I mean it makes a lot of sense for us to become a neutral state.
We follow the US but our biggest trading partner is China.
We are surrounded by Asian nations yet our political alliance is with the west.
We are a nation bound by multicultural with 52% of Aussie with a parent boring overseas.
We have natural resources everyone wants.
Why wouldn't us be better if we became a neutral state???
Looking at votes for #4, it seems people trust the courage (and hence courageous vision) of our politicians highly.
Looking at votes for #2, it looks like Straya still rides on the sheeps back
Oh the irony.
Forgive me for not analysing your entire posting history, but pretty much everything I can see on this page is you blindly repeating assertions formulated by other people without giving any original thought or reasoned justifications for what you've written. Regardless of whether you're "right" or "wrong", that's very much the behaviour of a "sheep".
Yes, because your reading of one post (where I used the same points to highlight the rank hypocrisy- by swapping one perspective out and the other in) , is enough to validate your bias? Okee
@Protractor: It was more than one post and you did exactly the same based on zero posts… Add hypocrite to the list…
@callum9999: LOL,
Nationalist sheep with no evidence makes it up as she goes along.
Oh BTW feels free to link the comments you claim I duped.
Otherwise that makes you the hypocrites hypocrite.
@Protractor: Well, I suppose the silver lining of this frustrating interaction is that you accept you're a hypocrite.
I'm neither nationalist nor female nor have made anything up. Do you have some kind of learning difficulty that explains your inability to make coherent thoughts? It sounds like your head is just a jumble of complete nonsense that you're firing out at random.
Virtually everything you've written on this page is a load of uncited tripe with zero context (i.e parroting stuff you've read somewhere - or, to be fair, have just made up in your head). Two examples would be:
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/14692292/redir
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/14689341/redir
@callum9999: Haha, the second link is the content from the moon unit above and I juxtaposed the opposite view using the same content. You think Trump is not Putins bitch? You must have just landed.Try harder.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers…
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/connections-…
@Protractor: You've flat out ignored the majority of my post so I'm not going to waste my time writing for you any more.
But to answer your question, no - neither the journalists in the articles you've quoted nor myself believe that Trump is controlled by Putin. Influenced? Sure.
@callum9999: You head hunted a single post.Made a broad unsubstantiated (BS) claim about all the rest, then crept away bit by bit ever since. You can't even understand the irony of missing the original INTENDED irony,in the second post you linked, nor did you read the post it related to (above it) in context.
You flat out ignored multiple posts of mine and lied that I was basically "plagiarising other peoples opinions", then it was "I make it all up". Pick a lane.
Dreaming? There is no such thing as neutral state…
Since we are already been coerced by china even with small things as last few years has shown.
So best to stay neutral is to arm up and then you can enjoy neutrality because potential enemies will think twice.
Why do we want to be like the gutless Swiss?
While Ukraine was having its energy infrastructure bombed into oblivion by Russia - leaving civilians scrambling not to freeze to death those mountain climbing bankers were destroying hundreds of their own obsolete SAM systems rather than donating them where they could have been used defensively to prevent this and they also blocked Germany from providing defensive anti-aircraft ammunition.
As someone who's followed that conflict closely the Swiss have blocked a load of things that would have assisted Ukraine. All so they could continue to be 'neutral' and yet keep accepting grubby Russian Oligarch money by the truckload.
The Swiss are nothing to aspire to when it comes to foreign policy. Alas foreign policy isn't perfect i.e some things stuff up completely, but if you do more right in the long run and always try to do the right moral thing I don't think you can judge it too harshly. Their neutrality is just morally gutless and self-serving for their grubby banking sector.
The US Congress is just about to approve the sale of three Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines.
Bring it.
The CCP and their supporters in Australia (as this thread proves) will hate this. The Chinese navy doesn't do ASW.
I was wondering when you would exhaust every playground jibe and resort to the low-balling infantile 'ooh look ,a CCP supporter' desperado mantra. Aggh the stellar nuance of bigoted dichotomies . "Must be pro China militarily , cos bags the USA ."
