I. Australia’s Constitutional Obligation
New Year’s resolutions fail because they are aspirational rather than binding. We announce them, mean them sincerely, then let circumstances intervene. Australia has been making the same mistake at a national scale—treating strategic seriousness as optional for nearly twenty-five years. The post–Cold War dividend made this possible. American security architecture underwrote our prosperity. We could focus on welfare distribution, cultural debates, and internal politics. The world allowed it.
That holiday is ending. Not because Canberra decided it, but because circumstances have changed.
Constitutional obligations work differently from resolutions. They are not symbolic statements of intent or cultural artefacts we honour ceremonially. They are the legal architecture of self-government—binding authority designed to operate under stress. Section 51(vi) of the Constitution vests the Commonwealth with power over “naval and military defence.” In Stenhouse v Coleman, the High Court established that the defence power is a purposive power—its scope expands according to the prevailing threats and needs of the Commonwealth. The Court has consistently held that legislation enacted under this power must have defence as its objective purpose, but the breadth of that purpose expands as threats grow. It does not ask whether the country feels ready. It assumes response. The Constitution anticipated a world like this.
II. Strategic reality
The framework for understanding what has changed is set out by defence analyst Ross Babbage in The Next Major War. He identifies a progression from strategic competition to protracted conflict, with distinct phases that shape behaviour well before kinetic war begins. Many Western observers remain fixated on whether conflict might occur. Babbage’s assessment is blunter: China is behaving as though the decision is already made and the remaining variables are timing and conditions.
The early phase—strategic competition—rested on the assumption that economic interdependence would moderate behaviour. That assumption failed.
The next phase is systemic confrontation, characterised by grey-zone activity: cyber intrusions, economic coercion, influence operations, legal warfare. China has been operating in this mode for years. Western capitals have often described this as “peace with tension.” It is not.
Australia experienced this directly. The Morrison government’s call for an independent COVID-19 inquiry in April 2020 was followed by comprehensive Chinese trade sanctions. Between May and November 2020, China imposed tariffs on Australian barley, wine, coal, and timber, and non-tariff barriers on lobster, beef, and cotton. These restrictions were coordinated across multiple Chinese government agencies at the direction of the Politburo. This represented the most comprehensive punitive trade measures China has applied to any country in recent history. The episode was a demonstration of coercive leverage—testing what economic punishment Australia would tolerate in response to an independent policy decision. The outcome was instructive: real economic damage to specific industries and regions, short political memory, and sustained pressure from commercial interests for accommodation.
Phase three is pre-hostilities shaping. This is where we are now.
The PLA isn’t practising in the abstract. Recent exercises around Taiwan rehearse specific operational scenarios with mechanical precision. The Joint Sword exercises of 2023-2024 practiced naval blockading manoeuvres at multiple points around Taiwan. The Strait Thunder-2025A exercises in April 2025 added simulated strikes against Taiwan’s critical energy infrastructure, particularly liquefied natural gas terminals that account for the majority of Taiwan’s energy imports. The December 2025 Justice Mission exercises—described as operating at record scale—demonstrated integrated blockade and control operations across multiple maritime zones. Combined-arms integration coordinates naval surface action, submarine operations, air superiority missions, cyber disruption, and information warfare—not as separate capabilities, but as synchronised systems designed to present adversaries with multiple simultaneous crises. China’s new Information Support Force, formally established in 2024, integrates cyber defences with AI-driven decision-making systems to enable what Chinese military theorists term “systems destruction warfare.”
Logistics stockpiling has accelerated: fuel reserves, ammunition dumps, medical supplies positioned for sustained operations rather than exercises. China is building economic insulation: reducing dependence on Western technology, diversifying energy supplies, securing alternative food sources. Political fragmentation of allied consensus is deliberate: different diplomatic approaches to ASEAN states, targeted economic inducements to Pacific nations, patient exploitation of political divisions within Western capitals. The legal and narrative groundwork is already established. The language is prepared: “internal matter,” “provocation,” “interference.” When crisis comes, the script is ready.
