The question comes down to one of simplicity, who should Australia trust, China or the US.

On about a par with each other.

Australia has no hope of outspending or out-gunning China for influence, and the US has minimal interests this far South.
Same old story, we are effectively on our own.

Start from the bottom end, expelling Chinese from Australia, but that will never happen since anything Chinese is sacrosanct, and has been that way for the past forty years, it’s impossible to change that locked-in association in a hurry.

How much of the Chinese intrusion into the Southern Hemisphere, (which is now painfully obvious that it’s well advanced), will Uncle Sam tolerate? It’s out of our hands isn’t it?

Dan

Our ability to thrust back at China and her investments are limited. Nor can we engage in a bidding war to buy PNG loyalty. We once had territorial control of PNG but gave it away before that nation was ready to self govern. What has emerged is a cargo cult administration trying to play us off against the Chinese.

The Chinese are there now and engaged for their own reasons logs, oil gas and gold! As for fish? Well, their appetite for other folk's legal fishing grounds has no apparent limit!

What should we do? Well it cannot be trying to match or better Chinese grants! We could help build a hydro, but would that not assist the Chinese and power their mineral smelters/timber exports/fish canning production?

Yes we should be alarmed and need to arm ourselves we reprisal weapons that the Chinese would respect, namely nuclear tipped, Mach five plus missiles.

And an industrial capacity that should and could match the Chinese. And only doable with MSR thorium, nuclear energy. And energy prices that are as low as 1 cent PKWH. This would allow quite massive automation of all manner of high tech manufacture and high tech manufacturers beating a path to our door!

Particularly if matched with real tax reform, say as a 15% flat and unavoidable tax. Collected from all income/profits earned here in Australia.

PNG has made a deal with the devil and cannot expect Australia to pull its irons from the fire! It invited the Chinese in and needs to uninvite them out! No ifs, buts or maybes!

As for the purchase of off the shelf nuclear subs? We should but without signaling the Chinese in advance just for some hidebound and asinine political reason? TBC.
Alan B.

Everything the CCP is doing in the region is "aimed at Australia". They are slowly but surely cutting us off from the only ally capable of defending us. While they have been doing this, the Morrison government has been caught like rabbits in the headlights, doing nothing. Now we have a socialist government who will continue to do nothing: they might even pal up with the CCP. The main thing on Labor’s minds is helping to wreck the country with a republic and the racist voice to parliament. The way things are going, we might end up part of a certain 'people's republic'.

The dissolution of sovereignty for PNG and the Pacific Islands is implied by most CCP agreements, and the Communists are out to pick our cherry, too.

With 9 years of a government taking little notice of what China has been doing - quite openly - and now with a socialist government with some members who think Communists should be treated with "respect", the dozy Australian population is in for something a lot more unpleasant than McDonalds replacing lettuce with cabbage.

Censorship is alive and well on Microsoft. I tried to comment on nuclear energy after jumping through all their ID hoops only to be rejected because they claim I'm under 18! I am 78 and their information cannot be correct unless some tech savvy kid has stolen my ID!

Simply put. Australia has no choice now but to transition to nuclear energy!

And we need to stop the antinuclear brigade from filling the media with their BS. Like the one that it takes 20 years to build. On the public record is info that saw a reactor built for Iceland, completed in 6 months and commissioned inside a year.

Then there is the BS about waste. Waste in MSR technology is just unspent fuel! And we could earn annual millions or even billions storing other folks unspent fuel, i.e., nuclear waste.

Even then spent fuel rods can be sliced wafer thin and then covered with manmade diamonds that safely convert radioactive emission to electricity! And could continue to do so for literally thousands of years! No rads just almost endless electricity!

People that know SFA has spent years filling the media with their ignorant fearmongering!

The most dangerous waste can be used inside appropriate shields to preserve fresh cryovaced food for possible centuries?

I have at times earned a living as an assayer, a lab tech, a chemical engineer and a science assistant for a power generating authority. And have spent more than 15 years researching thorium as a fuel. I'm across the science. Thorium delivers everything fusion promised but never delivered.

