Australia boosts anti-China defences, plus inside Myanmar's rebel mountains
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The Pacific Ocean is no longer an American lake. From the end of the Cold War onwards, America has dominated the Pacific in maritime terms, in maritime naval terms. That's just no longer true.

To the Middle East now and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the war began. That's according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.

I'm Venetia Rainey and this is Battlelines. It's Monday, 31st of March, 2025.

Myanmar is reeling from a major earthquake that has hit residents who are already struggling to survive amid a brutal four-year civil war. We speak to a journalist who's recently reported from inside the country about how this will affect the junta's grip on power and why things are likely to go from bad to worse. Plus, a major debate is underway in Australia about the growing risk posed by China after it sent an unprecedented naval flotilla to circle the country.

With snap elections now called for May, we'll be looking at the tussle over the defence budget and how well equipped the Australian Defence Force is. But let's start with Myanmar. Shortly before 7am local time on Friday, the Southeast Asian country was hit by a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake. It struck just six miles below the surface near Myanmar's second largest city of Mandalay. There was a second earthquake of 6.4 magnitude just 12 minutes later and aftershocks continue to be felt today.

A natural disaster of this proportion couldn't have come at a worse time for the war-torn country, which has been in turmoil ever since the military junta overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021 and seized power in a coup. Initial death toll estimates were low due to the very poor state of communications and infrastructure in Myanmar, but we now know that at least 1,700 people have been killed. With many more trapped underneath buildings and huge difficulties reaching more remote areas, that death toll is expected to rise.

Our Asia correspondent Sarah Newey was in Bangkok when the earthquake hit and sent this report. The tremors were intense enough that we felt it hundreds of miles away in Bangkok. I was at my desk at the time and the whole building was shaking enough that I grabbed my cat and ran with my neighbours out of the building for fear it was going to collapse. In Bangkok, the main damage has been at a construction site a few kilometres away from here actually, which completely disintegrated when the earthquake hit, trapping roughly 100 in total were trapped inside Bangkok.

But really that pales in comparison to the devastation we're seeing coming out of Myanmar. It took a little bit longer to get a sense of what's been happening there. Communications have not been as easy. And given the civil war and the secretive military junta in charge, there aren't many journalists operating on the ground there. So getting a clear sense of what's happening has been difficult. But it's clear that the devastation is...

just awful. We have been managing to speak to people on the ground. So I just want to share one message with you from Tehzar Lin, who's 28 and a rescue worker in Mandalay. He's been digging through rubble with his bare hands searching for survivors for more than 48 hours now. And here's what he had to say. I joined the rescue mission because in times like this, we only have each other. I've never done anything like this before, but we have no choice.

Since 28th of March, me and my fellow volunteers have been working relentlessly. Without proper training or equipment, we rely on sheer determination. I believe that there are still people alive under the rubble. We can hear them. The worst part is knowing they're there, but not being able to reach them in time.

The biggest challenge is the lack of tools. We don't really have anything, just our bare hands. Ideally, we need excavators, cutting tools and even something as simple as gloves and masks to protect ourselves from dust and debris. We want to do more, but we don't have the equipment or knowledge to save as many lives as we should. And yet, despite the exhaustion, the hopelessness and the overwhelming destruction, we will keep digging because if we don't, who will? But I hope there will be aid in coming days.

Now this is something that is starting to happen. The UK has announced it's going to send 10 million, the EU 2.5 million euros to start with. Rescue teams have flown in from China, from Russia, Malaysia, India, among others. There are concerns about how that aid might be distributed. The junta have a history of restricting access to aid when a cyclone hit China.

In 2008, that was a really major problem. I think it's a bit of a test for the junta. Some people we've spoken to kept mentioning omens and saying that this is potentially a bad omen for the military. On Thursday, they had their Armed Forces Parade, which is a really big moment meant to show their military might today.

And then on Friday, the epicenter of the earthquake was very close to the capital city that the military finished constructing just over a decade ago. It's meant to be their seat of power. And it's that area that's been really badly hit by this earthquake. So people are saying this is a sign that Min Aung Hlaing, the dictator, his days are numbered and that he's been too cruel and nature is going to come back and take its course.

