South Wind

A Lowy Institute debate last month on the value of Australia’s massive AUKUS nuclear submarine commitment, featuring two well-credentialled defence analysts, revealed troubling problems with the Australia-US military alliance.

The same signal, but much louder, came last week from the non-official “AUKUS Public Inquiry”, backed by the Australia Institute, which is premised on the urgent need for such a discussion after the secrecy and deceit that surrounded its beginnings under Scott Morrison’s government.

Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie told the inquiry that AUKUS signified “an appalling abandonment of proper process”. He said the Albanese Government’s decision to charge ahead with the deal when it could have critically revisited it “just goes to show that they’ve also drunk the Kool-Aid”.

In 2003 Wilkie ended a career in military intelligence by resigning and publicly accusing the Howard government of lying about going to war in Iraq. Last week the independent MP warned that AUKUS forced Australia into relying on crewed boats for decades ahead, at an “eyewatering” cost, while locking us into alliance with a country that has become “an unreliable ally”.

Such a notion has yet to surface in the Labor government; certainly not in the mind of defence minister Richard Marles. He beamed with delight last week in the company of America’s self-styled “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, and declared that AUKUS is on track. But a chronic shortfall in US naval shipbuilding guarantees only that if those subs ever happen, they’ll be many years late.

Less than halfway through Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the “nothing to see here” approach still favoured by Australia has lost its shine elsewhere. And the country leading that reappraisal turns out to be Canada, known for going quietly about its business while its powerful neighbour struts its stuff.

Needing to replace retired PM Justin Trudeau, in March last year Canada’s governing Liberal party chose Mark Carney, a celebrated global economist and former head of both Canada’s and Britain’s reserve banks. Carney turned Canadian politics on its head. On the back of Trump fantasising that Canada should be a US state, his Liberals won the national election in a landslide.

Canada has been a thorn in Trump’s side ever since. After his first round of tariffs were deemed illegal by the US Supreme Court, in July the US president announced new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.

Trade talks collapsed when Trump insisted that Canada drop official support for the French language and stop negotiating foreign agreements he doesn’t approve of. Declaring Canadian sovereignty to be non-negotiable, Carney announced reciprocal Canadian tariffs on US imports, starting today.

Carney’s election slogan was “Canada strong”. Last week he said this: “The most important thing we can do is not to spend all our time waiting… No. It’s building here, building bold, building now… making agreements with all of those countries around the world who want to deal with Canada.”

Far from waiting for a trade war to cripple his country, he’s made multiple new trade deals around the world. Besides massively expanding Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic ports, he’s building new icebreakers and a 1000 km fast train service, and last week announced a multi-billion-dollar deal to make passenger rail cars in Canada. This is Canada’s version of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal.

In another New Deal echo, Carney is transforming Canadian defence. He’s prioritising domestic manufacturing, speeding up procurement processes, and forging international security partnerships outside the US system. Canada has already reached NATO’s defence spending benchmark of two per cent of GDP and aims to go much higher.

Pete Hegseth, who is said to fear competent underlings, has overseen the forced departure or “early retirement” – purge is the word being used – of at least 25 top Pentagon officers, all of whom swore to defend US constitutional democracy. With military leadership ranks so thin during a major war, alarm bells are now ringing after last week’s resignation of US army secretary Dan Driscoll.

Trump is no longer an object of derision. Trumpian intimidation is a clear and present danger to democracy and the rule of law everywhere. Openly speculating on reasons for Trump to keep Hegseth in his job, some senators are formally seeking Hegseth’s assurance, so far not forthcoming, that troops won’t be deployed to polling places during November’s midterm elections.

Canada signals that Trump’s foreign and economic policy is actually about subjugation, borne out by facts on the ground. That front-line experience, the knowledge that an American dictatorship could swallow it up, is Canada’s warning for the world.

Carney leads a growing resistance in every country that subscribes to the absolute sanctity of the vote. We now must ask of our own leaders: In this growing crisis, where is Australia?

In ancient Sanskrit, Himalaya meant roughly “cold home”. It’s a good fit for the world’s largest store of ice – over 5700 cubic kilometres – outside the poles. Brought together, its thousands of glaciers would cover Tasmania.

The Himalaya will always be colder than elsewhere because it’s so high up, but just like the air above Tasmania and pretty well everywhere, it’s getting less cold. And ice melts when nearby air gets warm enough. Of course you already know that.

Like high mountains everywhere, Himalayan high country is losing its ice, but the process is not completely visible. Glaciers are rotting away inside. Sooner or later they reach a point where they can’t support their mass, at which point the decay becomes very visible – instantaneously.

It’s hard to get a measure of last week’s mind-numbing flood disaster across the China-Nepal border. Such ice-and-rock falls like this are now happening often in different river systems, and no two events are ever the same.

What set this one apart was the immediate, shocking sense of scale that people all over the world got from a surveillance video as an avalanche dwarfed a multi-storey border building at Gyirong, north of Kathmandu on the Nepal-China border.

The Chinese government had rebuilt the border infrastructure, including a concrete road bridge over the Trishuli river, after a similar though smaller flood of ice, rock and melted glacier water destroyed its predecessor in July 2025.

Now, the whole lot is gone – along with hundreds of human victims seen in the video trying vainly to flee the onslaught before it swallowed everything and everyone in its path. Australian foreign minister Penny Wong found it horrifying. So did I.

Like Olympus, home of Greek gods, the breathtaking landforms of the Himalayas have inspired a profound, complex human mythology which draws many thousands each year. “Conquering” the world’s highest mountains is for rich Westerners with nothing better to do, but Himalayan people are drawn to lower slopes to pay homage to power beyond human imagining.

Many of these pilgrims, including some Australian citizens, were victims of last week’s disaster.