Your wonderful subs are all second hand , (if Trumps allows it) retirement class piles of radioactive crap. And we have to bury the waste here. (Hopefully in your backyard) We won't see any own 'new' subs' inside your life span.If ever.By the time they arrive tech will be way over their head.They are a redundant legacy. But at least your great great grand kids will get to see their maiden berth, ( as adults).(If by some miracle there's anything livable left of the planet, at that time) .
uh uh
To be a neutral state, you would probably need to at least:
1) Have a very strong and advanced military with good experience.
2) Have a lot of money.
We kind of fail at both of those. Our military might be ok but comparatively I don't think we could protect ourselves entirely on our own.
Money? Well… if you count inviting foreigners into our country to invest to get money, then maybe… we are only good at selling ourselves and own people out to get money into the country. I mean we probably don't need a military since every other country is just buying our country out.
All countries need to be part of an alliance, even the USA. Your post is naive.
Taiwan at the moment is very much divided. the young didn't want to war and many didn't even want to know about the politics. So I wouldn't say they really want to be part of china.
From the ESC/NCCU 2023 survey:
6% no opinion.
7.4% status quo moving towards unification or unification ASAP.
86.6% status quo (independence in practice), status quo moving towards independence or independence.
That does not sound very much divided to me. Amongst young people independence would be even more favoured.
Percentage-wise it's all a bit like saying that Australia's population is very much divided because many people live in Adelaide.
1:We should be a neutral state
2:We should always follow the western way
If those two are the only options then I'll happily call Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, Malaysia, Thailand, (feels like I'm listing everyone in the region other than the DPRK and PRC) etc., etc. "Western" countries.
The problem is…. what will be the cost of independence for Taiwan?
Australia, Japan, the US would have to commit a strong force to fight China thousands of kilometres away (except for Japan and SK of course) on their doorstep, and if backed into a corner China has nuclear weapons.
SJWs and Virtue Signallers may talk things up with their rusty pens and smelly ass saliva but it will be the men and women of the ADF doing the actual fighting and dying.
They signed up to defend Australia but I’m not so sure they want to fight and die on a foreign beach far from home with little implication on Australia.
Unless we instead send the all volunteer pro war bluffer army - pretty sure with all the talkers we could cobble up a few garbage divisions to send to Kinmen, though I suspect they would be useless cannon fodder and be wiped out within seconds……….
No serious military planner is actually going to send any significantly sized unit (foreign or domestic) to Kinmen which can be blockaded at will and deprived of fresh water (and pounded flat by artillery from the mainland while the PLA transports sail on, bypassing the island entirely).
For Australia, an island nation, the goal has always been naval deterrence, not land detterence. If the PLA boats actually manage to land soldiers on Taiwan, it's probably already over.
I find it interesting just how many people seem to be so gung-ho about us having some superpower military alliances and nuclear subs and all this nonsense, when honestly I think it’s unlikely anybody would want to invade us for the next 50-100 years with or without any military. We have historically had only one major noteworthy attack on Australian land, and that was during WWII.
Nobody wants this geographically isolated land and the resources here are practically all more or less foreign-owned industries for which Australia makes minimal profit anyway. Valuable enough to invade? Doubtful. Not in my lifetime.
However, with alliances come free trade deals. That’s where the real money is. However we need to be getting better ends of the deal… not giving away $400 billion for submarines we will never meaningfully use.
Even as we debate the pros and cons of being neutral or subservient to the US and being a modern colony of the Military Industrial Complex via Aukus (which by the way the Aukus deal is a undemocratic decision costing Aussie taxpayers hundreds of Billions while the democratic Voice referendum only cost millions), President Biden has already instructed his Pacific branch of the US Navy (ie Royal Australian Navy) to become embroiled in the Israel-Palestine war and thus put Aussies sailors lives at risk.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-14/us-request-australia-…
It'll be interesting to see if old mate Albo now rubberstamps the US instructions to our Royal Australian Navy despite yesterday's United Nation unanimous ceasefire call. We are no better than communist countries if our democracy continue to be subservient to the US Military Industrial Complex.
Correct .
Putin effectively makes Trumps decisions for him.