We welcome the call for a climate-based and more independent foreign policy.

Written by: Nick G. on September 8, 2025

The Australian Army, Navy and Airforce – collectively the Australian Defence Force – constitute the core of the ruling class machinery of state.

Institutionally, they will never forego that role. They have been deployed time and again to serve the interests of whichever imperialism has the dominant position of influence within the Australian ruling class. At times they have been used to break strikes and deployed against the Australian working class in the direct interest of Australia’s monopoly capitalists. 

But contradiction exists within everything. Individuals with a “defence force” background can sometimes break ranks with the ideology and policies that determine the official view of the Department of Defence and the ADF.

(This is written when Trump, the chieftain of US imperialism, has at least had the honesty to drop the doublespeak inherent in the name “Department of Defense” and rename it the “Department of War”.)

One such departure from the official rhetoric came with the foundation of the Australian Climate Security Leaders Group headed by former head of the ADF, retired Admiral Chris Barrie. The ACSLG has an executive drawn from the military and includes Ian Dunlop, former Chair of the Australian Coal Association. 
It has issued several policy documents, the latest last week under the heading A Climate-First Foreign Policy for Australia: Human Security in the Age of Climate Disruption.

The ACSLG equates inaction over global warming with Australian foreign policy, stating that Australia is “almost totally unprepared” for the former, and has instead “put all its eggs in the AUKUS basket and a closer alignment with the USA’s erratic security stance. This risks Australia being dragged into a war with China on the losing side.”

It says that “In the context of Trump#2 and geopolitical upheaval, Australia’s current security frame — “America first, Earth last” — needs to be abandoned.”
Retired Admiral Chris Barrie, formerly a supporter of the AUKUS arrangements, declares that he has now changed his mind, declaring that “AUKUS and confrontation with China are not the only choice…Since retiring as Chief of the Defence Force, I have participated in many war game exercises focused on conflict with China, and in every case the American side lost.”

It is not just that we would be on the losing side in an American war with China, but that we are currently losing capitalism’s destructive war on nature.
Barrie says that average global warming of 1.5°C, predicted to occur by 2040, has already been reached with all of the accompanying unprecedented wild weathers, and “catastrophic damage to our terrestrial and marine ecosystems”. Any further rise, inevitable under present policy directions, will lead to a “climate refugee inflow of a scale that we simply cannot image. Think millions of people.”

The ACSLG acknowledges that fossil fuel companies have created the climate crisis and warns that “Big oil and gas are backtracking on reduction commitments fast, and planning increased production to 2050.” It calls for leadership to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and the fossil fuel economy, but warns that the Australian government “is supporting and expanding dirty coal and gas, and does not want to talk about climate impacts…while the opposition lives in a dark space between delay and denial.”

The call for a climate-based foreign policy is not the only sign of disaffection with our subservience to the US within the defence community. Kym Bergmann, editor of the online Asia Pacific Defence Reporter says in his most recent podcast, “If Australia ever wanted to send a Minister to the United States who is the best at licking the boots of the Americans it is definitely Minister for Defence Richard Marles who has never, ever been able to conceal his overwhelming enthusiasm for everything the US does, I believe to the detriment of Australia’s strategic interests.”

As a Party, we have our own take on climate change and the environmental crisis. 

We believe that capitalism and its current form imperialism have given rise to the irreversible destruction of the environment and global warming in particular. Imperialism is based on constant growth and expansion of profit at all costs before the needs of people and the environment.

While we support all calls for the rapid decarbonisation of Australia’s economy, we must go further than the views of the ACSLG and call for capitalism to be overthrown and a socialist society established. Only this will make it possible for humans to be able to live in an environment that is sustainable long-term. Only this will break capital’s cancerous need for the further accumulation of capital.

The Party and the working class must exercise leadership in protecting the environment and ensure that a socialist society works not to “conquer” nature, but to co-exist with it, restoring the balance between humanity and nature.

It is not a question of our tailing behind progressive bourgeois opinion of the ACSLG type, but of welcoming that opinion and trying to draw it closer to our own.

The expanding united front against US imperialism can accommodate a variety of opinions, but struggle for the leading influence of a socialist and anti-imperialist perspective is required.

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