Although the National Unity Government, which is the exiled government, shadow government from the military regime, they've asked the People's Defence Forces, which are the armed groups they work with, to halt any offensives in earthquake-affected areas for the next two weeks. In contrast, there have been reports of airstrikes from military junta, including in some areas affected. So it's unclear how this is going to affect the war and the military leadership's influence.

But, you know, this is a humanitarian disaster on a huge, huge scale. And it's hard to know of a country that would be worst placed to deal with this. Very few journalists managed to report from inside Myanmar due to the junta's restrictions. But Sarah recently managed to travel to opposition-held territory in the border Karen state to visit a number of field hospitals.

I spoke to her last week before the earthquake hit about what she saw there. I started by asking her for a broad update on the state of the war. The country is locked in a pretty brutal battle with the junta, the military junta, who took control in a coup in 2021, continuing to bomb people, targeting hospitals, targeting education centres. But it's an interesting moment because in the last kind of 18 months, two years, we have seen a bit of a shift with the opposition groups moving

taking capturing more territory but the military junta which does have some backing from china from russia increasing their use of suicide drones and drones in general continuing with airstrikes so although they are sort of losing ground um it's difficult to put specific percentages on it in myanmar but about 60 percent of ground is now held by this motley crew of different rebel groups

But it is sort of in a bit of a landlocked. There's key battles in the west and the east of the country right now, but there's not really any end in sight. And the humanitarian toll is just huge. The UN estimates that 3.5 million people have been displaced, almost 20 million now displaced.

Reliant on Humanitarian Aid, which is a third of the country. And according to Ackled, which collects data on conflicts, about almost 80,000 people have died, soldiers and civilians, since it started now. And among the impact of that war that you've been looking at is the health system, which has apparently almost completely collapsed.

You went to visit a hospital in a rebel-held area in Karen State. Yes, so we were in a few different health facilities across the state. One of them was a bigger hospital closer to the border with Thailand in this mountain range, a collection of buildings there.

It's one of the better hospitals in any rebel controlled area, really, but they still have huge shortages of medicines because the supply chains are still completely controlled by the junta, really. So it's very difficult to get medicines, oxygen, all the fundamentals of what you need for a health care system. Right. But we also went further inland.

across this huge mountain range, across very bumpy roads, beautiful, beautiful country, but levels of development very low in the areas that we were in. Met doctors. I think this was one of the things that really stood out to me, actually. A lot of the doctors said,

cities and urban areas when the war first broke out they were involved in what was called the civil disobedience movement so they joined the protests against this coup in 2021 they left they were forced to leave their homes because the junta went very hard against those who were in a civil disobedience movement hundreds and hundreds of people were arrested lots of them thought they were leaving for three or four months they really had a lot of faith in these protests four

Four years later, they're still there. Many haven't seen their families at all in that time. And they're doing their best to offer health care in very difficult circumstances, as well as the supply chain issues that we were talking about. There's just a real surge of disease. Malaria, tuberculosis. We met so many children who had pneumonia. Mothers talking about their difficulties accessing food. The UN has described the health care system across the country as broken.

It's a very patchwork picture. In some states, it's better than in other states. In junta-controlled areas, they just are having huge shortages of staff, partly because of the civil disobedience movement. Everyone left. In opposition-held areas, they're struggling with medicines, etc. But they're also getting bombed a lot. So one of the things that they showed me as they're showing around the hospitals is where like,

the very makeshift really bomb shelters are which is basically a hole in the ground covered in wooden planks with some soil and sandbags on top. One of the hospitals I visited

is quite near a military base and was bombed last year. Fortunately, they were pretty lucky and no one got killed. But across the country, there's a lot of evidence that it's healthcare and education sites that are really being targeted. One of the doctors that you spoke to, Mr T, can you tell us a bit more about him and his backstory? Yeah, so he used to work in...

a city hospital. He was a surgeon getting on with his life, newly married. And then when the coup happened, he joined the civil disobedience movement. He was one of these doctors who left because he was threatened by the junta. His name appeared on an arrest warrant list. He knew he had to get out there.

