Recently my stream’s algorithm served me up Pine Gap, a gripping if sometimes slow-moving geopolitical drama that I managed to miss when it first aired on Aunty in 2018.
Set around the joint US-Australia surveillance facility near Alice Springs, the series paints in the grey spaces that lie at the heart of our most significant alliance on a national, professional and personal canvas.
As a showdown in the South China Sea looms, our protagonists are caught between the demands of a trigger-happy US president and an Australian PM trying to land a lucrative Chinese mining development on nearby First Nations land.
Viewed just half a decade after it was made, the series seems like a quaint artefact from a quieter time, before the Covid outbreak, trade sanctions, Pacific incursions and bullhorn diplomacy deeply soured Australia-Chinese relations.
While a work of fiction, the series serves up a more nuanced analysis than the Red Alert panic of the Nine papers and the ongoing hyperventilation of some other media outlets at a moment when Australia is making arguably its most significant strategic decision of this century.
In fact, this week’s Guardian Essential report suggests Pine Gap might be more in tune with today’s zeitgeist; despite the surround sound of the PR war effort, the public is mostly rejecting the claim that China is a threat to be confronted head on.
These findings suggest two things: first, that the foreign minister, Penny Wong, has managed to reset the tone of the Australia-China relationship; but more profoundly that the elite national security consensus is not reflective of the prevailing national mood.
This presents clear challenges for the Labor government in selling the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine deal announced amid fanfare and subsequent fury last week.
Labor’s pre-election calculation not to challenge the Morrison government on national security was a tactical masterstroke, leaving the French president to offer the independent character assessments while clearing the way to pick up swathe of seats with large Chinese populations on the back of Morrison’s bombast.
Now we have an unashamedly progressive prime minister tasked with explaining why the nation has signed up to a long-term security alliance with the two imperial powers that dominated the region through the 19th and 20th centuries.
Anthony Albanese’s challenge is to integrate Australia’s military into the British and US nuclear technologies while continuing the rebuild of our most significant economic relationship.
This requires not just tolerating, but embracing, the rising power of the Chinese state and recognising its (as well as our) desire for autonomy and security in the region.
Albanese has to thread this needle without diminishing China’s human rights abuses of minorities nor its penchant for digital state surveillance that serves up the dystopian social rating system and nips political dissent in the bud.
As the punters say: a complex relationship to be managed, indeed.
Adding to this political challenge is the eye-watering price tag attached to the Aukus alliance whether you look at the raw numbers, the percentage of annual defence spending or, more disingenuously, the annual GDP.
The risk is that the subs (alongside the similarly unchallenged stage-three tax cuts) will become a counterpoint for every good thing the Labor government can’t afford to do. The challenges of this are illustrated in our second table.
It has been estimated that the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine plan will cost between $268bn and $368bn over the next 30 years. This is the equivalent of increasing Australia’s entire annual defence budget by 28%.
These figures can be read two ways: on one hand there is a raw majority (53%) who would take the subs. But another majority (55%) can be built between those who don’t think the submarines are worth the dough and those who don’t want them anyway. Whichever column you privilege, this looks a long way short of a national consensus.
Completing the wicked degree of difficulty for Albanese, these views are most dispersed among Labor voters who are basically split down the middle on the propositions, unlike the Coalition where a clear majority are for the subs and the Green where a clear majority are against the price tag.
The other – perhaps not completely unrelated – development against the backdrop of last week’s noisy debate has been a deterioration in support for the yes vote for an Indigenous voice to parliament.
Unlike Aukus, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is not offering bipartisanship when it comes to confronting Australia’s own history, while also showing a far greater appetite for granular detail than he has around the subs spend.
Pointedly, the deterioration in support is coming from younger progressives, a caution that any attempt to water down the proposition in a bid to secure the cooperation of bad faith actors fundamentally misreads the current fault lines in Australian politics.
Also worth noting is that younger progressive voters are the same cohort marking the Aukus deal down, highlighting the danger of assuming the “rules-based” post-
second world war consensus speaks to people born in an altogether different century.
The responsibility of leadership is to not just deliver on election commitments, but to invest time in telling truths that provide both context and a tolerance for ambiguity, be it our national foundation story or the chapter that is coming next.
Back on Netflix at fantasy Pine Gap, war is ultimately averted through off-the-books collaboration between the Australian and US base leaders while our pan-Pacific love interests realise they can find a way of staying together after all.
A final scene hints that the Chinese miner (who has just seduced the US commander’s wife) has formed an alliance with a young First Nations woman in a tacit pact to act against the two colonial powers.
Sadly, Pine Gap never got a second season. The pandemic and a handful of middling reviews conspired to end the series on an unresolved cliffhanger.
• Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
