Recent meetings between Australian and United States officials resulted in significant developments on two key issues: the unresolved conundrum of the Australian and US strategic relationship vis-a-vis China, and Australia’s deepening integration into US global space-based intelligence and military communications systems.

In particular, the ratification of a new treaty to build a new joint facility at North West Cape, as part of the US Space Surveillance Network, is clearly tied to US concern over China’s challenge to American space superiority. 

The paper states that the strategic options for Australia about China’s rise that Hugh White urged for serious public discussion may well be enthusiastically pre-empted by what appear to China as all too concrete facts on the ground. The calculations about the costs and benefits of the joint US-Australian facilities carried out by Australian officialdom in secret almost forty years ago need to be revisited – this time in public.