He really was a very optimistic person. He thought he still is, but he thought at the time that he may be gone for three or four months and four years later, he's still living in kind of very basic dorm, providing health care in this border hospital. Hasn't seen his parents, his wife for four years now. It was the anniversary of the coup in February.

But he also is incredibly optimistic about the future as well and proud of what he is able to build in Karen's state and the healthcare that they are able to provide even during these difficult circumstances. But I think another gutting thing was that, and this is a problem that's going to hit the whole of Myanmar very hard, is you do see these doctors doing incredible work in really difficult circumstances. And then the

The US aid funding, which the US aid is one of the biggest donors to Myanmar, about $200 million a year, goes to lots of different areas. About 40 to 50 million of that goes towards healthcare provision. And so a lot of these hospitals are now going to be hit very hard by that at a time when funding is very difficult. So has all US aid funding been cut to Myanmar? Because there's been some confusion around life-saving aid will continue to go out, but no one's quite clear where the line is. I think it's going to become clearer in a few weeks when the three months end.

of the aid freeze are over and people get their firm letters about whether they're being funded. There have been reports that waivers should be in place for things like tuberculosis and HIV, but that's not always getting through. A lot of the biggest impact that we've seen really tangibly has actually been on the Thai side of the border. So Thailand and Myanmar share a very long, very porous border. And a lot of people, refugees, have come over the border into Myanmar, about 100,000 since the war began.

And there are a lot of health facilities being operated for those communities in Thailand. And a lot of them were funded by USAID. And we saw actually quite a few deaths reported and confirmed of people in these refugee camps because overnight health care just stopped. So there were cases where people were discharged from hospital because they weren't able to offer care anymore. And within four days, people died of a lack of oxygen.

I think it's not entirely clear what that's going to look like in the long run, especially for the healthcare system. We know that for other elements like media, US aid funding went to a lot of media groups and that looks like it's not coming back, which will impact things like tracking human rights abuses, etc. in Myanmar. You mentioned China and Russia supporting the junta. Can you tell us a bit more about that, how much support they're providing? It's an interesting one, especially from a China perspective. They've both had long ties with the junta. They're getting...

Drones is a big one, but in general, military supplies from those two countries. But there's some evidence that China isn't actually all that happy with the junta leadership. From China's perspective, it's a border control issue as well. They don't want all these drugs, scam centers, all of this that's happening and impacting their citizens. They're pretty unimpressed with Min Aung Hlaing's efforts to clamp down on that. And they're pushing for elections.

I think it was really telling that Minal Alain recently went to Russia and Belarus. He's the general in command of the junta. Exactly, yeah, he is. And he confirmed during his trip to Russia and Belarus that there were going to be elections later this year, which is quite controversial because lots of people are saying that they're sham elections. How can you possibly be holding elections when you only control 40% of the country?

But China's pushing for that as well, in particular, because they want there to be more legitimacy on the global stage, I think. One big thing for China that they're worried about is even when they have supported some of the armed groups and there's very complicated relationships. 18 months ago, they gave tacit blessing to an offensive against the junta government.

But they're really worried about what happens next because they don't want this black hole of a lawless state. It's not good for their border security, but they also don't know what the alternative is and they don't really want the national unity government, which is the exiled government, to gain control and to potentially be more aligned with the West. I think the relationship with China is a bit more tense, but they're definitely still getting weapons from Russia and China, especially drones. And there have been documents of Russian teams going in and giving drone training as well.

