Insurgent Intellectual: Essays in Honour of Professor Desmond Ball

17. American bases in Australia revisited

17 AMERICAN BASES IN AUSTRALIA REVISITED Richard Tanter TEMPER DEMOCRATIC, BIAS HUMAN1 Desmond Ball’s labours through four decades to elucidate the character of United States defence and intelligence facilities in Australia, to document the evidence, test the balance of benefits and dangers to both national security and human security, and then tell the story to his fellowAustralians is unparalleled in Australian intellectual and political life, and I suspect on an international scale. The dedication, often neglected, to the most famous and influential part of this work, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia, was the call “for a sovereign Australia”. We might best sum up the character of Ball’s work of a lifetime — or more precisely, this one, brightly coloured, thread of a multi-stranded body of work — by recalling the enduring watchwords of an earlier Australian nationalist, Joseph Furphy: “temper democratic, bias Australian”. Both elements are keys to understanding the animating force behind Ball’s work on the American installations in Australia — the concern for a fully and properly informed public as a prerequisite to democratic debate about the American bases, and the concern that Australians identify their country’s 192 Richard Tanter specific interests concerning the bases, citing Malcolm Fraser’s prescient but often ignored 1976 warning that the interests of the United States and the interests of Australia are not necessarily identical”.2 And yet, this is not enough, on either count. One might more properly say of Ball on the bases that the work is characterised by “temper offensively democratic, bias human”. Ball’s anger is clear for those Australian officials and politicians who would hide the true nature of these military and intelligence bases behind unwarranted secrecy, unjustified discounting of risk, and willingness to traduce the fundamental civil rights of citizens in a democracy. At root, Ball was not only sure that truths hidden or obfuscated by government would always be revealed in the end, but he was confident that a properly informed Australian public would be able to make judicious assessments on the merits of a case that a reasonable government committed to both genuine national security and a viable democratic polity could live with.3 Moreover, while retrieving national sovereignty has always been central to Ball’s critique of particular American facilities (or particular aspects of some or all of them), from the beginning of his career Ball has often gone beyond questions of national interest to identify the ways in which the outcome of misconstrued or inadequate conceptions of national interest have implications for the wider human interest — or indeed, a planetary interest — albeit in a distinctively Australian accent.4 PURPOSE AND METHOD Tellingly, Ball’s published work on the American bases begins in 1975 with a 14-page article titled “American bases in Australia: the strategic implications” in the venerable Australian adult education magazine the Current Affairs Bulletin.5 Over the next decade and a half Ball published two major works, four monographs and a series of research and policy papers documenting, analysing, and assessing the implications of these American installations. Of these, Ball’s 1980 book A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia became the best known of all of Ball’s dozens of books. The book has an iconic status for many Australians, in part because it is often assumed to be principally about the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap. In fact only 24 pages of the book are devoted specifically to that base, but the apparent error of fact is a slip of the mind that reflects the American Bases in Australia Revisited 193 profound significance Pine Gap has acquired in Australian culture, as well as in practical political life, in both cases largely due to Ball’s work. Among all the many American (and Australian) military installations past and present in Australia, Pine Gap occupies a literally iconic place in the Australian imagination. Through Ball’s work, the base has acquired a sense of specialness — a place of difference, and a place of manifold potency, not least politically.6 In the minds of many Australians, American concern about a threat to the future of Pine Gap was enough to bring down the elected government in 1975. Its association with uncontrollable foreign powers, extraordinarily sophisticated technology, the exotic and necessarily fantasy-laden realm of space, and its associations with the use of nuclear weapons (including being a target...