Couldn’t agree more with you’re assessment. I’m more hopeful Australia can pull its finger out its arse with military manufacturing.

Yes we’ve shut down an insane amount of primarily manufacturing based industries, (eg cars, thanks Liberals, ya dumb cunts!), the mining and construction industries have a large amount of incidental manufacturing for repairs and unique materials, while our knowledge base from universities and the small military-industrial machine puts us in a okay position to ramp up onshore production of many items, not too mention our wealth and borrowing capacity.

But we will need to relinquish the neoliberal monetary policy only choke-hold on our economy, and allow fiscal spending to direct a greater proportion of our economy than we’ve seen in most of our lifetimes.

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I also think while NATO and Europe should always be kept on friendly terms, we need to invest in our neighbours. We may recieve support from far off allies, but those commitments may only go so far. See the British decision to desert the region after Singapore in WW2 for an example of the limitations of far off allies.

So strong allies in our region including Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Pacific Islands countries et al, that are bound to us through geography, and we to them can bring a deeper/different form of mutual defence commitment. Its time for Oceania as a region to become a more serious idea.