So they've definitely got their fingers in the conflict. Because I don't think I was aware of just how long the border between Myanmar and China was. So you mentioned drugs and scam centres. Can you tell us a bit more about those impacts on China going across the border? Yeah, this is a huge problem. With scam centres in particular, China's actually been behind quite, or been involved in quite a big crackdown in the last month. These scam centres, they proliferated since the coup. Myanmar has become basically a lawless state. These scam centres are...

where lots of people are actually being trafficked in from across the world, from Africa, from East Asia, from Southeast Asia. Even there are reports from South America, people thinking that they're coming to Thailand to get jobs. And actually, they're ending up in one of these scam centers in Myanmar. They're also in Laos and Cambodia, but Myanmar is a big focus.

And China has been really badly hit from this, both in terms of Chinese citizens being trafficked into Myanmar to work in these scam centres, but also in terms of Chinese people being scammed. So that's one big problem. Drugs is another big problem. We've seen just huge surges in, especially synthetic drugs, but also opium production increasing too. And China, again, is a market for that.

that but equally China's got interests in Myanmar as well like rare earth mining as one they want Myanmar to be a more stable country on their border um but they're also pretty fed up about

some of the illegal activities that's flowing into their country too from what is now crime indexes basically say that Myanmar is one of the most lawless countries in the world just because there's no unified there's no governance governance is so weak right now and the civil war has really broken down all infrastructure the economy is in free fall. That's fascinating I guess my final question is why do you think this doesn't get more coverage does it get a lot of coverage out where you're based in Bangkok and is it just a western media don't focus on it?

Yes and no. Definitely the specifics of what's happening get covered more, especially the geopolitics of it in this region. There's so many, there's dozens of people dying in airstrikes and deaths.

I don't think it's capturing attention or capturing headlines because it's become so normal. I also do think that there's an element of which the conflict is really complicated. There are dozens of different groups involved. It's not as easy as saying these guys are good and these guys are bad. Some armed actors are a really big patchwork of what they're involved in. But I also think Myanmar just isn't. It's a smaller economy.

It's not so well known on the global scale. It's maybe less of a geopolitically important position than, for instance, Ukraine, although it's very important and it definitely gets a lot more coverage in Southeast Asia. It's in the headlines every week than it would do in the UK. I think a combination of attention deficit and

complicated to get your head around. And the fact it's a civil war, so you can say it's internalised, just changes the dynamics of how we talk about it. Thank you so much for joining us, Sarah Newey, our global health correspondent in Bangkok. Thank you for having me. Coming up, we look at why Australia is being forced to take the China threat seriously.

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Last week, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles brought $1 billion of defence spending forward by a year, saying that there was a need for the government to acquire certain defence capabilities faster. He also proposed a $6.66 billion rise in defence spending over the next four years, which he said was the most significant defence hike since World War II. To understand why and what it could mean for security in the Indo-Pacific, I spoke to Sam Roggeveen, director of the Lowy Institute's international security programme based in Sydney.

Sam was previously a strategic analyst in Australia's now defunct intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, and also worked on arms control policy in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He's also the author of the book, The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace. Welcome to Battlelines, Sam. Clearly like much of the Western world, Australia over the last few years has been going through some soul searching with regards to its military.

You guys had a strategic defence review in 2023 that I believe was largely well received, and the government last year issued its first ever national defence strategy. That concluded that Australia is facing the most challenging strategic environment since the Second World War. Can you explain why? In a word, China. So Australia is now in a position where

that historically it has never been before. Since Australia became an independent state at the beginning of the 20th century, it's always been in the lucky position where its major trading partner has also been its major strategic partner. So first the United Kingdom, of course, and then after the fall of Singapore, the United States.

In the early 1970s, our major trading partner became Japan, which was, of course, a close ally of the United States. But now, like many countries in Asia, our major trading partner is a country that has strategic interests and diplomatic interests that are directly at odds with our major strategic partner. Like many countries in the region, we face a situation of being somewhat torn between the objectives of our

major strategic partner and an economy that's been absolutely vital to Australian flourishing over the last 30 years. With the sole exception of the COVID period, Australia hasn't gone into recession for that whole time. That's an exceptional record in the OECD. And that's in large part due to the efforts of Australians and successive governments to reform our economy.

but it's also been a function of the trading relationship with China and Australia and

surfing off the back of China's massive expansion, particularly its infrastructure push, which has been so vital to our iron ore exports, which go into making the steel that has built the Chinese miracle over the last 30 or 40 years. As you say, there's that economic relationship and then there's the geopolitical reality of a China that increasingly sees itself as needing to have dominance within a growing sphere of the Indo-Pacific.