Babbage’s warning is simple and historically grounded: wars can be decided before the first shot is fired. If allies wait for unmistakable kinetic action, they are already late. At Munich on September 29–30, 1938, Britain, France, and Italy formally agreed to German annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, negotiated without Czech participation. The decision to surrender Czechoslovakia’s territory—and with it the country’s industrial capacity, raw materials, and defensive position—was made at the diplomatic table. When German tanks crossed the border eleven months later, Czechoslovakia’s fate was already sealed. Similarly, Japan’s December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was not a sudden impulse. Japan’s Imperial Navy had ordered its assault force to sea on November 26, 1941, following months of calculated strategic escalation and failed negotiations. The decision to strike had become inevitable; December 7 was simply the date selected for execution.
The decisive point—the Schwerpunkt—is almost certainly Taiwan. Not for sentimental reasons, but structural ones. In Clausewitzian strategic theory, a centre of gravity (Schwerpunkt in the original German) is “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.” It is the focal point where concentrated force yields the greatest strategic effect. Taiwan meets this definition precisely. Taiwan hosts Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces over 70 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductor logic capacity and commands 64-70 percent of the global foundry market. Taiwan produces approximately 20 percent of global semiconductors overall. Control of Taiwan grants dominance over the First Island Chain—the maritime boundary separating China from the Pacific. It provides leverage over Japan and South Korea, and the ability to project power deep into the Pacific. It controls the chokepoint through which most East Asian maritime trade flows. Opposition to liberal governance is explicit in Chinese strategic doctrine. The platitude of “disagreeing where we must” is not the utterance of a serious person. There are incompatible visions of regional order. One side is preparing systematically. The other continues to debate whether preparation might be provocative.
The post–Cold War assumptions—that prosperity would liberalise China, that economic integration would constrain aggression, that a rules-based order would enforce itself—have all failed. We are reverting to a world where power outweighs norms, coercion is routine statecraft, and Australia cannot assume sovereignty is guaranteed by default.
III. Australia’s current posture fails our own constitutional standard
Australia’s political culture remains oriented toward welfare distribution rather than strategic preparation. Across successive governments, defence has been treated as a budget line to manage rather than a constitutional obligation to meet.
The metrics are unambiguous. In 2009, the Defence White Paper called for twelve submarines to support force projections into the 2030s and beyond. Since then, Australia’s commissioned naval fleet has declined from roughly fifty vessels to thirty-four. Full-time Australian Defence Force personnel have increased by only approximately 4,200 personnel, from roughly 57,000 to 61,189—an effective plateau despite force expansion targets. Meanwhile, China’s military has expanded by hundreds of thousands and undergone comprehensive modernisation across all warfare domains. The submarine commitment evolved into AUKUS, with the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia issuing a joint statement in July 2023 committing to an ambitious timeline: the United Kingdom will deliver its first SSN-AUKUS submarine to the Royal Navy in the late 2030s, while Australia plans to deliver its first Australian-built SSN-AUKUS to the Royal Australian Navy in the early 2040s. Subsequent deliveries are scheduled for the 2050s and 2060s. The threat timeline has moved in the opposite direction.
Serious institutional warnings exist. Parliamentary voices such as Andrew Hastie have raised concerns. Strategic analysis from organisations like ASPI and the Lowy Institute has been consistent and detailed. Yet these warnings remain marginal to political decision-making. Rather than integrating uncomfortable assessments into policy planning, governments have shown reluctance to allocate resources proportional to the threat level assessed by professional defence analysts.
Public appetite for preparedness remains thin. The 2024 federal budget debate focused overwhelmingly on cost-of-living measures and tax adjustments. Strategic competition with a rising authoritarian power preparing for conflict barely registered.
