"We don't seem to know what the right policy should be…".

The right policy is to dump China as soon as possible. We are only dealing with this horrible Communist dictatorship because of already wealthy people wanting more money and cheaper labour. We did alright without China before our politicians sold out; we could do it again, but we won't.

"I do not think that China has any plans to invade Australia". They don't need to. The war they are waging against us started with the Covid virus which has wrecked our economy, and it continues with spying and cyber activity.

As one American military man said, all weapons don't go 'bang'.

We don't have an interest in the South China Sea? For heaven's sake, man! At least 60% of our trade is conducted via the SCS.

Save us from theorists well past their use-by date. This is as naive and useless as it was 50 years ago. Nobody listened then, and they are not listening now. Australian politicians are lurching from one crisis to another: a bandaid here, a patch there.

Australia is rooted.

Australia's defence position, Don Aidkin, is to fight to the last American. It has been that since 1945 and it is still the policy today. To claim we should be neutral is preposterous. Even Sweden is no longer neutral. Sweden sent combat troops to Afghanistan with NATO. Swedish fighter jets provided escort for a damaged
US SR-71 spy plane over the Baltic when the Soviets tried to shoot it down.

Australians spend more on gambling and feeding pets than defence. Our shambolic "submarine" program was never anything more than a submersible pork barrel. We bought the badly performing FA-18 instead of the fabulous F-15,which was cheaper. We could not contribute to Desert Shield because our "army" consists of a single, badly armed infantry division. We once had 220 Centurion tanks, reduced to 106 Leopard tanks, reduced to 50 M1A1 tanks with a 105 mm gun. Every other modern army (including China) has tanks with 120 mm guns. Most of our defence money goes to the Air Force and Navy while our Army, which has taken nearly all the casualties in to last 70 years of fighting, is at the back of the queue for money. We almost scrapped our Chinook helicopters before we discovered they were essential in Afghanistan. We bought the execrable Eurocoptor Tiger helicopter gunship which we could not field in Afghanistan because it was so problem ridden, instead of the fabulous Apache which was significantly cheaper. Somebody should have been shot for that, and I mean that literally.

In ww2, our unions actively sought to sabotage our war effort, even when Australia was fighting for it's survival against a barbaric enemy. And I doubt if we can trust them now to put any national interest above the self interest of their own members.

We are now a culturally divided society where you can bet that a significant proportion of our population now has sympathises with any enemy we may fight. And we have an academic caste determined to undermine our democracy and weaken us as much as they can.

So, no, we do need the Americans.

LEGO,

You say:

"We are now a culturally divided society where you can bet that a significant proportion of our population now has sympathises with any enemy we may fight. And we have an academic caste determined to undermine our democracy and weaken us as much as they can."

Very true. Mass immigration and multiculturalism will eventually finish us off. Not satisfied with kowtowing to China, we have allowed our truly awful politicians to import increasing numbers of people who do not have anything in common with the host population by way of values, culture, language. Some are downright hostile towards us, and many could be actively working against us in accordance with China's expectations of it's overseas diaspora.

We are as helpless as a sitting duck as long as we are importing almost all of our petrol & diesel fuels. This is even worse when it all cones from the one source. Just a couple of months interdiction of those supplies, in the south China sea, & we are broken, with most of the population starving with no food getting to the supermarkets.

Of course we don't need WW11 technology subs, & we do need a full nuclear armed range of missiles, cruise & ICBM, but they wouldn't be much use if we can't get to them to service them.

We need to start right now harvesting some of our large deposits of shale oil, & refining it here in Oz. If that doesn't suit international oil company business plans, we have to do it ourselves. Without fuel we are a sitting duck waiting to be plucked, no matter what arms we have.

Don. We need to be far more self-reliant and we need to be nuclear powered and nuclear-armed! Also, we need a robust manufacturing sector!

We need to Automate! So as to be able to manufacture massively if our defence requires that of us, were we stood alone and dependant on our own resources! And we need to jettison the idealogical idiocy of the past that emasculated and put our self-reliant defence in a straight jacket!

Automation requires the cheapest possible energy supply and cheaper than coal, thorium, fits that bill!

And given recent trends and perceived threats, time is of the essence and a luxury we can no longer afford! And defence manufacture needs an independent ultra-reliable energy supply as does our military bases.

Thorium powered microgrids doable in around 12 months! And need to be protected from cyber attack!

The only thing missing is the political will/nouse
Alan B.

Hasbeen. Cheap nuclear power (thorium) allows, via proven science, to turn seawater into all the fuel types we need for any purpose, be it jet fuel, diesel or petrol as fit for purpose, hydrocarbon alternatives. And from an inexhaustible local supply!
Cheers, Alan B.