How has Australia been balancing those two aspects of its relationship with China? It would have been convenient for us, of course, had China continued on this path of economic growth and yet not asserted itself militarily and strategically. The ideal scenario for Australia and America actually would have been if China had become some kind of supersized Japan or Germany, which is to say economically enormous but...

strategically and militarily a kind of client state of the United States. Of course, that didn't happen. And China now is looking to assert itself much more strongly on the international scene, and particularly as an Asian power. And that means not just becoming bigger and more powerful in the United States, it means pushing the United States out.

So how does Australia cope with that? In fits and starts, what we've tried to do is both maintain a very close economic partnership with China whilst developing an ever closer strategic partnership with the United States, where we basically say we don't have to choose between the US and China.

But I think we're butting up against the limits of that approach. And that's become more clear first by the AUKUS agreement that was announced in August in 2021.

and then much more recently by the Trump administration, where the cracks are really starting to show. I'd like to come on to those cracks a little bit later, but first, can you explain what are the defence challenges that a country like Australia faces? I think listeners here in Europe might think Big Island, very far from China, has a lot of natural protection in terms of its geographical position. So how exactly does China pose a defence challenge to Australia? I'm glad you said very far from China, because this is a point I make over and over in the Australian debate.

And it's routinely forgotten. Beijing's closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney. And just recently, a Chinese naval flotillas circumnavigated Australia. This had never happened before to Australia, certainly not a circumnavigation by a very advanced surface fleet built around the Type 55 destroyer, which is their most modern and largest design. But not only that, but they conducted gunnery practice off the coast of New South Wales on

close enough that it disrupted air traffic approaching Sydney Airport and several dozen flights had to be diverted. And they didn't take the usual step of alerting Australian authorities beforehand. So they were clearly trying to poke us in the ribs and send a bit of a message. But nevertheless, that flotilla had to sail over, depending on where they derived from, and I think it was probably from the Southern Fleet.

It's something in excess of 7,000 kilometres. Now, that's a long way. My argument in the Australian defence debate has been that distance is Australia's single biggest defence asset. The AUKUS project is effectively an attempt by Australia to compress that distance because what we're trying to do is we're building nuclear-powered submarines that are ideal for operating off the Chinese coast and even lobbing missiles onto the Chinese mainland.

When I would argue what we should be doing is saying to the Chinese, look, if you ever want to cause us a problem, come to us. You can traverse that massive distance like that flotilla just did. Let's not, as Australians, take the trouble to try to traverse that distance ourselves. So actually, Australia is not a particularly inherently difficult place to defend. We're far away. We have a massive continent that's sparsely populated.

And we have a sea air gap to our north. And if we can maintain surveillance of that sea air gap, and if we maintain enough military capabilities to shoot down aircraft and missiles and sink ships that threaten us through that sea air gap, then we'll be just fine. The problem is that we try to do much more than that. I think in a misguided effort to be relevant to the United States, we try to do a lot more than that.

Can you tell me a bit more about the Chinese flotilla? It seems a pretty extraordinary thing to do. This is the furthest south that the Chinese Navy has ever been. You said they wanted to poke Australia in the ribs. Why? It's a good question. I mean, it's both extraordinary and ordinary. So extraordinary in respect that the Chinese have never done it to Australia before. They've certainly sent ships our way and it's now pretty routine.

to see Chinese signals intelligence vessels monitoring our annual joint military exercises with the United States, for instance. But never have they sent a flotilla that circumnavigated Australia and never have they sent such powerful warships. So your listeners can do a quick Google search on the Type 55 destroyer. It's an incredibly powerful and large design, one of the biggest ships of its kind in the world.