The structural inadequacy is now clear. Section 51(vi) requires expanded defence capability as threats grow. Seventeen years of declining fleet numbers and marginal personnel growth under conditions of escalating risk exposes a widening gap between constitutional obligation and political reality. The Constitution does not grade on effort or intention. Stenhouse v Coleman established that courts assess the validity of defence legislation by determining whether the legislative measures have a genuine and meaningful connection to defence purposes as understood in light of actual, prevailing threats. At present, Australia is not responding proportionately.
IV. Material consequences of unpreparedness
The consequences of unpreparedness are not abstract. They are material and increasingly visible.
Australia has already experienced strategic coercion under grey-zone conditions. The trade restrictions of 2020–2024 caused real economic damage to specific industries and regions. Wine producers faced tariffs as high as 218 percent; barley exporters lost access to the Chinese market, the world’s largest importer of that commodity; coal and timber producers saw shipments blocked. More revealing, however, was the political interpretation that followed. Some interpreters treated the episode as a diplomatic misstep rather than a strategic demonstration of leverage: an implication that compliance would have avoided punishment. This logic inverts causality and misreads power. It assigns responsibility to the target rather than the coercer.
What China demonstrated was simple: Australian prosperity is contingent on Chinese forbearance, and that forbearance is conditional.
Under pre-hostilities conditions, the leverage increases dramatically. A China that controls Taiwan’s semiconductor production, dominates regional shipping lanes, and faces no credible deterrence would possess vastly greater influence over Australian economic life. This is not speculation. It is mechanical consequence. Taiwan’s role as a critical node in global semiconductor supply chains is not redundant or easily replaced.
Supply chains running through contested waters become vulnerable. Critical imports become subject to disruption. Foreign policy decisions are weighed against economic retaliation. Prosperity declines not through domestic mismanagement alone, but through constrained access to markets and materials.
For Australian families, this translates into narrower futures. Trade-dependent jobs become precarious. Industries reliant on critical inputs face persistent uncertainty. The post–Cold War assumption—that each generation would enjoy expanding opportunity—evaporates once a hostile power acquires effective veto over economic access.
The Constitution’s external affairs power, set out in Section 51(xxix), assumes a world of competing powers with divergent interests. The framers did not assume benign global conditions. They assumed strategic contest. That world is not approaching. It is present.
V. Constitutional obligation requires civic resilience
Section 51(vi) is not confined to military hardware. The defence power extends to national resilience—the capacity of the Commonwealth and its citizens to function under sustained pressure. This includes supply chain disruption, infrastructure stress, and information warfare.
Civic resilience is not emergency theatre or survivalism. It is redundancy, local competence, and social trust. It is households with basic buffers, communities with practical capability, and institutions that assume disruption rather than deny it. Serious countries are built from serious citizens. When citizens understand resilience as a shared obligation rather than a service delivered by government, political incentives shift. Representatives respond to voters who expect preparedness, not insulation from reality.
The Constitution supplies authority. Citizens supply will.
VI. Obligation, not aspiration
New Year’s resolutions fail because we treat them as preferences we hope to honour rather than commitments we must keep. Australia has treated strategic preparedness the same way—something to pursue when conditions are favourable and budgets comfortable.
The Constitution does not operate on that logic. Section 51(vi) creates obligation that expands with threat. Australia’s extended holiday from strategic seriousness ends in 2025, not because a government has declared it over, but because circumstances have ended it for us. Pre-hostilities shaping is underway. Taiwan drills continue at historical scale. Economic coercion intensifies. China’s official defence budget for 2024 was announced at approximately $232 billion USD at market exchange rates, but estimates accounting for purchasing power parity and hidden military spending place the true figure at approximately $474 billion annually, with projections reaching nearly $1 trillion by 2035.
The question is no longer whether Australia faces strategic competition. It is whether we will meet constitutional obligations designed precisely for this circumstance.
Self-government is not merely a right Australians inherited. It is an obligation the Constitution requires us to meet. Section 51(vi) does not ask whether we feel ready for strategic competition or whether political consensus exists or whether the budget is comfortable. Stenhouse v Coleman confirmed that the scope of the defence power expands as threats to Commonwealth security grow. Circumstances require serious response now.