Australia’s support must increase to prevent disaster
Australia’s support of Ukraine is, however, on the wane. Perhaps that’s putting it too nicely. It has fallen off a cliff.
Albanese and his cabinet have said for months that Australia is “one of the largest non-NATO contributors to Ukraine” when it comes to both military aid and humanitarian support. It’s a line that has been blindly accepted.
Australia has supplied Bushmaster vehicles to be used by combat medics in the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
It should be noted that the other non-NATO members contributing less than Australia are New Zealand and Taiwan. The countries that contribute more as a percentage of GDP are: Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. Australia is about eighth on the list, we know this courtesy of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine support tracker.
Overall, the cost to Australian taxpayers of assistance to Ukraine since February 2022 is about $960 million. The overwhelming majority of that has been in military assistance, including 120 Bushmaster armoured vehicles, weapons and artillery ammunition. But it’s the government decisions of what not to send – such as decommissioned helicopters and Hawkei vehicles – that have garnered more headlines.
As retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan, now an author, strategist and commentator pointed out recently, it represents about five cents per person, per day since war broke out.
“Put another way, this is less than 0.3 per cent of the budget for the future submarine fleet,” Ryan wrote. “As the thirteenth-largest economy in the world, Australia can afford to do more.”
For a country as wealthy and generous as Australia, it is measly. This is from a group of people who wanted to spend $6 billion paying everyone $300 to get two COVID vaccines. About 90 per cent of us were happy to do it for free.
As World Vision Australia chief executive Daniel Wordsworth says, the Australian people are a generous people, and even if there is dissent on military aid, nothing should be stopping the government handing out humanitarian aid. Even if Australia’s focus is now fixed on the Indo-Pacific.
“You don’t have to see everything as a zero-sum game,” Wordsworth says. “Like surely we could help the Middle East at the same time we are able to help in Ukraine. People like to say, ‘but there’s four things going on’, ‘there’s a scarce allocation of resources’… ‘it’s economics’. No, we can handle it.”
But this is not ignorance or apathy from the federal government. It is a conscious, hardheaded choice from the people running their departments and budgets.
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Australia’s foreign policy, under Foreign Minister Penny Wong, is now much more focused on its interests than promoting its values. For a long time, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ view has been that Australia has no interest in Eastern Europe and so pays mere lip service to its challenges.
How else can you explain the fact that while 67 other nations have re-established embassies in Kyiv since the invasion − including the United States, Japan, UK and Canada − Australia is not among them?
Many credible analysts say Ukraine could achieve sufficient leverage from military success on the battlefield to impose a lasting peace if the West stood together and increased assistance.
But if Russia wins? Dr Jack Watling at the UK Royal United Services Institute says that might mean a greater US commitment to deterrence in Europe, which would weaken its capacity to deter China and North Korea in the Indo-Pacific.
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Watling says keeping the US distracted from the Indo-Pacific is probably a key motivation behind Beijing’s support for Moscow. So it is in Australia’s interests for the conflict in Ukraine to be resolved in Ukraine’s favour as quickly and efficiently as possible.
It is in everyone’s interest for Australia to put aside small and miserly spats over department budgets and look up over the horizon. This isn’t a quarrel in a land far away, it’s a battle at the heart of everything we value.
