Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the Vegetius treatise De Re Militarii, there's a very apt thing, 'Si vis pacem, para bellum', which means 'If you want peace, prepare for war.' You have to be strong to deter people. He was under the Emperor Valentinian. But some time before him, in the 'Melian dialogue' by Thucydides, on the Peloponnesian War of Athens versus Sparta in 416 BC, there is another very apt one: 'The strong will do what they can, and the weak will suffer as they must.' It's once more a reinforcement that, if you want to protect your liberty, you have to be strong, which is why I always say you've got to become as powerful as possible as quickly as possible—and we are not. We are not.

I want to go to something just briefly to shine some light on that. We have six Collins class submarines. They're from about 1993. They're antiquated, to be honest. China has 79. We have six; they have 79. We have three destroyers—and that's being kind about them. China has 62. We have seven frigates, and they're very dated. China has 58. We have two amphibious warfare ships. China has 12 amphibious transports, 32 landing ship tanks and 32 landing ship mediums. And that's before we get to the 1.3 million people they have in their army. Just giving this speech is in breach of China's '14 grievances' against Australia, both No. 7 and No. 14. In No. 7 of these grievances—they came out in 2020—we can have no criticism of China's political system by Australian politicians, and grievance No. 14 is opacity in doing the bidding of the United States.

What we saw, when Wang Yi went to Timor-Leste, the Solomons and Kiribati, and had communications with the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, to name a few, and attempts with both PNG and Fiji, was the tactics of the encirclement of Australia. It's not the Chinese people, of course; it's the Communist totalitarian regime. Encirclement means they have the capacity of duress over Australia and to put a foot on our throat, and one of the mechanisms that they could enforce is on trading terms.

You've got to remember that everything you do, whether you realise it or not, is in US dollars, if it's traded. US dollars is the trading currency. It's a democracy, and we're very lucky it is. China's vision—this came from some bankers from New York, who I was lucky enough to be discussing this with, maybe, a year and a half ago in London—is that the RMB becomes the mechanism of exchange. At that moment, everything in Australia would be determined in Chinese yuan, and at that moment the whole aspect of the Australian economy and the value of everything we have would be turned on its head, without the firing of a bullet. The threats to us are not just military, but we must be strong in order to push back against that.

What we have to do is understand that becoming as strong as possible as quickly as possible is one of the reasons I fight so virulently against things such as net zero, because you can't be strong if you don't have a manufacturing base. Australia's got the lowest manufacturing base in the OECD, so we can't manufacture what we require in a time of peril. It's not there—even the componentry of an artillery shell. Whether we can produce everything that's required is highly dubious.

In closing, I want to quote Dwight D Eisenhower, who was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 to 1961:

Some day there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in their estimates can be made with little or no damage. If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen in this country.

That was the USA, and for us it's vastly more dangerous than when he said that. So how are we going? We've got Richard Marles over in the United States who can't crack a meeting with Pete Hegseth—

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