I think one of the first times Pine Gap came to public prominence, an activist I know who lives in Darwin, decided to go and take a look. Crept into the location, took a photograph and it had five discs. That caused a bit of a controversy with the government back in the seventies because they were saying there was only two. So it's very interesting how secretive the place has been right from the get go.
From Schwartz Media, I'm Ashlin McGee. This is seven AM. Once upon a time Australians were told Pine Gap was a space base, then a weather station. But now of course we know the installation deep in the Northern Territory outpack is a US spy base, which isn't say that it's any less secretive. We still don't know a huge
amount about what goes on there. We do know that it's likely America's biggest offshore spy base, that it gathers critical intelligence about current conflicts, and now we know that it's undergone a rapid expansion. Today, editor of Declassified Australia and contributor to The Saturday Paper, Peter Crono on how he discovered the Bass New technology and what it means for Australia's safety. That's coming up after the break, Peter. Before we get into what you've uncovered, let's talk about
pine Gap itself. Why is there a US intelligence base in the middle of the Australian outback. Where does the story start?
Pine Gap is a satellite signal receiving station. It's jointly run at the moments by the United States and Australia.
Mister Holt speaks to the American Vice President, mister Humphrey via the Space Track network and then tells the cloud that Australia was benefiting in many ways because it was linked with America in space research.
So pine Gap was I think proposed in sixty six nineteen sixty six.
A network of complex machinery to track American satellites in the effort to conquer space.
It's located about fifteen kilometers in a direct line from Alice Springs in central Australia, and Australia gets access to some of the information that comes into the satellite dishes there, but it is essentially a US base. They basically fund it and it's for their purposes.
Today's globes bins within an invisible network built and maintained by the United States of America. It is our Defense Communications System DCS.
By nineteen seventy it was being used to scoop up North Vietnamese communications in Cambodia and in Vietnam, trying to locate their supply lines.
Thank God for far God your order, you want the player road.
After that, it was used, for example for the Yomkapur War, but that was done without telling Australian government at the time, and it leaked out through would you believe a journalist? So you know, the Prime Minister Whitlam eventually found out and went ballistic, and so it's been a controversial and secretive spying location. There was quite a few protests in the eighties. In ninety eighty three, the Women's Camp was held out there with Indigenous women and women from all around Australia.
We the Undersigned Australian People demand the removal of the cia NSA Pine Gap base and all other pario military installations on our soil.
And that was really one of the biggest and earliest public revelations really of what Pine Gap was up to, and just in my sort of life, that's when I first really heard more about it, so I've been interested and I've followed it, and the numbers and purposes of the satellite dishes there have just increased over the years.
So, Peter, tell me, what did you discover about what's happening out there at the moment.
Well, as a nosy journalist, I take a look at things like Google Earth images of various locations such as Pine Gap, and noticed there'd been a bit of land clearing going on. I was back in twenty twenty one when I first took a look, and I thought, oh, well, maybe it's bushfires, maybe they're building a new power station, could be absuming pool. But I kept an eye on it, and what I found is that on the western boundary they cleared fourteen nectares, so it's not a small spot.
And they put three big dots from space looks like a dot on the Google Earth image, but the three large concrete pads, and I thought, oh, they're building something. I better keep a look at this. And over the months, you know, it turned out that they were indeed putting up some new dishes, and there's three twenty meter wide big golf ball structures. They look like golf balls but
they're massive. They're called ray domes. They're covered in like a composite fiberglass plastic material to keep out the sun and the dust and also prying eyes of protesters peering through binoculars. So I spoke to all the right people, you know, and discovered, yeah, they were building this at the same time there was an expansion of the ability
to do infrared detection. So those three satellites are believed by Professor Richard Tanter, who's the top Australian expert on this sort of research, to be involved in what's called it's a new system. It's called OPIR, and OPIR stands
for overhead persistent you've read. And what they do is they detect missile launchers the heat signal coming from the burning of the fuel from missiles, from rockets going into space, but also things like jet engines of planes, very sophisticated and from that data they can work out from the signature of the heat and the time of burn and so forth, they can work out what sort of missile it is, what its range is, its warhead, it's likely target.
And it's an incredibly sophisticated way of getting very early warning of these missiles or rockets being fired.
And so you mentioned before some of the conflicts that pine Gap has been used to gather intelligence for in the past. Do we know currently which conflicts it's gathering intelligence in.
Pine GAP's got a range of different capabilities. One is this infrared system that I've talked about, but it also does sigint, which means it has a whole bunch of other satellite dishes which can access signals intelligence collected by satellites, you know, thirty thousand kilometers above the Earth surface. They collect things like mobile phones, microwave communications. So it allows a very comprehensive look at all sorts of digital communications going on and wherever it is in the world that
the US is interested in knowing about. It can direct the satellites to target and zone in on those locations or those individuals. At the moment, the Ukraine War and the Gaza War are of particular attention to the US, but the capability of pine Gap is enormous. It's probably the most important US satellite base in the world. But at a time when the War on Terror has calmed down, sudden building at pine Gap suggests that other people are thinking very differently. About the future.
After the break, how an expansion at pine Gap could inflame tensions with China Beta. We've been talking about how pine Gap looms large in the Australian imagination, and it has done for a long time. But what will hosting this site mean for us in the future? How could it be used in the years ahead?
Well, pine GAP's got so many uses. It can be used for good or for evil, and so it largely depends on who has political control and access to it. The importance at the moment in terms of the war fighting ability is that it's developing that that arm of its capability, those three new satellite dishes that have been built. On one hand, it sounds like a good defense for Australia, good defense for the wider world. However, you can imagine
what it does to the adversary. The adversary now thinks that their ability to remain hidden is gone, which means their ability to defend themselves evaporates very quickly. I don't know if you remember des Ball.
