Australia: the White Experience of Fear and Dependence

The Defence Debate in Australia and New Zealand

“…Opinion polls over the last decades have consistently shown that a majority of those asked have felt that Australia is likely to be threatened, that it cannot adequately defend itself, and that it needs to spend more on defence. 17 The current Liberal-National government has embraced this strategic tradition because it has an ideological inclination to a 'Realist' outlook on the world, an outlook which stresses the importance of national security, strong defence forces and military alliances. 18 The opposition Labor Party's ideological heritage, in contrast, is Liberal Internationalism, which emphasises peace through disarmament and international institutions.…”

“…Indeed, Cheeseman claims that Australia has always been a 'frightened country'. 11 Key factors in this sense of vulnerability have been the discrepancy between the size of the Australian continent and the size of its population; a sense of isolation and distance from its cultural relatives, and the continent's close proximity to an alien Asia. 12 The sense of external threat was focused in the nineteenth century on Britain's European enemies, since Australia was a British colony.…”

Settler Colonial Strategic Culture: Australia, AUKUS, and the Anglosphere

“…It is an elitist, masculinist and largely Anglo-American construct, underdeveloped, narrowly conceived and centred around the twin pillars of fear and dependence. 65 It is within Cheeseman's work on Australian strategic culture that this paper sits theoretically. Although Cheeseman looks at Australia's relations domestically as a colony, and the "ethnocentric Anglo-American enterprise" 66 that is strategic studies, we expand on this further by arguing that Australia's experience as a settler colony in the Indo-Pacific see's Australia seek out Western hegemony in the region to secure its borders and interests.…”

Two‐Level Games and Australia's Defence Procurement: The Case of Land‐Based Anti‐ship Missiles

“…The electorate of Durack manifests symptoms of Australia's enduring strategic culture, described by scholar Graham Cheeseman as ‘a constant fear of attack or conquest by external and predominantly Asian “others” ’ (Cheeseman , p. 273). During the resources boom of this decade, a discourse of protecting the north emerged.…”