Australia and New Zealand: Approaches to maritime security strategy
Australia and New Zealand: Approaches to maritime security strategy
WRITTEN BY BEC STRATING
22 June 2021
Asia’s more demanding geopolitical environment has compelled states to rethink approaches to maritime security. The maritime domain has increasingly become a site of geostrategic competition between the US and China. Conventional maritime security issues intersect with unconventional challenges such as illegal fishing, piracy, human trafficking at sea, and climate change in complex and challenging ways.
New Zealand recently released its new maritime security strategy, designed to develop a “common approach, coordinated investment decisions and effective resource prioritisation” in dealing with maritime issues. Australia should consider following New Zealand’s lead by articulating a coherent maritime security strategy.
New Zealand’s maritime security strategy
New Zealand’s strategy defines maritime security in the widest sense, as “preventing, detecting, mitigating and responding to risks introduced by malicious, unregulated, negligent or harmful (or potentially harmful) human maritime activity”. The strategy sets out a multi-agency approach to enable New Zealand to establish a “more efficient and effective maritime security system that exerts comprehensive and sustainable kaitiakitanga (guardianship) of our maritime domain”.
The overarching strategy is designed to assist coordination and information sharing of the various government agencies and stakeholders that comprise New Zealand’s maritime security sector. There are two interesting features about this strategy: first, it does not appear to come from foreign or defence policy agencies, but rather the Ministry of Transport. Like Australia, over 99 per cent of New Zealand trade by volume is seaborne. Second, New Zealand has also established a Minister for Maritime Security to take charge of the strategy. In contrast, New Zealand’s neighbour Australia has no comparable document outlining a multi-agency or ‘whole-of-government’ approach to maritime security strategy.
What is Australia’s maritime security strategy?
Australia’s Indo-Pacific concept recognises that the maritime domain is increasingly at the frontline of emerging challenges to Australia’s national interests, regional stability and the liberal international order that successive governments have sought to defend. National security documents have considered the maritime dimensions of conventional maritime security challenges such as deterring attacks and coercion against adversaries; achieving and maintaining air and sea control; protecting key sea lines of communication (SLOC); denying access to forward operating bases by adversaries; and deploying joint task forces in support of the operations of regional partners and projection objectives.
In an age where great power rivalry and challenges to regional stability and rules in the maritime domain are contributing to a rapidly transforming regional security order, it is time for Australia to develop a standalone maritime security strategy.
Australia has sometimes been accused of ‘sea blindness’. Although it has the world’s third-largest EEZ and a search and rescue zone constituting around 53 million square kilometres or around one-tenth of the Earth’s surface, Australians do not tend to identify as a maritime nation. Australia’s Oceans Policy released in 1998 outlined a novel and ambitious plan for an integrated, ecosystem-based approach to ocean governance, but its ‘silent demise’ demonstrated a lack of political will, jurisdictional problems and the absence of clear lines of responsibility.
In 2004, a Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade inquiry report into Australia’s Maritime Strategy recommended the Australian Defence Force (ADF) implement a “modern maritime strategy”. Defining maritime strategy as one that involves “air, sea and land forces operating jointly to influence events in the littoral together with traditional blue water maritime concepts of sea denial and sea control”, the report listed three elements: sea denial, sea control, and power projection.
More than a decade later, little appears to have changed. The term ‘maritime strategy’ did not appear in the 2016 Australian Defence White Paper despite its ambitious plan to regenerate the Royal Australian Navy through the modernisation of maritime capabilities and procurement of submarines and other naval surface combatants.
The 2020 Strategic Defence Update makes it clear that Canberra considers Australia’s security outlook to have deteriorated considerably in the intervening years since the 2016 White Paper. While China is not always explicitly mentioned, references to grey-zone tactics, military bases and new weapons that challenge Australia’s capability edge, make it clear that Australia’s security posture is driven by threat perception shaped primarily by China’s rising influence in the region.
The 2020 Force Structure Plan outlined by the Morrison Government promises capability investment of AU$75 billion to maritime security. Massive shipbuilding plans for the acquisition or an upgrade of up to 23 different classes of Navy and Army maritime vessels are projected to cost AU$50 billion over the next decade. Yet Australia lacks a clearly articulated and coherent maritime strategy explaining the relationship between capabilities, means and ends — how do complex security threats emerge and overlap, what does it want to achieve, and how will seapower be deployed to serve and secure its maritime interests?
Does Australia need a maritime security strategy?
Middle-sized states cannot rely on hard power alone to defend their rights and need a maritime law-based order with the legitimacy and capacity to constrain the unilateral behaviours of more powerful states. These issues should be integral to an Australian maritime security strategy, particularly as UNCLOS — which underpins the maritime entitlements of states — is coming under challenge, particularly through ‘grey zone’ tactics that fall short of the threshold of war by using non-naval vessels to intimidate and harass other maritime actors.
China, for example, asserts its strategic interests in the South China Sea by building artificial islands, undertaking naval militarisation and rapidly increasing the number of blue and white hulls (maritime militia and coastguard) that are active. These activities undermine UNCLOS by preventing states from accessing their legitimate sovereign rights to key maritime resources, such as fish, and oil and gas, within the maritime zones generated under international law.
Such security dynamics within the maritime domain are not abstract concerns for Australia. Illegal fishing, for example, is a maritime security issue, overlapping as it does with other security challenges, including drugs and human trafficking, piracy and irregular maritime arrivals. A maritime security strategy should grapple with the full suite of interests that may be encompassed by the term ‘maritime security’ and how sea power may be mobilised in the defence of these interrelated interests.
An expansive concept of national maritime security would incorporate a vast array of interests and actors from a range of Commonwealth and state departments beyond the RAN, including the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force and customs, that work to defend Australia’s interests in peripheral domains in the Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans. Reflecting the complexity of Australia’s maritime security efforts, the 2020 Guide to Australian Maritime Security Arrangements attempts to map the different agencies and their roles and responsibilities in the maritime security sector. While it runs to nearly 200-pages, it provides little by way of strategy.
Australia has national security documents with maritime dimensions. In an age where great power rivalry and challenges to regional stability and rules in the maritime domain are contributing to a rapidly transforming regional security order, it is time for Australia to develop a standalone maritime security strategy. A strategy fit for a regional power should accommodate the broad sweep of Australia’s maritime security interests, build on opportunities for regional partnerships and cooperation in the maritime domain and grapple with how it can best employ all elements of the state to defend maritime order and the international law that supports it.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Rebecca Strating is the Executive Director of La Trobe Asia at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Image credit: Wikimedia.