Does this mean we, we should turn this immigration narrative on i- on its head and ramp it up and, and have a bigger population so that we can rely upon our own resources to defend ourselves?

Well, that's certainly what I'm trying to do.

Um, I've, I gave, uh, the first Boyer Lecture at the ABC on Wednesday, which will be broadcast tomorrow on the ABC.

And in that, I, I basically argue that- Uh, population should be at the center of our thinking about our foreign policy and our national security.

It's not purely an argument about defense, uh, although that's certainly part of it.

But, uh, one of the things I say in the lecture is that a retreat from immigration is a retreat from Asia.

But y- y- so i- i- do we need to sort of build that consensus again, you're saying?

Yeah.

What's your read on where the balance of power between the two superpowers sits now compared to then?

Well, it's interesting you mention the fact that there was a military flyover when Xi Jinping arrived.

President Trump puts a lot of weight on those kind of displays of military power.

He did the same thing with President Putin in Alaska last year.

The irony there is that Chinese military power has come along in leaps and bounds over the last decade.

President Trump still believes that the United States has a massive lead over every other country in the world when it comes to military power.

That's simply not true.

What could he feasibly extract from President Xi if he agreed to further halt that assistance or even to stop it?

But let me begin with this question I already mentioned, which is, how do you think Australia is already changing as a result of what's been happening in the past year and a half?

Well, thanks, Nicholas, first for having me.

I'd say my honest reaction to that question is to reflect on how little Australia has changed actually in the last year and a half.

It's worth noting here that the Trump phenomenon had a material effect on Australia's last federal election in 2025.

So the opposition, the centre-right opposition, up until a few months before the election, had a... a minor, a narrow lead in most opinion polls.

As soon as Trump was inaugurated in January of 2025, we saw that lead evaporate.

And there was a clear attempt by the government, the ruling Labor Party, to insinuate that there were ideological connections between the centre-right Liberal Party and the Trump movement, the MAGA movement.

Do you think that is the right approach of the current Australian government? And if not, what do you think it should be doing?

Sam, to kick things off, can I invite you to the lectern?

Thank you, Mihai, and thank you, Jen, for taking part in this.

And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here.

Welcome.

This is a debate about AUKUS, and I'm against it.

So let me start by acknowledging the people here today and those watching online who share my point of view.

You are wise and you are numerous.

Sam, would you close Sterling to American submarines? And if not, what is the practical difference between your position and the government's?

Sam, to kick things off, can I invite you to the lectern?

Thank you, Mihai, and thank you, Jen, for taking part in this.

And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here.

Welcome.

This is a debate about AUKUS, and I'm against it.

So let me start by acknowledging the people here today and those watching online who share my point of view.

You are wise and you are numerous.

Sam, would you close Sterling to American submarines? And if not, what is the practical difference between your position and the government's?

What would preparing the civilian population on that scale actually involve?

Well, I think when we think about civilian preparedness for war, there is perhaps a tendency to go back to World War II and e-even before that.

So, you know, the army really has a-- and, and ground warfare really has an outsized place in Australia's historical imagination when it comes to military conflict.

The ANZAC legend is really centered around, uh, land campaigns and land warfare.

But in the kind of future we're imagining in which the United States and China might get involved in a war and in which Australia needs to defend itself, that would be overwhelmingly an air and a maritime campaign.

Uh, and so we shouldn't be thinking about civilian resilience as supporting, you know, a, a, a ground warfare over, over many years, like in World War II or, or even World War I.

We should be thinking of much more rapid, uh, maritime war, uh, that is high technology, and importantly, that is not so much labor intensive, it is capital intensive.

What would you say to that before we let you go?

That's pretty close to home.

Right.

Absolutely.

And it was a, a great message to Australia that China's military capabilities are expanding at a rapid rate.

In fact, I, I think we've not seen anything like it since the Second World War in terms of, you know, the pace and scale of its modernization.

