From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Wednesday, April two, twenty twenty five. Disappointment for householders and Anthony Albanizi. As the Reserve Bank holds the cash rate at four point one percent, the bank is still assessing inflation and the threat of a global tariff war. That comes as labour backs and above inflation pay rise for two point nine million workers on awards and the minimum wage in a bid to ease cost of living pressures.
The coalition says it will wipe out woke activism and ideological agendas in universities. It follows The Australian's revelations about law students being marked on their acknowledgments of country and ordered to examine their own privilege. Shadow Education Minister Sarah Henderson says a Dutton government would use the Education Standards Watchdog to examine course content. Those stories alive now at
the Australian dot Com dot au. A Chinese spy ship in Australian waters doing what and why and how come Australia knew nothing about it? It's the latest flex by the People's Republic of China. On a mission to demonstrate its muscle. As Australian politics and the world enters a new era of uncertainty today, exactly how worried should we be about the Chinese navy apparently mapping our undersea chasms
and cables. A so called Chinese spy ship is circumnavigating Australia, apparently mapping the seabed and the location of undersea cables. What exactly is Beijing up to? I spoke to Greg Sheridan, the Australian's Foreign editor. Greg zooms from analyzing one in national crisis to the next, and I caught him between assignments in The Australian's Melbourne newsroom. Now, Greg, what on earth is a Chinese spyship?
Well, Claire, the ten su Ji Howe has been in and around the Australian coast. It's a dual purpose Chinese scientific research vessel, which does indeed do some scientific research. But China, more than any nation in the world, combines military and civilian capabilities. So what's doing south of South Australia. The logical thing that it's doing is that it is surveying our seabed and looking at a couple of things.
One is where are our underwater sea cables? And it's also looking at the seabed and looking at the sea trenches and will report back to the Chinese Navy on what the best conditions are or its military submarines should they ever be sailing in those waters with evil intent towards Australia. This vessel is very large and it carries both manned and unmanned submarines. It could cut those submarine cables itself if it wanted to, but there's no evidence that it's going to do that.
Now, Greg, what are the rules about being in waters like this? Is it just a matter of it would be good manners for the Chinese government to tell us if they were surveying the submarine landscape south of Australia or not. Are there no rules about this kind of activity?
The rules are that if they're in our exclusive economic zone, they're supposed to give us notice and ask permission. There are reports that it has been in our exclusive economic zone, but it's not there at the moment when we're speaking, as far as we can tell, and it certainly hasn't given us notice or sought permission.
Anthony Albanezi has said he would rather the Chinese vessel wasn't there, Oh, that it wasn't there.
But we live in circumstances where justice Australia has vessels in South China Sea and vessels in the Taiwan Strait and a range of areas. This vessel is there.
But what can we take from the fact that the Australian government clearly hasn't been asked permission or even given notice of this.
I think you've got to see it as a continuity of the Chinese military flotilla in February.
About Chinese warships conducting live fire drills just a few hundred kilometers off our coast. Australia has lodged a diplomatic protest over the exercise, complaining at the lack of advanced notice.
So it contained clearly naval vessels, a big destroyer which in other navies indeed might be called a cruiser with one hundred and twelve one hundred and sixteen vertical launch cells and a lot of missiles it can launch. And it was accompanied by a frigate and a tanker with fuel and probably, although we don't know, accompanied by a submarine as well. And now it conducted live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea, and it didn't give us notice
about that. That's very dangerous because civilian aviation, civilian planes had to divert. And it did that not because there's any particular need for the Chinese navy to conduct live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea, but it wanted to humiliate Australia and show us whose boss. It's showing us that it can bring even its conventional navy to our shores, and it can bring naval vessels which are more powerful
al most than the entire Australian surface Navy fleet. And it conducted the live fire exercise in the Tasman just so that we'd noticed, to make sure it got on the front pages and led the news bulletans and so on. It was rubbing our noses in the dirt. There was nothing we could do about it, and it didn't give us notice, it didn't ask permission, and our navy is currently so feeble that we only learned about it when a virgin pilot was warned off the area by the Chinese.
We didn't learn about it through our own naval or surveillance resources. Then the next month it follows up with this very large spyship or research vessel. And it's doing this at a time when Australia is up for election and it knows that it's not going to get any response from the Albanesi government, which has adopted the fetal position on all these things. It just cringes itself into a tiny ball and hopes no one notices its existence.
And it's also doing it at a time when it knows that Donald Trump has put the reliability of the US alliance under doubt. And in all of this there's no Australian response, no political response, no military response. I'm not suggesting we should fire on the chineseships or anything like that, but we can't even send an equivalent sort of ship to go in Bristle and show that we have a bit of muscle as well, because in fact,
we don't have any muscle. And I think the Chinese are actually doing military things for military purposes, but they're also just demonstrating to us who is boss, and their lesson to us is tremble and obey.
The Albanese government has spent a lot of time and effort and talked a lot about rebuilding relations with China. They're very much hoping to win back some of the Chinese voters who were disillusioned with Scott Morrison during the COVID era. Peter Dunton has been less effusive about China. What if anything, would the Chinese government want out of this election?