Just 8 grams of thorium contains enough recoverable energy to power your house and car for a century without refueling!

It's time the science free zone that's the nations parliament stopped listening to advice that was appropriate over 70 years ago! And listened to voices that are cogent in the 21st century! And that's not Dutton dressed as lamb.
Alan B.

What we can't afford is having that dill Dutton airing sensitive and classified information about Australia's capability in defence. That is exactly what this fool is doing by writing opinion pieces for his backers in the Murdoch gutter press. When you're kicked out of office like Dutton was, an unwritten law is you don't disclose sensitive information you learned while in office, the government should put Dutton on a dangerous persons list, not to be briefed on sensitive matters. He can't be trusted!

Nailed it in one, Paul. Better the world should suspect Dutton is a fool than he open his mouth and remove all doubt!
Alan B.

With Albo in the Lodge, anything China might do is the least of our worries.

Sorry, Hasbeen, but China is the most of our worries regardless of who is in the lodge. Then other worry is the trillion plus debt with SFA to show for it, that the Morrison government left and the parlous position of the global economy and the cost to us of energy.

And runaway inflation, the end result of way too much fiscal pump priming!

Runaway inflation that could top 9% by years end? And matched by interest rate rises that create many bankruptcies/forecloses.

Most of which could be avoided by the embrace of nuclear energy as MSR thorium also tasked with burning nuclear waste as virtually free fuel. If it's energy that creates the downturn, then virtually costless energy can and will reverse it.

Morrison and co had nine long and wasted years where they could have been mass producing SMR MSR thorium and nuclear waste burners for the huge economic upturn that would have delivered. And fart assed around with defense spending and the acquistion of nuclear subs.

If they had been on the ball some of those nuclear subs would already be in our fleet and already patrolling the oceans.

What would you have elbow do? What pearls of wisdom would you have him know? And that can't be a rant about who's in the lodge. Doesn't help or change nought! That said, don't see labor embracing the nuclear option, just huge and vastly more costly and intermitant renewables!
Alan B.

Hi Alan B,

As a Green I have always opposed nuclear power, on the grounds of nuclear proliferation, and the safety aspects associated with old style power production and waste disposal. If as you say all those fears can be overcome with new technology then there is no reason why nuclear power generation is not explored with an open mind.

As for China, it does not matter who is in the lodge, what matters is Australia's strategic and economic interests are being served. Our overriding objective should be peace and stability within our region, along with economic development of our neighbours. I don't believe we were well served by the Coalition government in regards to China. Blindly aligning ourselves with America is not serving our interests or the interest of peace and stability. I'm certainly not pro China, but then again I'm not pro America either. Its not a sign of weakness to engage in diplomacy and dialog with China, as the hawks like Dutton would have it, in fact it is likely to be respected by China if we stand up for ourselves in a diplomatic way, rather than presenting as a "Yankee lapdog" in a military sense. In the event of conflict between the two superpowers there will be a point at which Australia becomes totally expendable.

It should be noted that in every armed conflict we have joined America in since WWII it has resulted in failure, Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, Afghanistan, all failures of catastrophic proportion if the objective was "freedom and democracy". I never believed that F&D was the true objective at all, but rather the successful maintenance of the American military/industrial complex was, and still is, the true objective, I can't see that changing anytime soon.

I've heard it said that we need to be on a war footing. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. An isolationist USA was dragged into WW11. And used its industrial muscle to build B34 bombers at the rate of one a day, via mass production in a purpose built and massive factory.

For us in our circumstances and the threat to our liberty coupled to cost of living pressures, means something similar as the mass production of SMR MSR thorium. And no alternative!

Given comparisons between then and now. doable under the right leadership at one a day and not the twenty years some airhead pollies claim!

Anyone who seriously believes we can manufacture anything at today's energy prices has to have horse manure for brains. If the cap fits?

New baseload power only doable as the nuclear energy option and as outlined above. The first one off the rank powering the above mass production!

