Q:
Australian Sovereignty. Malcolm Turnbull at the public enquiry into AUKUS says that it involves without doubt a massive sacrifice of national sovereignty. Seeming to suggest we still have some left. That’d be good. But to be realistic, looking at things in the crudest terms, isn’t it more less impossible that we do? Given the ‘exceptional privilege’ of the usa and its ramifications and Australia’s total devotion to that paradigm ?
A:
Yes — but I think there is an important distinction between formal sovereignty and effective strategic sovereignty. On the first measure Australia unquestionably remains sovereign. On the second, your question becomes much harder, and I think Turnbull’s wording is revealing.
At the recent independent AUKUS inquiry, Turnbull did indeed argue that AUKUS entails a serious diminution of Australian sovereignty, as part of his broader argument that the arrangement makes Australia increasingly dependent upon the United States.
Australia certainly possesses legal sovereignty
There is no American governor-general in Canberra. Parliament can repeal legislation, terminate agreements subject to their terms, order Australian forces home, refuse participation in an American war, and ultimately tell American forces to leave.
The Australian government’s formal position is emphatic on precisely this point. Richard Marles has said that decisions about going to war and the use of Australian territory or assets remain decisions of the Australian government, and that US activities here occur with Australian “full knowledge and concurrence.”
Likewise, the government says Australian AUKUS submarines will be Australian-owned, commanded by Australian officers and deployed only on Australian government authority.
So it would be too strong to say Australia literally isn’t sovereign.
But that isn’t really the interesting question.
The more interesting test is: how large is Australia’s practical freedom to say no?
Suppose Canberra decided tomorrow:
Australia’s strategic interests have diverged fundamentally from Washington’s. We will therefore pursue an independent foreign and defence policy, including neutrality in a US-China conflict.
Could Australia actually implement that policy without undertaking an enormous reconstruction of its defence, intelligence, diplomatic and perhaps economic arrangements?
Increasingly, the answer appears to be no — or at least, not cheaply, quickly or without accepting major strategic risks.
Consider how far integration has already gone.
Australia hosts or jointly operates facilities critical to the American alliance relationship; US Marines rotate through Darwin; American bombers and fighters rotate through Australia; infrastructure is being expanded for American aircraft, ships and ground forces; and fuel, munitions and other stores are being pre-positioned here. The two governments have explicitly described the objective as increasingly integrated logistics, sustainment and “high-end warfighting.”
AUKUS takes this much further. From 2027, Submarine Rotational Force-West is intended to bring up to four US Virginia-class submarines and one British Astute-class submarine through HMAS Stirling. Australia then depends upon the United States for the transfer of Virginia-class boats and upon both America and Britain for nuclear-propulsion technology, equipment and expertise.
And there is a rather extraordinary inversion in the arrangement: Australia is putting billions of dollars into expanding the American submarine industrial base so that America may eventually possess sufficient production capacity to sell submarines back to Australia.
That isn’t colonial rule. But neither is it what most people instinctively imagine when they hear the phrase “independent national defence capability.”
Where I think your “exceptional privilege” point fits
If by that you mean the broader post-1945 US-centred system — dollar primacy, American financial power, sanctions reach, technological dependence, intelligence networks, military alliances, control of crucial defence technologies, and enormous influence over the institutional architecture within which allied states operate — then Australia has made a very unusual choice.
It hasn’t merely submitted unwillingly to American predominance.
Australian governments have repeatedly chosen to embed Australia inside it.
That’s an important difference.
Washington doesn’t normally need to telephone Canberra and issue instructions. Australian defence and foreign-policy institutions have spent generations constructing their conception of Australian security around the maintenance of American strategic predominance.
Indeed, Australian government documents say this quite openly. Successive governments regard a strong US military presence in the Indo-Pacific as essential to Australian security, and describe deeper interoperability and American force posture in Australia as enhancing rather than diminishing sovereignty.
So the really interesting argument isn’t:
“Has America stolen Australian sovereignty?”
It is:
“Has Australia voluntarily constructed itself in such a way that exercising sovereignty contrary to American strategic interests has become prohibitively difficult?”
I think there is a substantial case that it has.
And that is much more profound than simply having American bases here.
There is a useful thought experiment
Imagine three Australian governments.
Government A says: We support the United States.
Government B says: We disagree with this particular American operation and won’t participate.
Government C says: American primacy in Asia is no longer the organising principle of Australian foreign policy. We intend to maintain friendly relations with America, China and others while constructing an independently usable defence and intelligence capability.
A can govern tomorrow.
B probably can too. Australia declined to participate in the 2003 Iraq invasion? Actually, it did participate—but there are other examples of allies declining particular US operations without ceasing to be allies. Nothing in ANZUS automatically compels Australia to join every American war.