And I'm joined today for an interview with Professor des Ball. Des is a homegrown giant, Australia's pre eminent scholar of so many strategy and defense issue.
He was a professor at a in U involved in strategic studies, and he really is the god father of research on Pine Gap.
When one of my first books, A sort of a Piece of Real Estate, was published, with some people in the intelligence community thought had gone too far in revealing secrets about American installations in Australia, certainly revealed secrets to them because most of them are ignorant about the sorts of things which they had allowed to happen in this country.
He died a few years ago, but his memory is strong with many people. He said, once pine Gap is approaching the situation where China knows that once it fires a rocket in defense of itself, it will be obliterated. So therefore he suggested to me that it's likely that China, if it fears it's under attack, will fire everything in the first day. Now the idea of a first round of nuclear exchange slowly building with diplomatic talks trying to
calm things down. He said that the risk is that won't happen, that if China thinks its existence is actually being threatened, it'll fire The lot. People used to think, oh, you know, Australia is a long way from all the world's wars, aren't we lucky? Well, we're a long way away. Unless we put our submarines off the Chinese coast, then we're very close, and we're a long way away, unless we have United States bases in Australia fighting a war
against China. As a result, Australia is really at the forefront of a battle of a war potentially if it develops. These are terrible risks that Australia has taken on, and the risks have been taken on kind of without much discussion going on. There ought to be parliamentary debate, there ought to be public input into the role. But at the moment we're all shut out. And I'd ask why why doesn't it get mentioned? Why is there no discussion. It's a terrible topic and about the only access we
have through satellite images of the base. I mean, obviously I've contacted in my job being a journalist on this, I've contacted the Defense Department a couple of times seeking responses, you know, things like legal culpability of Australian staff at the base if it gets involved in things that are deemed war crimes. And I've asked them about the costs of Australia, you know what dollars we put into the US base, and you know the Defense Department won't answer.
They won't answer, and they won't answer.
Peter, that picture you painted what could happen is pretty horrifying.
To think about the idea of Australia being a nuclear target is horrifying to anyone. There's been a number of studies as to what the effects could be. There was a GP in Alice Springs who tried to find out about the civil defense, you know, what the local council, local authorities would do to evacuate people, how they got about it, and he found there was nothing planned. So he did his own research. This is in the late eighties, so it's a while ago, but nuclear bombs is even
better now. And he found that if the wind was blowing the wrong way, if it was blowing from the southwest, Alice Springs would have an hour to evacuate. And his conclusion as a GP knowing the effects of that sort of contamination, says that anyone who didn't get out of Alice Springs in an hour would die, and that then those clouds of dust, thousands and thousands of tons of dust. Radioactive dust would then sprinkle down across the rest of Australia.
You know, the prospect is horrific, and the base is being run by the United States, which has no longer denying its ability to use nuclear met missiles on a first use basis.
Is there any evidence either that behind closed doors or in public forums in Canberra, that there is enough scrutiny, or in fact even a base level of scrutiny of what's going on at Pine Gap? Given everyone is in such furious agreement that the relationship with the US is of utmost.
Importance, probably the best source of information at the moment is through centered estimates.
In response to some questions I noticed that I put to you. You informed us that all activities at Pine Gap are conducted in compliance with Australian law, and I thank you for that response. Our activities at pine Gap also conducted in compliance with international human rights and humanitarian law.
Well, Senator Ludlam, I'm confident that all activities are conducted in accordance with all relevant laws, and beyond that, as with your previous question, I'm not.
Prepared to go and the questioning by opposition members, tills, screens, etc. So the ability to scrutinize Pine Gap is restricted. Maybe if some senior bureaucrats are held in the cells until they're prepared to answer, that we might get some information. But I mean, really, the two main parties, Liberal and Labor.
I mean Liberal set the base up. So the Liberal Party was in government power at the time, and you know we had the Whitlam government which was a little more critical of the base, at least publicly because behind the scenes Whitlam gave the nod for the base to continue. But it's really with the Hawk government. I think that Labor decided that there was no point ruffling the feathers of the United States because they weren't going to win.
They wanted to get on with running Australia, and Hawk decided that all the way of the USA was a good policy to adopt again. And I think the current government is pretty much in that vein as well, in that it wants to get on with things, it wants to have peace in the region, but it's not going to stand up to the US. I mean, how can that happen? How can you stand up to the US? You know, maybe we should just stand up for international law and humanitarian law and stand up for international legal
institutions and then let everyone else get in line. You know, supporting international law and humanitarian institutions really is about all we've got to keep the world at peace, because relying on powerful countries to do it themselves hasn't really worked.
Thanks so much for your time, Peter.
Thank you very much, Ashlyn.
Also in the news today, Peter Dutton's nuclear energy plan could blow out to six hundred billion dollars but only supply three point seven percent of Australia's energy by twenty fifty.
According to research by a peak body for the renewable energy sector, the Smart Energy Council, found that at its minimum projected cost, the nuclear plan would cost the same as the Albanese government's renewables investment, but that plan's projected to provide eighty two percent of the energy meets by twenty thirty and almost one hundred percent by twenty fifty.
And the Albanese government appears to have shelved the emergency immigration legislation that had urgently introduced to parliament in March. The legislation would have made it easier to deport non citizens, including making it a criminal offense for a person to refuse to engage with the embassies and authorities from their
country of origin to facilitate a return. On Sunday, the bill was once again left off the government's list for Senate debates, meaning it's unlikely to pass before Parliament's winter break. I'm Ashlin McGhee. This is seven am. Thanks for your company. I'll see you again tomorrow.