This most recent flood is among the worst of many similar catastrophic Himalayan events, featuring sudden releases of glacial meltwater, huge landslides, hydro dams breached, towns washed away and many lives lost. They’ve always been a feature of life in these mountains, but never so often as now. The rate of ice loss has doubled since this century began.

No-one who saw those awful images last week should be in any doubt. This calamity was the deadly work of climate change, of a warming world. And it will happen again and again, and get worse.

Those images, that connection should guide the thinking of every Australian. It should wipe away any doubt as to whether ending the fossil fuel era is worth bothering about. Those net-zero targets aren’t much, but they’re better than nothing.

It’s a shame that message wasn’t being put to the farmers, industrialists and politicians at the Bush Summit in Dubbo last week. Instead they were told that any such measures are a blot on the national canvas, a complete waste of everyone’s time and the nation’s resources.

They would have learned a lot about why Australia needs a climate policy from former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, now chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation.

Ending the fossil fuel era is a marathon, not a sprint, Henry said last week, involving many policy levers including renewable energy targets and compulsory emissions cuts for big emitters. And carbon credits too, for all their negative connotations, because they redirect polluters’ money into protecting native forests, essential to drawing carbon dioxide out of the air.

For One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce, who see the cause of lowering carbon emissions as passé, irrelevant, or downright wrong, all the above may be tedious, too prescriptive and regulatory. But it’s unforgivable that Liberals and Nationals – “parties of government” – are also on that bandwagon.

Donald Trump rose to the US presidency on the back of ill-defined grievances and resentments, which are what brought One Nation electoral success in Farrer and in WA’s weekend by-election for Secret Harbour. The party seems to think that what worked for Trump ought to work here.

Trump has set a tone for politics everywhere. Bullying, hectoring and browbeating have always lurked on the fringes of public policy discourse, in Australia and everywhere, but for those opposing open, rational debate they are now regular tools of trade.

For all these people there will be no clear message from the Himalayan disaster, just as they’ve learned nothing from the fierce heat and fires of this past northern summer, or the succession of other weather disasters of recent years. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

“A rollercoaster of revelation and despair” was how the Mercury’s David Killick described a week’s sitting of the House of Assembly in an excoriating opinion piece back in June.

“The basic structures which are supposed to ensure accountability and integrity are broken by intent,” wrote Killick, lamenting “the energy and creativity frittered away while we don’t face our real problems… We are funding a protection racket for the powerful. The foundations are rotten, the house cannot stand.”

Killick’s words pack a punch, but apparently not for premier Jeremy Rockliff. He gives no sign any such message has found its way to whatever lies behind his implacable public mask.

Last week saw draft gun laws that run counter to both a national push for tighter controls and the urging of police commissioner Donna Adams to limit gun ownership in Tasmania – the nation’s highest at four weapons per registered owner, plus stolen and other unregistered weapons estimated by police to number in the thousands.

It ought to be shocking that in the wake of the Bondi shootings, police minister Felix Ellis should post an image of himself proudly brandishing a rifle while openly defying legal, medical and police advice on gun ownership. The only advice the government seemed to hear came from gun owners.

It should be shocking, too, that in response to the state’s dire financial state and steadily building crises in housing, education and hospitals, instead of opening itself up to outside scrutiny and advice the government has opted for secrecy. But nothing shocks any more in this mad world.

Government failure becomes a thousand times worse when the Labor Party ceases to function as the official Opposition. The Liberals are floundering because they’ve overstayed their time in power, but what’s Labor’s excuse?

Labor spent a good part of this parliamentary term trying to fasten a “Liberal-Green” tag on the government, apparently in an effort to belittle the Greens and boost its own fraying credentials. But on critical issues Labor, not the Greens, has more frequently aligned itself with the Liberals.

In the August sitting of parliament, while questioning from Independent and Green MPs probed a range of government failures, Labor spent virtually all of a week’s allotted questions on the future of Bell Bay Aluminium – important, but just one of many topics that Labor needs to draw together to bring government to account.

The AFL stadium is a topic Labor has fallen over itself to avoid. We don’t need to discuss whether Tasmania should have an AFL team (of course it should), or whether the Devils need better playing and training facilities than are currently available (of course they do).

But the government is stretching credulity beyond breaking point to insist that these needs can only be met with a brand new stadium costing a billion dollars (or two), and that this stadium must be built at Hobart’s Macquarie Point, and that in Australia’s second driest capital city it must have a roof.

Yet for well over a year Labor has effectively taken itself out of the debate.

For both parties, aside from a competent enough response to the avian flu threat, environmental issues are a black hole. Aquaculture and the state of our waterways, native forest logging and water management, plus Tasmania’s blueprint (actually, the lack of one) for cutting carbon emissions while adapting to a changing climate, rate a mention only in passing.

In 2010, Labor was brave enough to join a coalition with the Greens, which for almost four years delivered innovative, reforming government culminating in an agreement to end the forest wars. That was quickly terminated by the new Hodgman government.

Under Rebecca White the party made gambling reform the centrepiece of its 2018 campaign. Under ferocious attack from gaming interests it gained some ground against the Liberals, but not enough to make a difference in seats.

That was the last gasp of reforming Labor in Tasmania. Two more lost elections saw White ousted by Labor hard man Dean Winter. In July 2025 the electorate showed what it thought of Winter’s “my way or the highway” attitude. While the Green vote held firm and the Independent vote rose 5.7 per cent, Labor crashed to its worst result in living memory.

With Liberals on life support and Labor everywhere except where it counts, this parliament is surviving on the goodwill of Independents and Greens.

History tells us parties can help corral competing interests, and democracy needs Oppositions standing up to be counted on all the big issues. Above all, both Liberal and Labor must open up to new ways of governing. But there are no signs anyone is listening.