But C would face an enormous structural problem.
It would have to reconsider intelligence arrangements, Pine Gap and other joint facilities, US force posture, weapons supply chains, communications and targeting systems, nuclear-submarine technology, maintenance, munitions, logistics and probably significant portions of Australian force structure.
That difference between B and C is where effective sovereignty lives.
Australia retains the capacity to say no occasionally from within the American system.
What is much less clear is whether Australia retains a readily usable capacity to say:
We are leaving the American strategic system and will determine our security independently.
It could legally do so. But decades of policy have made the cost increasingly enormous.
And AUKUS arguably increases that exit cost dramatically.
Which brings us back to Turnbull
There is an apparent paradox in saying AUKUS represents a “massive sacrifice of sovereignty”: you can only sacrifice something you possess.
I think the charitable interpretation is that Turnbull is talking about degrees of sovereignty rather than an on/off condition.
Australia still has political and constitutional sovereignty. It still has meaningful freedom of action in many areas. It can disagree with Washington.
But its strategic autonomy is much narrower.
AUKUS potentially converts some things that Australia presently chooses to coordinate with America into capabilities Australia simply cannot operate, reproduce, sustain or replace without continuing American cooperation.
That is qualitatively important.
And interestingly, the government’s rebuttal implicitly acknowledges the dependence while interpreting it completely differently: it says sophisticated modern military capabilities necessarily involve international dependencies, and that acquiring vastly greater military capability through the US and UK actually increases Australian sovereignty because Australia becomes harder to coerce.
So there are really two definitions competing:
Government: sovereignty = Australia’s capacity to defend itself and resist coercion.
Turnbull/critics: sovereignty = Australia’s capacity to make and implement strategic choices independently.
Under the first definition, AUKUS can increase sovereignty.
Under the second, it can diminish it.
And under the particularly crude test you’re proposing — “Could Australia adopt a fundamentally different grand strategy from Washington and actually carry it out?” — I think your suspicion is justified. Australia remains sovereign enough to make that decision, but has progressively arranged its affairs so that exercising it would be extraordinarily costly.
That is not no sovereignty. But it is a peculiar form of sovereignty: the door is legally unlocked, while practically we have spent decades piling furniture against it from our own side.
Q:
And a corollary of this is that we become willy-nilly enmeshed in the american military posture re the rest of the world: i.e. america’s enemies become ours, de facto.
A:
Yes. I think that follows quite strongly from the distinction we were making — with one qualification: America’s enemies do not automatically become Australia’s enemies in law, but increasing military integration makes them increasingly likely to become Australia’s enemies in practice.
And there is a mechanism for that which is more interesting than simply saying “Australia follows America.”
Australia is becoming part of the physical apparatus by which the United States exercises military power. The Australian and US governments themselves describe the process in terms of increasing interoperability, integrated logistics and sustainment, US bomber and fighter rotations, Marine deployments, pre-positioning, submarine operations and defence-industrial integration. The 2025 AUSMIN arrangements, for example, expanded infrastructure for US bombers, fighters and intelligence aircraft, Marine logistics, combined logistics networks, and the American administrative structure supporting the US military presence here.
And in June 2026 the next stage became quite tangible: the US Navy announced the re-establishment of Submarine Squadron 3 and a Naval Support Activity at HMAS Stirling in preparation for US nuclear submarines operating rotationally from Western Australia under AUKUS.
That changes the problem considerably.
Suppose the United States goes to war with China.
Australia could theoretically announce:
This is an American war. Australia is neutral.
But what does neutral mean if American bombers have been rotating through Australian bases, American submarines operate from Australian facilities, American intelligence systems depend upon Australian facilities, logistics and munitions have been positioned here, and Australian and American military systems have deliberately been constructed to operate together?
Indeed, Richard Marles described what Australia is doing in remarkably explicit terms in December 2025: “enabling America to do more from the Australian continent”, while simultaneously increasing the ability of Australian and US forces to work together.
That sentence gets remarkably close to the heart of your point.
The adversary gets a vote
This is the part that sometimes disappears from Australian discussion.
Australia can say:
“China is not our enemy.”
But if the United States is fighting China and US forces are conducting or sustaining military operations from Australian territory, China doesn’t have to accept Australia’s description of itself.
From Beijing’s point of view, the relevant question becomes something like:
Is Australian territory contributing materially to American military operations against China?
If the answer is yes, Australia has a problem irrespective of what Parliament has formally declared.
And exactly the same principle works elsewhere. A state which makes its territory, intelligence infrastructure, communications, logistics or military facilities materially useful to one belligerent cannot entirely control how the opposing belligerent regards it.
So there is a kind of reverse sovereignty problem here.
We normally ask:
Would Canberra decide to join an American war?
