On the Historical Breadth of Australian National Security

Abstract

This article details the use of the phrase ‘national security’ in political and public discourse around the time of Australia’s Federation (1881–1921). It finds that while it was not present in policy or legislation until later, the phrase enjoyed noteworthy use in political debates and news media during the early Federal period. Further, the article finds that while military and defensive concerns were a common consideration of this early ‘national security’, there also existed a strong economic and social element, prefiguring the ‘broadening’ of security following the Cold War.

Introduction

This article explores the way in which the phrase ‘national security’ was used during Australia’s pre- and early Federal period (1881–1921). The article serves as a scoping study for a wider consideration of how notions of national security evolved in Australia; it seeks to contribute to Australian history (and the history of security, foreign policy and public policy especially) by giving context and precedent to various elements of Australia’s political consciousness. By tracking early uses of the phrase – uses predating the adoption of explicit ‘national security’ spolicy – the study gives a ‘common use’ basis of national security in early Australia.

The study draws on political discourse, namely the twenty-four uses of the phrase recorded in Commonwealth Hansard uttered between 1901 and 1921, and thirty-nine newspaper articles drawn from the Trove archive printed between 1882 and 1921. The study looks at the Hansard material in the first half, before moving to the newsprint sources in the second. These sources and time periods were selected in order to capture how the phrase was used in the early years of Federal Australia, as well as the degree to which these uses were informed by wider social expectations built in the lead-up to Federation.

While prescribing a specific definition or expectation on ‘national security’ is counter to the goal of this article, for the sake of clarity, ‘national security’ is categorised into four distinct senses in this study:

• Sovereign defence, which covers military matters, matters of sedition and subversion, and issues of foreign affairs.

• An economic sense, that deals with matters of finance and monetary policy.

• A ‘hybrid’ sense, in which issues of defence and economics are explicitly combined.

• Social cohesion, which covers issues of population, social construction, and private ownership.

The article first considers uses in Hansard by moving through the sovereign defence, economic and hybrid categories (as there are no ‘social cohesion’ uses in Hansard records). Following this, the article considers newsprint sources; first uses pertaining to sovereign defence, then economic, social and hybrid uses. In doing so, the study builds a picture of ‘national security’ as it was in the early Australian political consciousness – the concerns it encapsulated, and the values it demarcated in public discourse.

The study finds that ‘national security’ in the early Federal period was a complex and contested phrase, transcending military matters to encompass issues such as immigration, trade, land ownership, public health and even gender relations. Further, the study finds that in its early stage, the ‘national security’ of Australia was as much an economic consideration as a military one, with use of the phrase evolving to what is now being rediscovered as a ‘geoeconomic’ perspective.¹ The study maps how this conception of national security played out in public discourse, and it considers how world affairs drove this economic conception of national security to be subsumed into wider matters of sovereign defence and foreign affairs. Such work is of value as there is not as yet any robust engagement on how the very concept of ‘national security’ gained relevance or import in Australia to begin with. A greater awareness of the origins of ‘national security’ as a concept will assist historians to contextualise events and issues of the past, and to better position modern concerns against historical incident and precedent.

Existing literature

While Australia has the benefit of substantial scholarly engagement with the history of issues that we now consider national security, these focus on specific topics, or begin their analysis well after the notion of ‘national security’ was first voiced. Further, there is little engagement on what the Australian concept of ‘national security’ has meant throughout history, and how it was used. This lack of engagement is in line with scholarship internationally, which security studies scholar Michael Sheehan claims has failed to engage with the meaning of security (historical or otherwise), and operated under an ‘unacknowledged consensus’ of what security actually entails.²

Regarding existing studies of Australia’s ‘national security’ history, some do not cover the earlier years of Australia’s Federal history, and none engage with the history of ‘national security’ as a concept itself. Examples of those that do not cover the earlier history of Australia’s Federal period are Gyngell’s Fear of Abandonment, which concentrates on the 1940s onwards, and Curran and Ward’s The Unknown Nation.³

Regarding work that considers the relevant time period but does not question the concept of ‘national security’ per se, these include the work of Beaumont, Smith, and Lowe, among others.⁴ While these works offer interesting and useful insights into the events they analyse, by not containing an analysis of ‘national security’ as a concept, or a definition of what ‘national security’ they are studying, their utility to the current project is limited.

In the field of security studies, efforts have been focused on how national security is currently understood, not as it has been formed or changed.⁵ Much of this work explores the ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ of security as the concept moves beyond simple notions of defence, with this ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ paradigm spurred on by Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde’s Security: A New Framework for Analysis.⁶ While some of this work has gone some distance to considering ‘security’ as a historical concept, only one (Anthony Burke’s Fear of Security, discussed below) has considered Australian national security specifically.