We can jawbone the issue to death and the next election by which time we may be reliving the Great Depression and the opportunity squandered. And investing in the learning of Mandarin instead. As do little pollies stare at the issue like rabbits caught in the glare of the spotlight?
Alan B.

Paul, many greens are on board the nuclear energy bandwagon, just not as conventional nuclear power! But rather MSR thorium which was rejected by the USA due to the extreme difficulty of weaponizing it!

Moreover, inbuilt passive safety makes it safer than almost any other option! In fact, so safe the operator could walk away and leave the system completely unattended for months or years!

That you don't know that is understandable given the antinuclear brainwashing that pervades green belief systems!

That you don't understand that renewables backed by pumped hydro and batteries, prices essential manufacturing off of the table, is also understandable, given the actual economic nouse of most if not all greens. If the cap fits? And no offence intended.

That said, suggest you get online and listen to former NASA scientist and nuclear technologist, Kirk Sorensen and his tech talks on MSR thorium and some of the commentary by leading greens formerly opposed to nuclear energy! It won't hurt, promise!
Alan B.

You know I think about the folly of all of this.
How much did Scomo cost Australia shirtfronting China over the pandemic cost?

How much did losing exports of 70 million tonnes of coal cost us?
What about cost the trade tariffs on barley, wine, beef, lamb, cotton, timber, lobsters, honey, fruit, pharmaceuticals?

How much is this costing the Australians that bust their asses to produce it.
Jobs and food on our tables? Tell me?

Now matter which home in Australia you go into, it's full of goods made in China, right?
- Yet WE export more to them than we import from them right?

What about the 4bln+ wasted on the bungled French submarine deal that delivered NOTHING?
How much are new ones going to cost? Maybe 200 billion?

All for WHAT exactly?
Becuase China may exceed the US economically?
- Of course they will, they have 6 times as many people.
Its INEVITABLE

Yamamoto was supposed to have said after Pearl Harbor
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
China has a 2 million man army, what the hell are we going to do?
- Chuck rocks at them? Submarines aren't going to save us.

China Threatens War I Beijing's Face To Face Warning To US Over Support To Taiwan's Independence Bid
http://youtu.be/9eoo2SFmYHk

Chinese and US defense officials, Wei Fenghe and Lloyd Austin held their first face to face meeting in Singapore on June 10
China will 'smash to smithereens' any Taiwan independence bid.
Wei Fenghe said that Beijing 'will not hesitate to start a war' if Taiwan declares independence to safeguard national soverignty and territorial integrity.

[Cont]
More people in Taiwan oppose independence than those who support it.
Why is the US so determined to meddle in other countries affairs?
You want to wake a Chinese sleeping dragon?

Who's going to fight them Australia, Japan, and South Korea and the US from the other side of the Pacific?

The world is pushing closer to WWIII

You know what would be best for us?
1 Either request the UK take back their Union Jack and give us Nuclear Subs with nuclear weapons so we can remain a voice of neutrality in the world, or we'll go to Russia and do a a deal with them for the same instead, promising to stay out of their business.

2 Instead of opposing the Chinese Pacific Security Pact, we sign the damn thing.

We'd all be a whole lot better off.
Look at the state of our country, how much has this cost us ALREADY?
- And people like Jeffrey Wall want to cost Australians more and more and push us to a point, where we are involved in a war that gets Aussies killed and our nation bombed?

How much does the US care about Ukrainians?
1000 or more a day are killed and wounded to 'Get Russia'
You think it cares how many people have to die?
And you want to put us in the same boat against China.

The US wont care how many Taiwanese get killed, nor will it care how many Aussies also end up dead.

Biden says China won't surpass U.S. as global leader on his watch
- All for this?

It's INEVITABLE.

[Deleted]

US Coerces UN Human Rights Chief Following Xinjiang China Visit
http://youtu.be/vtA_dKjb4F0

She's EXPOSING the truth in China, and they're furious | Redacted Conversation w Vanessa Beeley
http://youtu.be/FX45f7IU4q0