I think they're getting everything they want. They want the Australian government to curl into a fetal ball and do nothing and say nothing and object to nothing that they do, and they want disarray in the US Australia alliance. The relationship with China. This really had very little to do with the Albanes government. China itself brought its wolf warrior
diplomacy period to an end because it was obviously so counterproductive. Instead, I guess what, we're not enhancing Chinese national aims here, so we'll go back to our normal pre wool Waria mix of sometimes being threatening and sometimes being very sweet
and keeping everyone off balanced that way. But now the Albanesi government is so determined to keep that so called stabilized relationship stabilized that it won't say boo to a goose when it comes to China, It won't call out any Chinese behavior and Albanesi quite bizarrely keeps saying we do the same things with China.
What our task is to do is to make sure that we represent Australia's national interest. We do that each and every day, and I have every confidence, every confidence in our defense for us and our security agencies to do just so.
As if you could compare the efforts of our puny toothless navy, which can barely sail all the way to China without getting roadside assistance, to the actions of what is now the biggest navy in the world. Now, if we had any brains as a name, we would quickly build our own deterrent capability, especially in our own shores,
with missile ships, submarines, all the rest of it. But Albanisias said he's not going to increase defense spending at all, and Dunton still hasn't told us what he's going to do on defense.
Spending coming up as China and Donald Trump shake up the world order, are we getting those nuclear submarines and will there be war over Taiwan? That's after the break. Theoretically, the Orcus deal with those long range nuclear submarines is still on track, although Donald Trump has quite alarmingly indicated that he might not even know what Aucus is or
be enthusiastic about giving US Virginia class submarines. Can we assume that one of the goals of the PE the Republic of China is to discourage the Orcast alliance to prevent Australia getting those submarines.
Yes, we can assume that. So China has campaigned very strongly against UCUS and tried to turn Southeast Asia in particular against UCUS. But I'm very frustrated by Orcus. This will sound strange to you, clear, but August is really a side show in Australian defense. We don't get our
fleet of eight nuclear submarines until the twenty fifties. We get a very old second hand boat sometime in the twenty thirties, which will really be a training boat more than anything, and we don't get much actual capability out of this for a long, long, long time. There's a terrible tendency in Australia to have phony debates about phony issues which have no consequence. I mean, nothing could be sillier than Albanezi and Dutton debating whether we're going to
send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine. You know, we've barely got three and a half soldiers serving as it is. We'll have a furious debate over that. We don't have a debate over all the things we need to do in our conventional defense force. Even if you had eight nuclear submarines, that's not a whole defense force. We've got no missile defense of our northern air bases. They could all be
taken out one day by Chinese missiles. We've got no d mining vessels, so that China could mine all of our ports, including our submarine bases, on the first day of hostilities. We still believe that the Americans will always take care of it, they will always win, and they will never get tired of defending us. But that's a very dangerous assumption, and Donald Trump has qualified that. But
also it's a kind of a bloodger's assumption. Anyway, Why should the Americans put their blood and treasure into the defense of Australia if Australia won't put its blood and treasure in our own defense. And we're not doing any of that.
As China flexes its muscle in our own region, they are, of course, like everybody else in the world, trying to work out what the Trump administration will do next, and one of the biggest questions for them is what would the Trump administration do if China took Taiwan reclaimed what it considers to be its own territory of Taiwan.
China has launched large scale war exercises around the self ruled island of Taiwan. The Chinese Army, Navy, and Air Force sent planes and nineteen warships to surround Taiwan in a drill aimed at practicing a total air and sea blockade of the territory.
What do you think is the latest thinking about that, Greg, Do we have an idea of whether Trump has walked away from the defense of Taiwan.
It's very hard to read Trump, and very often it's impossible to answer a sensible question like that because Trump himself doesn't make a decision until he makes a decision. So Trump is generally giving us the idea that he's not going to go to war to defend anybody else. So that's bad news for Indo pacificsecurity because it's only the American deterrant, which ultimately China has to take notice of. But as against that, you can't be sure that Trump
won't ultimately defend Taiwan. I mean, Trump certainly will not want to be humiliated by China, and if he lost Taiwan, that would be a humiliation. Secondly, the entire American military establishment is geared around helping Taiwan, so he has to go against that, which he might do in certain circumstances, but that's a very big thing. Thirdly, both the Congress and American public opinion is extremely hawkish on China at the moment, and Trump is more affected by public opinion
than he lets on. And then finally he's telling all the allies you just can't rely on America to do everything for you all the time. All of the Western Europeans are increasing their defense budget very significantly. The only ally, of course, that's not going to do a damn thing is Australia. Because we live in this kind of fantasy land. You know, we live in a Tolstoy novel War and Peace, but we behave like we're in a Jerry Seinfeld sitcom.
You know, when nothing happens, nothing matters, and everything's a joke.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian's Foreign editor. Wednesday sees a big decision in the High Court of Australia on the Albaneze government's ongoing bid to deport non citizens who've been convicted of crimes. Among those who've had their deportations halted by the courts are a man who exposed himself to a ten year old child in a public toilet and a convicted drug trafficker. You can follow the High Court's decision live at the Australian dot com dot au