But increasing integration raises another question:
Could an American war effectively involve Australia before Canberra had made any meaningful decision to join it?
That’s considerably more troubling.
It also alters the meaning of “deterrence”
The Australian government’s argument is almost exactly the reverse of ours. Its position is that integration with the enormously more powerful United States increases Australian sovereignty because it deters states from coercing or attacking Australia. Marles made that case explicitly in 2023 and continues to argue that AUKUS increases Australian self-reliance and sovereignty.
That’s not a nonsensical argument. There is a genuine benefit.
If Australia were threatened independently, having the United States thoroughly embedded in Australian defence makes an aggressor confront not merely 27 million Australians but the possibility of American power.
But it has a mirror image:
American deterrence becomes Australian deterrence; American confrontation becomes Australian confrontation.
The stronger the integration, the harder those two things are to separate.
And this is where I would slightly modify your formulation that “America’s enemies become ours.”
I would put it:
The more completely Australia incorporates itself into the American military system, the less control Australia has over the process by which an American adversary becomes an Australian adversary.
That’s stronger analytically, because it doesn’t require believing Canberra is simply Washington’s puppet.
Canberra might sincerely want good relations with China. It might sincerely oppose some future American action. Australian ministers might sincerely believe that Australian forces would participate only following an Australian sovereign decision.
But an adversary looking at Pine Gap, Stirling, Tindal, Darwin, intelligence cooperation, submarine operations, logistics, munitions, communications and interoperable forces isn’t interested primarily in Australia’s constitutional theory. It is interested in what those things can do to it.
And there is a cumulative effect
This connects very neatly with our previous point.
One American facility doesn’t abolish Australian strategic independence.
One weapons purchase doesn’t.
ANZUS doesn’t — indeed, the treaty itself doesn’t say Australia must automatically enter every American war. Its operative language says the parties will “act to meet the common danger in accordance with [their] constitutional processes.”
One intelligence-sharing agreement doesn’t.
One submarine agreement doesn’t.
One US Marine rotation doesn’t.
But pile them on top of one another for decades and something different emerges:
bases + intelligence + communications + weapons + maintenance + logistics + doctrine + exercises + industrial integration + personnel + submarines + strategic planning.
Eventually the question ceases to be whether Australia has signed away sovereignty in some document.
It becomes whether the Australian defence establishment is sufficiently separable from the American strategic system for Australia to pursue a radically different strategic policy when it really matters.
And there’s an interesting historical indicator here. In a July 2026 speech, Australia’s Assistant Defence Minister proudly noted that Australia has fought alongside the United States in every major conflict since the First World War.
That predates ANZUS, of course, and therefore isn’t proof of American control. But it tells us something about Australia’s persistent strategic culture: Australia repeatedly chooses to attach itself to the dominant Anglosphere great power and treats that power’s maintenance of the international order as an Australian national interest.
Britain first; America subsequently.
So perhaps the deepest question isn’t whether Australia has lost its sovereignty to America.
It may be whether Australian governments have developed a conception of the Australian national interest that is so thoroughly identified with preservation of the US-led strategic order that exercising sovereignty against that order has become almost inconceivable.
That’s a rather different thing from being conquered or commanded — and in some respects a much more interesting one.
Q:
And a final note: I predict Mr. Turnbull’s words will sink without trace beneath the surface of Australia’s public life and consciousness. Advance Australia Fair.
A:
I suspect you may be right about the sinking without trace, and there is already something rather telling about the circumstances.
A former prime minister has just appeared before a public inquiry and argued, in substance, that Australia has surrendered a significant measure of its sovereignty and autonomy through AUKUS. This isn’t merely an interpretation being put on his remarks: Turnbull has been using almost exactly those words publicly for some time.
One might expect the proposition “Australia is surrendering its capacity for independent strategic decision-making” to provoke a fairly profound national argument.
Instead, much of the immediate public discussion has been about whether the submarines will arrive, whether US production can reach the necessary rate, whether Turnbull has an axe to grind, whether the project costs $368 billion, and so forth. Those are perfectly legitimate questions, but they’re downstream of the extraordinary question Turnbull is raising.
And perhaps that itself tells us something.
Because if the analysis we’ve just worked through is substantially correct, the loss of strategic autonomy doesn’t necessarily arrive as some dramatic national humiliation. There is no ceremony at which the flag is lowered. No treaty says Australia hereby relinquishes sovereignty. Parliament continues sitting; elections continue; Australian ministers continue making Australian decisions.
It happens incrementally.
Another joint facility. Another interoperability agreement. Another weapons system dependent upon American support. Another intelligence arrangement. Another deployment. Another strategic assumption incorporated into Defence planning. Another billion dollars invested in making the integrated system work.
And each individual step is defensible.
Eventually somebody like Turnbull stands up and says, in effect, “Have you noticed where all these individually defensible steps have taken us?”
