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Trends in Australian Defence Policy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 April 2011
Extract
For the past thirty years, events in Southeast Asia have substantially shaped Australian defence policy. Japan became an imminent threat only when it moved into Indo-China, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies. As a result Australians became understandably alarmed, and concentrated their defence programme on this situation rather than events in Europe, the Middle East, or even South Asia. Since World War II, a sense of continuing threat or potential threat from Asia has prompted the raising and maintaining of a regular, standing army, units of which have been deployed almost continuously since 1950 on the Asian mainland – in Korea, Malaya, Singapore and South Vietnam, as well as in northern Borneo. As this is being written, there are still Some 8,000 Australian servicemen in the Vietnam theatre, and nearly 3,000 in Malaysia and Singapore.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 2 , Special Issue 1: Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia , March 1971 , pp. 49 - 55
- Copyright
- Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1971
References
1 Emphasis added.
2 This was a military communications co-operative programme between the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, cancelled by U.S. Congress in 1970.
3 On 28 October 1970, the British government announced in a Defence White Paper that it would keep five frigates or destroyers on station east of Suez, including Hong Kong: a battalion group (in Singapore), and a detachment of Nimrod long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft plus helicopters in the same area.
4 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House of Representatives), 25 February 1969, pp. 34–36.
5 A more detailed account of these developments is given in my article ‘Soviet Policies South and East of Suez’, Foreign Affairs, XLIX, 1 (October 1970)Google Scholar.
6 See Robert J. O'Neill, The Army in New Guinea: Current Role and Implications for Independence, Canberra, ANU Press Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 10, 1970.
7 In this article I have not discussed prospects for an independent Australian nuclear weapon, since I do not believe that this is either likely or desirable in foreseeable circumstances.