcome reassurance about Europe’s position, as was the statement by the UK’s own Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, last month, reinforcing the UKs cooperate, challenge and compete strategy towards China.
One further factor that will be central to how autocracies assess the free world’s resolve is the question of our conviction and belief. If we are to prevail, the West needs more true believers, and I’m not talking about religion, although I do think that helps.
Henry Kissinger observed in his discussion with the Economist that “no society can remain great if it loses faith in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception.”
In his book, America in the World, Bob Zoellick summarised how Ronald Reagan set about addressing the existential challenges the US and the world faced in the early 1980s.
The world was on the brink. The US was, once again, being written off as a once great power in terminal decline. A global energy crisis was wreaking havoc on the global economy. The Cold War threatened nuclear armageddon.
Reagan’s response was to reclaim America’s advantage. This meant rebuilding America’s economic and military strength. But it also meant re-energising America’s confidence in their own exceptionalism.
In Reagan’s mind, there could be no settling for less with the Soviet Union. Reagan understood that peace and freedom were a package deal that could not be compromised.
Zoellick recounts how in Westminster, at the invitation of Prime Minister Thatcher, President Reagan laid out his moral manifesto for winning the Cold War, warning that state dictatorship, armed with the most dangerous weapons, threatened human freedom, internally and externally. While acknowledging that Soviet Russia did not desire war, he did note that it desired ‘the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of [Soviet] power and doctrines’. It all sounds familiar. Reagan said the mission of the west was ‘to preserve freedom as well as peace’.
Reagan chose to believe in America and it’s foundational values when others were giving up and surrendering their faith. Zoellick reminds us that in Reagan’s Westminster speech he praised Great Britain’s ‘great civilised ideas: individual liberty, representative government and the rule of law under God’. Reagan was a true believer.
Zoellick shows us how Reagan acted to directly delegitimize Soviet Communism as a system and rejected the idea that superpowers were morally equivalent, equally at fault.
Reagan was unrelenting in his approach with Gorbachev, and he prevailed.
What was built by our post second world war architects was not a series of transactional and bureaucratic rules cast in a moral vacuum. Rather it was a new and aspirational architecture where power is constrained and even sacrificed for peace, freedom, reason and respect for human dignity. Some suggest these values are universal. I don’t fully agree. While the application, desirability and utility of these values are certainly universal, their origin is not. The values that underpin and preserve our global rules based order that favours freedom were derived from the western powers that raised a new world from the ashes of WWII.
My concern is that we have entered an age of self loathing and western guilt. The post war global order produced the greatest lift in public health, human living standards and technological advancement in human history. This is not to deny our faults or the many egregious injustices they produced. But it is possible to acknowledge our faults without condemning our society.
In our enthusiasm to disown our transgressions we are failing to also appreciate the reasons for our success. We are surrendering our optimism, frightening our children and forfeiting confidence in our western model of freedom, representative democracy and a market based entrepreneurial economy to overcome the many challenges we face, including climate change.
The enemies of freedom welcome such an appetite for self loathing with open arms.
We must assess our past with humility and grace. When we rightly denounce abhorrent practices of the past, let us also be careful how we judge those now in their graves.
It is highly arrogant to think our generation would have easily translated our present-day morality to earlier times had we been there. Our current generation is the beneficiary of centuries of Judeo-Christian moral influence that has thankfully fine-tuned our society’s sensibilities. We like to pretend this modern morality is self-evident, intrinsic to our humanity. This is nonsense. Human history tells a very different story. Our society has become better, we are the moral beneficiaries of this improvement, an advantage our forebears did not have.
Take slavery for example. Slavery and it’s industrialisation was most certainly an abhorrent western practice, but it was not unique to western society, nor did we invent it. Slavery is a human invention as old as human history itself. What is remarkable is not that slavery was practised in the west, but that the west recognised it was morally repugnant and abolished it right here in the mother of all Parliaments, at Westminster. That’s what the west does.
Western society is fundamentally reformist, guided by our core values. This is a virtue. Western society does not pretend to perfection, but nor is it static. We are just not perfect yet. However, we also recognise in humility that the finish line for perfection will always recede, nonetheless we press on.
Our Western society’s reformist nature can be traced to our Judeo-Christian values of repentance, grace and redemption. The realisation that slavery was an evil did not come from enlightened secular humanism, but the transformative impact of the Christian faith on a group of societal reformers known as the Clapham Sect here in the UK, most notably William Wilberforce. Their wild evangelical activism impacted British society and western society in numerous other areas, including reforms to child labour laws, public education, healthcare, prison reform, support for the unemployed and even protection against cruelty to animals, to name just a few.
The Late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks credits such Judeo-Christian influences as the foundation of western morality and liberty, by acknowledging the dignity of every human being as being created in God’s likeness. Judeo-Christianity strives for an objective truth and standard beyond self, tribe, nation or even culture. Sacks argued in his final published work: “Remove the moral matrix of civil society and eventually you get the death of freedom .. this is the wrong road to take.”
For this reason, Sacks warned against the trend to moral relativism increasingly evident in western society, as a likely source of its undoing.
Our global rules based order that favours freedom is a modern miracle that bucks the trend of human history. Peace, security and respect for human dignity is not our natural state as human beings. We must work together to hold it and sustain it.
Our ambition must not simply be to live in a world without fighting, but to live in a world that is worth fighting for, to protect and defend it.
President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher knew that the west was right and was prepared to stand up for it and not compromise it. The west must put away the sackcloth and ashes, and get back to confidently championing the freedom, peace and stability that was gained through the sacrifice of a generation during WWII. By all means be candid about our failures, and reconcile with our past, but not at the expense of yielding advantage to those who would seize our liberty through our weakness or self doubt.
Let us be at least as diligent, courageous, moral, innovative and compassionate as those who gifted us a world based order that favours freedom, so that we may keep it, and pass it on in good repair.