 No, Australia does not actually need to prepare for war with China. In the latest instance of the Australian media's deluge of propaganda geared toward manufacturing consent for war with China, nine entertainment-owned newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, have brought together a panel of experts to assess how well-prepared Australia is for a hot war with its primary trading partner. The question of if that war is necessary, or should be prepared for, is left completely unexamined. In a report titled, Australia Faces the Threat of War with China Within Three Years and We're Not Ready, we learn the names of the five experts, SMH and the age of recruiter to make the titular claim. And you're never going to believe this, but it turns out they tend to work in professions that are intimately intertwined with the Western Imperial war machine. His first expert is Mick Ryan, who I have written about repeatedly because he seems to feature in literally every single Australian news media piece geared toward propagandising Australia into accepting war with China as an inevitability which must be prepared for. Ryan is an adjunct fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which is funded by military industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Garrenman. And it is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. SMH and The Age make no note of this immense conflict of interest. The second expert is Peter Jennings, who is a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, ASPE, where he was the executive director for 10 years. Like CSIS, ASPE is a think tank that is funded by US-aligned governments and the military industrial complex. It has played a major role in manufacturing consent for the foreign policy agendas of the Western Empire, particularly in escalations against China. ASPE has been described as the propaganda arm of the CIA and the US government by Australian diplomat Bruce Hay. The third expert is Lavina Lee, an academic who is a council member with ASPE and an adjunct fellow with CSIS, so when it comes to pro-war punditry, she's what they call it too far. The fourth expert is Australian defence insider Leslie Seebeck, a regular ASPE contributor. Seebeck is a chairperson of a swampy, warmongering think tank of unclear funding called the National Institute of Strategic Resilience, which publishes woke imperialist articles with titles like First Nations Drone Network Project Initiation, Solomon Islands, Time to Take an Indigenous Perspective, Building Australia's Strategic Resilience, A Spotlight on Military and Gender in the Pacific Region, and Key to Australia's Strategic Resilience, an Australian feminist foreign policy. The fifth is Alan Finkel, a scientist who works for the Australian government. Again, none of these conflicts of interest were mentioned by the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, which as we've discussed previously is an egregious act of journalistic malpractice. This is the little like gathering Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Taco Bell Chihuahua to discuss whether the government should employ fast food outlets to supply school lunches. Except these guys aren't selling junk food, they're selling mass murder, human suffering, ecological disaster, and the violent deaths of our children. There are rivers of tax money at stake here, delicious, reserve-backed dollars straight into the old bank account, mountains of them. And essentially these people are the forward-facing public representatives of those companies whose job it is to sell the public on an outcome that directly benefits their backers. This is an elaborate advertorial, and it is incredible that the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age not only ran it as news, but hosted it. These five experts conclude that Australia needs to do much more rapidly to prepare for hot war with China, saying that the need to dramatically strengthen our military and national security capabilities is urgent, but Australia is unrepared. They say Australia must make these dramatic changes not to defend itself from a Chinese invasion, but to fight a war over Taiwan. The war Xi is preparing for, they say, is one fought over Taiwan, a prosperous, self-governing island of 24 million people that sits about 160 kilometers east of mainland China. The report reads, This is entirely in line with the appalling propaganda piece put out by Murdoch Sky News last month, which said Australia must double its military budget to prepare to back the US in a hot war over Taiwan. The panelists paint Australia's participation in this war as a settled matter, an inevitability should the US wage war on China. We have made our choice. If the United States goes to war with Taiwan, we're going to support them one way or another, says Mick Ryan. Neither the Australian military nor the public are presently truly prepared for the outbreak of war and Australia's inevitable participation, says Lavina Lee. These military-industrial complex-funded pundits are lying. Australia's participation in an American war against China is not an inevitability, and it is not necessary. In reality, the best way Australia can protect itself from China is not to prepare for a war with China. A hot war with our primary trading partner would destroy our economy and would likely cut off most of the imports that we require to function as an island nation. We've got no business preparing to throw our nation's sons and daughters into such a conflict, and we've got no business stealing from our nation's most needful in order to effect that preparation. An unresolved civil war between two adjacent bodies who both call themselves China is none of Washington's business, and it is certainly none of Canberra's. Let the Chinese sort out China, because China poses no threat to us. That last point isn't actually debatable, by the way. As Andy Wars Daniel Larison recently noted on Twitter, China's military budget consistently sits at around 1.5% of its GDP, which is less than half of the USA's. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case. The US is a nation with an interesting global domination, and its military budget reflects this. China is not a nation with an interesting global domination, and its military budget reflects this. In reality, the US has been circling China with more and more war machinery for years, in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled, and has been preparing for confrontation with Beijing for a very long time. The US is plainly the aggressor here, and Australia now has an existential interest in militarily uncoupling from that aggressor before it gets us all killed. The report by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which former Prime Minister Paul Keating just called, the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life, actually comes close to admitting that there is a concerted propaganda campaign designed to increase hysteria about China and manufacture consent for the war. The expert panel asserts that there needs to be a psychological shift. In the public towards this direction, which they must be actively persuaded to accept, most important of all is a psychological shift, said the report. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquility were not the norm in human affairs, but an aberration. Australia's holiday from history is over. The report cites Sebeck as saying, the nation's leaders should trust the public enough to include them in what can be a confronting discussion, and that the public must be regarded as smart enough to talk about defence and national security. The reason they are saying the public needs to be spoken to and persuaded to psychologically accept hawkish escalations against China is because no sane person would consent to such madness if they weren't psychologically manipulated into it. No sane person would consent to agendas which threaten to kill our sons and daughters, impoverish us all, and even turn us into nuclear targets with our copious amounts of propaganda. And so that's why we're seeing all these news reports about how urgent it is to prepare for war with China all of a sudden. Not because China poses a threat to us, but because we are allied with an empire that is planning to start a war of unfathomable horror.