They were clearly sending a message of Chinese capability and Chinese power. It's already the biggest navy in the world, at least by the number of ships, not by tonnage. The Americans are still by far the biggest in terms of tonnage, and I would argue in terms of global capabilities. Look, some people have read into this that it's a message to the United States right after the election.

And often the Chinese will pick on allies rather than picking on the United States itself. I basically took it as a signal from the Chinese that the Pacific Ocean is no longer an American lake.

From the end of the Cold War onwards, America has dominated the Pacific in maritime terms, in maritime naval terms. That's just no longer true. New Zealand and Australia have had quite different reactions, particularly to the live fire exercise in the Tasman Sea. Can you explain that a bit and why? Yeah, I can't actually. The Kiwi foreign minister came out much more strongly, used much stronger language, whereas Australia downplayed the incident and said...

look, this is unfortunate, the Chinese should have informed us, but let's not allow it to derail the bilateral relationship. But the longer story here for Australia is actually quite interesting. From 2019 to 2022, China imposed a series of quite substantial economic sanctions, tariffs and other anti-trade measures against Australia because they're upset with us for various reasons.

And we got through that really well. Australia is a very globalised, open economy and our exporters found new markets

customers for their goods. And so the economic measures that China took barely left a mark. It was a rounding error in the national accounts. I think in around 2022, when the government changed here in Australia, the Chinese saw an opportunity. They said, look, this isn't working. Let's try a new tack. And subsequently, the section slowly started to come off. And we're now in a much more normalised period.

Notably, from an Australian perspective, what the government didn't do in that period of economic measures was to push back. Nobody at any point suggested Australia needs to impose tariffs now as well. And I think actually that informed the government's approach on the flotilla. They just said, look, we can get upset about this if we choose to, but what difference would it make? We'll just wait them out. We'll let the message sink in that we're not going to be intimidated.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Defence Minister Richard Miles has recently brought forward $1 billion Australian dollars of defence spending. Why are some people not happy with that? So there's more or less universal agreement that Australian defence spending needs to rise among not just our commentators, actually, but our political class. There's now an argument between the two major parties about exactly how far it should rise. I believe the opposition is preparing to go to the election with proposals to circumvent

substantially increased defence spending. It's worth saying as a kind of disclaimer that I'm probably one of the few in the national defence debate who's saying that defence spending doesn't need to rise. I would say it needs to be radically changed in its nature and its direction. I don't see any urgent need for it to rise.

But I'm in the minority there. Can you explain a bit more about why some people think it does need to rise and why you don't think it should? I think what this brings us back to where you started with your first question, which is that it is more or less universally agreed that we're in the most difficult strategic circumstances since the Second World War. And that's language that successive governments have used. I wouldn't disagree with that. But the reason that I agree

I am not prepared to yet argue for higher defence spending is that we're spending it all in the wrong way. And that if we spend it the right way, we can secure Australia, I think, in an affordable fashion. As I said earlier, we have so many natural advantages, geographic advantages that make Australia relatively easy to defend. We're not South Korea. We're not Taiwan. We don't have the enemy on our doorstep.

We have the advantage of distance. And all we need is the right force structure to make sure we take advantage of that distance. At the moment, we're proposing to spend upwards of $368 billion on a fleet of submarines that I think are designed to effectively compress the distance between us and China. I would much rather see Australia spend lots of money on

cheaper weapon systems that make it impossible for any adversary to operate in the air and sea approaches to our north. So lots of anti-ship capabilities, lots of anti-air and anti-missile capabilities. It's a difficult task, but it's one that can be done affordably. How

How important do you think this new stock of HIMARS is? I know Australia has taken delivery of two last week. Is that something that you think is crucial for Australia's defence or is that for you something that is compressing the distance rather than expanding it? One obvious area of spending that I would cut other than the AUKUS submarines is just surface ships. I mean, this is a big area of debate I know in the UK as well, but I'm on the side of the debate that says...

surface ships are incredibly vulnerable now. We've known this since the Falklands War in the 1980s, that modern anti-ship missiles make it very difficult for big warships to survive in modern combat conditions. The Ukrainians are now proving this again. They are winning the naval war and they don't have a navy. They have drones and they have missiles and they've done terrible damage to the Russian Black Sea Fleet for that reason.

