Australia could end up an unexpected but major victim of the Iran conflict. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.
A limited war:
Until now, both sides have been fighting within certain limits. The US has not targeted Iran’s energy infrastructure. Trump was furious that Israel attacked Iran’s biggest gas field, leading to Iran attacking Qatar’s gas and other regional energy infrastructure. US and Israeli purpose diverged sharply.
Washington hasn’t hit Iran’s energy infrastructure for three reasons. It wants a post-ayatollah regime to be able to rebuild. It doesn’t want to take energy capacity out of the global system. But most importantly, Iran has desperate, perhaps devastating, things it hasn’t yet done but could do.
If you offer Tehran Armageddon, it might give you Armageddon in return. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is relatively straightforward for Iran but causes huge global disruption. However, if Iran systematically hits Gulf Arab energy infrastructure this could create energy chaos on a far bigger scale. Worse, if it systematically strikes the region’s desalination plants it could cause a fantastic humanitarian crisis.
It has also threatened to set fire to oil reserves. Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait in 1991 set fire to 600 oil wells. This took months to bring under control. The Iranians could do much, much worse. The Iranians have no incentive to surrender. They don’t mind death through martyrdom, but not through surrender. That makes them particularly dangerous. …
Albanese’s empty promises:
Before he was first elected Prime Minister in 2022, Anthony Albanese promised in speeches (and incidentally in an interview with me) to establish a “strategic fleet” — namely a merchant fleet. But according to Peter Court, an authoritative maritime consultant, there are now zero international trading vessels under an Australian flag.
This is a critical capability gap because a government can requisition in an emergency — for example, to transport oil — only ships that travel under its flag. There are only nine such Australian vessels. These are mainly passenger ships operating between the mainland and Tasmania or odd specialist vessels supplying Antarctic missions and the like.
This is a model for everything else the Albanese government has conspicuously failed to do in national security. It identified the problem, talked big, delivered nothing. Union power means Australian-flagged ships must have entirely Australian crews. That’s uneconomic so there are no such ships. …
Remember Albanese’s earnest pledge before the last election to take back ownership of the Port of Darwin? Zilch. Almost nothing the Albanese government says about national security is believable or consequential.
Australian car industry? It matters now:
Many failures have been bipartisan. It was a catastrophic mistake to get rid of the car industry. We have almost no advanced manufacturing, nor can this be resurrected through a few Dreamtime defence projects alone.
We lazily run a trade surplus on commodities and overspend the revenue. As a nation we’re fat, lazy and dumb.
Opposition industry spokesman Andrew Hastie wants to rebuild advanced manufacturing. He says: “A key input for manufacturing is energy. But Labor’s Future Made in Australia is all about net zero and decarbonisation. As long as we’re bound by the net-zero straitjacket we won’t revive manufacturing. (It) relies on cheap baseload power, advanced robotics, AI and cutting-edge processes.”
Hastie’s right. But his side of politics is also responsible for today’s mess, with 99 per cent of our trade carried by sea, a pitiful few weeks’ fuel reserve, no merchant fleet and a vacuum in most areas of critical capability.
We could end up an unexpected but major victim of the Iran conflict and its fallout.