This article by Professor Rory Medcalf first appeared in The Australian Financial Review on 23 April 2022.

Australia needs a new national security ethos. The ANZAC legend, for all its ragged nobility, is not enough for the strategic realities of the 21st century.

This is with full reverence to the spirit we mark each April 25: of wartime service, sacrifice, resourcefulness and that special comradeship – or mateship – that Australia claims as its own.

Values of duty, courage and selflessness in the national interest matter all the more in an age of international disruption and danger.

Today’s security environment is confronting. In launching a major defence policy update two years ago, the prime minister warned about a new 1930s – and that line was not mere politics.

Since 1945, much of our population has looked out from an eastern coastline onto an ocean that was literally pacific, sheltered from even the idea of war.

Now we face the prospect of a Chinese military presence in the islands and waters where we and our American allies fought to stop imperial Japan.

The United States is still on our side but is – and should be - only interested in allies that help themselves.

The blundering brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has returned industrial-scale warfare and atrocity in Europe, with global consequences and a nuclear shadow.

War remains not just thinkable, but nightmarishly doable – and the potential in our Indo-Pacific region is real.

This is underscored by China’s staggering expansion of military power over the past two decades, which continues despite a slowing economy.

An invasion of the self-ruled democracy of Taiwan is the most feared and studied possibility of regional war, but hardly the only one.

Many potential conflicts have a China factor: Xi Jinping’s techno-totalitarian regime, combining repressive one-party rule with overweening nationalism, pushes up against Japan in the East China Sea, India along a disputed border, and much of Southeast Asia in the South China Sea.

Astride those globally vital sea lanes, China has manufactured islands and fortified them, despite promises to the contrary. This is a reminder of how little worth to place on assurances about its plans for the Pacific.

Of course China hardly poses the only security challenge to Australia.

The dictators of China and Russia have bound themselves through a ‘no-limits’ agreement that crystallises a global challenge to the principles of democracies and smaller nations in general: principles of rules, respect, tolerance and sovereignty.

The sense of order we have long taken for granted is threatened in other ways too. Politically-motivated violence of many origins, a tide of technology-enabled disinformation, the brittleness of economic systems narrowly focused on efficiency, convenience and choice: all of these threaten the cohesion of a complex society.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and accelerated such vulnerabilities, not to mention the limits of our unfinished nation, in pulling together for the common good.
And as the pandemic ebbs, the flame and flood of the long climate emergency will endure: testing all of these and other national fragilities yet to be recognised.

In the present election campaign, we will hear much about the capabilities the nation needs for the new era of insecurity, from the high-end technologies of nuclear-powered submarines, missiles and cyber defences, to the expansion of our undersized and overstretched defence force, and perhaps ideas about supplementing it with a civilian force for non-war emergencies. Promises will be made about defence budgets and what price sovereignty and self-respect.

But all this will be an elaborate Maginot Line if the Australian people lack resolve to work together and contribute to national security in times of crises and conflict.

And that’s where, for all its virtues, the ANZAC myth has latter-day constraints.

Most Australians today are from families with little connection to the serving military or even to ANZAC veterans past. It helps nobody if they find false comfort in the idea that collective interests and values can be protected by a valiant volunteer force of someone else’s children waging wars in faraway lands.

The contemporary landscape of threat pays little respect to borders or civilians. National security is everyone’s problem.

The truth is that, if Australia is to weather the challenges of the decades ahead, we will need a far more inclusive and integrated national effort than our history has prepared us for.

This means awakening to some truths uncomfortable in our democracy.

For decades, we’ve got away with a distinction between the vision of service celebrated in ANZAC, and the idea of mandatory national service that is standard across much of the world – including some democracies more progressive than our own.

The reality is that if we ever needed genuinely to brace for major conflict, there would be a larger mobilisation of society, even if mostly for roles of civilian service and industry. It’s still a reality most Australians – including our politicians - barely countenance.

This normalisation of a nationwide security effort will also be needed well short of war, indeed to help deter it, for instance in the colossal investment of a yet-to-be-trained workface for the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine program.

Being serious about national preparedness does not make for stirring commemorations of military sacrifice – but makes them less necessary in the first place.
Almost a third of Australians were born in another country, and more than half of us have at least one foreign parent.

It is reasonable to expect new migrants to learn and respect the core values of their adopted home. It is not so reasonable to assume that the story of ANZAC is one all Australians can relate to readily.

After all, the first ANZACs were sent to defend not just their young democracy but also the British empire and the White Australia Policy.

And in a world where resilience and resistance are the watchwords, and atrocity, coercion and empire-building the renewed threats, it is unsustainable that we keep excluding our own terrible frontier wars from the national security story.

Looking ahead, we need a fresh and depoliticised ethos about what it means to defend Australia, in this great multicultural experiment of a developed democracy in the Indo-Pacific.
Perhaps, like so many myths, the ANZAC story will keep being reinterpreted with each generation – but this risks making it so unrecognisable as to undermine its integrity.

More likely, if Australia is to have a national security narrative that will sustain us into the 22nd century, it will be written in a tribulation to come.

Professor Rory Medcalf is Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University and author of Contest for the Indo-Pacific.