So I would cut AUKUS, I would focus on diesel submarines, and I would certainly cut back the massive surface fleet that we're proposing to build. I think the core around which we ought to be building our force structure is lots of anti-ship capabilities. So we're slowly bringing into service a new missile system called LRASM, the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which is a very capable, long-range, stealthy anti-ship missile that can be fired from a number of different aerial platforms across

I would love to see that speeded up. It's taking a long time coming. And I'd love for Australia to acquire more aircraft to fire them from. Also, mine warfare. I mean, it's very unsexy, mine warfare, but it's not spectacular, but it's very effective.

at slowing down and stopping any shipping campaign against Australia. So that's something we're terribly underinvested in. And just thinking about the timing of why this money has been brought forward, is that Trump related? Is that election cycle related? Or is something else going on here? I read it more as a broader response to the ferment in Australia's national security debate that the government's simply doing too little.

So that is the tenor of the debate right now. And as I said, the opposition's about to come over the top with probably with some announcements that they will spend more than the Labor Party is. I mean, it's interesting to me that both sides see this either as a potential vulnerability or a potential strength in an election campaign. Australian election campaigns are not typically fought on national security. There are exceptions, but generally the

You know, the hip pocket nerve, as our politicians call it, is the one that's at the centre of our election campaigns, the economy and the budget measures to help with the cost of living for ordinary Australians. So the fact that they feel national security is either a vulnerability or a vote-winning issue is, I guess, an indicator of the tenor of Australian debate. And the Lowy Institute, where I work, does annual polling

Australian public opinion on big foreign policy issues. And it's clear over the 20 years, and particularly the last few years, that sentiment towards China has definitely shifted towards the negative. It's stabilised a bit in more recent polls, but

far less positive than it was in the middle of the last decade. And just finally, you mentioned briefly at the beginning of our chat about the effect of Trump. I'm wondering, how is this new president changing the debate around defence in Australia? It's harder to tell here than in Europe or in Canada. I mean, it's clear in those places that there are first principles debates now happening about the reliability of the US. So those conversations are happening among our expert community and among political commentators.

And actually, some very prominent ex-politicians do talk about it openly, but not our serving politicians. They're not prepared to go that far. And we haven't yet had that crunch moment. We're sort of out of the spotlight a little bit. And there's a good chance that we will remain out of the spotlight, that the United States will never target Australia, for instance, in the way that it has done Canada and Europe in recent months. That was certainly the pattern of the first Trump administration.

I would argue that those sort of first principles conversations are overdue in Australia and our politicians should be having them. But nevertheless, it hasn't happened yet. How could Trump impact AUKUS? Is there a chance that it could be mothballed or slowed down if he loses interest? So the delivery of the first Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine is not scheduled to happen until 2032, which would be in the administration after this one.

But that's not to say that nothing happens between now and then. Of course, an awful lot has to happen. And some of the things that have to be put in place may require some presidential decision or other. Certainly, if the president, if AUKUS gets in the president's sights and he decides he doesn't like it or decides he can use it as leverage, yeah, that could definitely happen. So that is, I think, a point of vulnerability there.

If someone briefs him or a piece of paper is put in front of him where it's put in terms of if we give the Australians, if we sell the Australians these submarines, then three and maybe as many as five submarines, right, that's what they've agreed to, then we will have three or maybe as many as five fewer submarines in our fleet. If the bargain is put to the US president in those terms, I doubt he would agree to it.

So the real battle here is can the American shipbuilding industry come up to speed quickly enough? And that is the sort of, that is the quiet debate that's being had here in Australia and in the US. Thank you so much for joining us on Battle Lines. That was Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute in Sydney. That's all for today's episode. We'll be back again on Friday with a Trump edition. Until then, goodbye. Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Venetia Rainey and Roland Oliphant.

If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it really helps others find the show. To stay on top of all of our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells.

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