And perhaps hardly anybody does.
There is an additional irony in Advance Australia Fair. The anthem contains that wonderfully uncomplicated declaration:
“Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are one and free.”
“Free” is doing quite a bit of work there.
Not because Australia is secretly an American colony. I still think that formulation goes too far. The more disturbing possibility is the one we’ve arrived at during this discussion: Australia may have freely exercised its sovereignty over many decades to construct a situation in which its future exercise of sovereignty is progressively constrained.
That is perfectly possible. Sovereignty includes the sovereign freedom to enter commitments which reduce one’s subsequent freedom of action.
And there is one more reason your prediction strikes me as plausible. Turnbull’s proposition attacks something much deeper than AUKUS. If taken seriously, it requires Australians to ask whether what governments routinely describe as the exercise of Australian sovereignty through the American alliance may simultaneously be producing a diminution of Australian strategic autonomy.
Turnbull himself framed his March 2026 Sovereignty and Security Forum around precisely that question: what would Australia actually need to possess — industrially, militarily, economically and institutionally — to have genuine sovereign autonomy as a middle power?
That’s a much more uncomfortable discussion than “Will we get the submarines?”
Because once you ask it, you can’t stop at submarines.
You get Pine Gap. You get intelligence. You get targeting and communications. You get weapons supply. You get American force posture. You get Darwin and Tindal and Stirling. You get foreign policy. You get China. And eventually you arrive at precisely the corollary you identified in the previous exchange:
Who decides who Australia’s enemies are?
And then Advance Australia Fair ceases, for a moment, to be merely ceremonial.
It becomes a rather good question.
Q:
Australia in my opinion effectively died the day they chose that dirge for an anthem and declined the raw guts, honesty, spirit, depth of meaning, ideology and national consciousness of Waltzing Matilda.
A:
I understand the distinction you’re making. Whatever one thinks of the musical merits of either song, Waltzing Matilda expresses a conception of Australia, whereas Advance Australia Fair largely announces one.
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And Waltzing Matilda is a remarkably strange candidate for a national song when you actually examine it. Its protagonist is an itinerant, penniless labourer. He steals a sheep from a wealthy landholder. The authorities arrive to arrest him. Rather than submit, he kills himself. And his ghost remains at the billabong.
That’s hardly conventional patriotic material.
But that is precisely where its power lies. It contains class, authority, property, independence, landscape, hardship, humour, defiance and tragedy. The squatter has his troopers; the swagman has essentially nothing — except his refusal to submit.
And Australians somehow took that story and made it their unofficial national song.
Banjo Paterson wasn’t writing a constitutional manifesto, and there is considerable argument over exactly what political meaning should be attributed to the song and its relationship to the 1890s shearers’ strikes. So I wouldn’t make Waltzing Matilda bear more historical weight than it can support.
But culturally, your contrast works extraordinarily well.
Advance Australia Fair says, approximately: here is our successful country; let us celebrate it.
Waltzing Matilda says something much more difficult to paraphrase: here is this peculiar fellow, in this harsh landscape, confronting wealth and authority, and whatever else happens, they are not going to own him.
That’s national mythology.
And mythology needn’t describe how people actually behave. Its importance is that it tells them what sort of people they imagine themselves to be.
Which connects rather beautifully — and rather unhappily — with our sovereignty discussion.
The old Australian self-image contained the independent bushman, the irreverent digger, contempt for pomposity and rank, suspicion of authority, mateship, improvisation and an almost pathological dislike of being told what to do. Much of that mythology was selective, masculine, exclusionary and historically romanticised. But there was nevertheless an identifiable ideal of character underneath it.
The swagman doesn’t conduct a cost-benefit analysis of whether resistance is prudent.
He says:
“You’ll never catch me alive.”
And jumps into the billabong.
There is something almost comically incompatible between that national archetype and a country deliberately arranging its most consequential military capability so that its operation depends for decades upon the technology, industrial capacity, political cooperation and strategic goodwill of another country.
That doesn’t prove AUKUS is wrong. Sometimes dependence upon a powerful ally is the rational choice for a middle power. And jumping into the billabong rather than being arrested isn’t particularly good public policy.
But as symbols of national consciousness, the contradiction is striking.
Perhaps that is what you’re mourning rather than literally the choice of anthem: not that changing the anthem caused Australia to lose something, but that the choice seemed to register that something had already changed.
The country that instinctively recognised itself in the doomed, thieving, insubordinate swagman had chosen instead to sing solemnly about being “young and free”, possessing “wealth for toil”, and advancing Australia fair.
One is an official description of a nation.
The other is a story Australians once told about themselves.
And for the question we’ve been discussing — what would Australia actually risk in order to remain capable of saying no? — the second is considerably more unsettling.