I've talked already about the expansion of its nuclear capabilities, but more important for Australia are the expansion of its long-range conventional, that is to say non-nuclear capabilities, particularly China's navy.

It's not the overwhelming priority for China.

Mm.

China's

ballistic missile capabilities are centred on what it perceives to be a threat from the United States.

They don't have very much to do at all with Australia or certainly not with the Pacific Islands.

This is a test of a nuclear weapon that is designed to reinforce China's deterrent vis-à-vis the United States.

And so that's where we should be looking, not to ourselves and not to the Pacific.

But he also reckons there are reasons for Australia to be wary of China's actions because Beijing wants to carve out a bigger role for itself in the Pacific.

China typically denies that it has any ambitions except for self-defence.

That kind of claim is not credible.

So, Sam, out of 100 then, the likelihood of China saying, Taiwan, that's ours, in the next, say, decade?

Oh, boy.

I mean, that is, of course, the Chinese already claim that Taiwan is theirs.

Whether they ever take military action to do it, I would say by far their preferred method and the strategy that they're pursuing now is to make their military and their economy and their larger diplomatic presence so overwhelmingly large that the Taiwanese ultimately, and the Americans, throw their hands up and say, look, we can't fight for this any longer because we know we'll lose.

The missile, if they launched one, unlikely to be aimed at a city?

Yeah, very unlikely, yeah.

I mean, unless you're talking about nuclear war, when you're talking about a missile with a conventional warhead, that is a high-explosive warhead, They do surprisingly little damage.

There's something like 500 kilograms to a tonne of high explosive on one of those missiles.

We just couldn't."

Yeah, well, the, the, the nice thing here actually is that the Chinese themselves have provided us with a blueprint about how we do this.

So about 30 years ago, the Chinese embarked on a strategy that Western analysts came to call A2/AD, anti-access, area denial, which is to say that they wanted to make it impossible for any adversary to operate ships or aircraft around China's vicinity.

And that is, that is a blueprint that Australia can adopt.

And in some, in some ways we are.

I don't think AUKUS, the submarines in particular, are consistent with that strategy.

But in some ways we are d- adopting a denial strategy, that is building a military which makes it far too costly and difficult for any adversary to operate ships, uh, and aircraft hundreds or even a couple of thousand kilometers to our north in, in a military contingency.

Australia.Are, are there other scenarios that you think that politicians or even the, the military strategists are thinking about that these nuclear-powered submarines might be useful for?

So just explain or remind me, what do we actually get for that?

Well, it's up to $368 billion.

That's, that's the figure we have from governments, so somewhere between 268 and 368.

That was the figure offered at the time.

Essentially what we get for that is eight nuclear-powered submarines, and the first three, and potentially as many as five of those submarines, will be American.

They will be Virginia-class submarines from American shipyards.

And then the final three, and maybe as many as five, will be a new class of nuclear-powered submarine to be designed and built primarily in the UK but also in Adelaide, and at the moment that's simply called SSN AUKUS.

Mm-hmm.

What do you make of that difference? Is Mark Carney able to, because of domestic circumstances at home, be a bit more plain speaking? Is it his background being in a different industry other than politics that makes him more open in his language? What do you think's behind that difference?

Well, not only is Carney able to speak more frankly due to domestic circumstances, I'd say he's almost obligated by domestic circumstances to do that because you'll recall that when When Trump was inaugurated in January of last year, Canada was in the middle of an election campaign and Carney was due to lose.

And then, of course, the talk of Canada becoming the 51st state and so on and the fight between Trump and Trudeau, who was then prime minister, began.

And all of a sudden, the opposition in Canada, which was very much more Trump-aligned, MAGA-aligned than the government, all of a sudden, they became on the nose and their polling numbers started to dive.

So Carney owes his job to the fact that politics changed radically in Canada after Trump was elected.

That's not the case here in Australia.

Well, I should qualify that.

What is it about Mark Carney that's able to have this level of impact?