There are however three works that, to some degree, include conceptual evaluations of national security within the Australian context. The earliest comes from security studies. In Australia’s Threat Perceptions: A Search for Security (1991) Alan Dupont attempts to trace ‘the evolution of Australia’s threat perceptions from early colonial times to the present’ by ‘exploring the patterns and themes of the nation’s security concern’.⁷ However Dupont’s study does not question what or how notions of ‘national security’ are constituted; it presupposes security as it was understood at the time he was writing, rather than commit to an examination of how the term or phrase was used in earlier eras. As a result, the work is not a history of the various meanings of ‘national security’; rather it views historical events through the lens of post-Cold War concepts of national security.

The second work that approaches the concept ‘national security’ is Stewart Firth’s Australia in International Politics (2011). Firth covers the entirety of Federal Australia’s history (and thus the earlier period of Australian nationhood), and considers the historical value of security in Australia – albeit briefly. In covering Australia’s foreign policy, Firth determines that ‘Security is an all-encompassing concept, referring to everything that contributes to the protection and wellbeing of a national population’.⁸ This definition goes some way to engaging with a broader notion of security, with Firth adding that ‘diplomacy, trade, investment, immigration, intelligence and political relations with other countries can, under certain circumstances, be just as important in creating the environment in which Australia is secure’.

Further, Firth suggests that the relative importance and focus on these elements has changed, at least in the last three decades. Where ‘defence was just one element … alongside others’ in the 1990s, Firth makes the claim that defence has since reclaimed a central role in national security.⁹ As evidence of this centrality, all four chapters in the ‘security’ section of the third edition of Firth’s work deal with armed conflict, and do not expand on the wider possible view of security that may have existed earlier. In this sense, Firth’s work witnesses to the fact that Australia’s conception of national security can change, however it does not make steps to qualify or quantify how those changes occur, and nor does it give historical detail on what attributes security may have had in the past.

The most substantive engagement with the history of Australians’ notions of national security is Anthony Burke’s Fear of Security, the first edition of which was published in 2001. In the book, Burke examines the history of Australian security from British occupation into the twenty-first century. Burke sees security in Foucauldian terms: as a technology, and as a practice, in which security is ‘not a stable category or state of affairs whose truth can be found and fixed for all time, but as a historically specific “system of truth” with intimate links to modern regimes of political, social, and economic power’.¹⁰ For Burke, security is a political technology ‘of the body, the economy, and the state simultaneously’.¹¹

While a robust construction of the Foucauldian concept, Burke’s framing of ‘security’ is not concretely tied to historical uses or specific invocations of the ‘political technology’ thus described. Instead, the history of Australian security represented in Fear of Security is the history of the Foucauldian idea identified by Burke, rather than the evolution of the term or concept as it was used historically by political actors. Put simply, where Burke’s approach examines historical events in order to better understand the contemporary notion of security, this article examines historical speech and writing in order to better understand how the contemporary notion of ‘national security’ came about.

It is not my intention to suggest that the term as it is deployed historically and the idea of security put forward by Burke should be (or have to be) the same, nor that they compete or negate one another. Instead, my goal here is to illustrate that the history of the political technology identified by Burke does not – and cannot – account for how or why the term ‘national security’ entered into the Australian political lexicon. Indeed, this more ‘literal’ historical analysis can enrich the conceptual approaches taken by Burke; if we are to understand security not as a fact of life, or as some matter-of-fact category to be unquestioningly employed, but as instead a historical construction that operates and is operated by systems of power, then we must pay mind to how it is that the term ‘national security’ itself can be born into the world.

As we will see, the issues raised as ‘national security’ by the literature above – issues of sovereign defence, trade, immigration, and social cohesion – were indeed present in early Australian use. Further, we will also see that these issues were not mutually exclusive, but could in some cases ‘hybridise’.

The rarity of ‘national security’ in Hansard

On face value, the phrase ‘national security’ was not a particularly important or well-defined fixture in political or legislative language in the years surrounding Australia’s Federation. Not featured in the text of the constitution or early acts of parliament, the phrase was used only once in early discussions of the Australian constitution, during the Third Session of the Australasian Federation Conference in 1898. Perhaps most surprising to modern readers is the fact that, as we will see, this sole recorded use of the phrase in the 1898 conference does not pertain to military or defensive matters, but instead to financial concerns. On 28 February 1898, George Reid argued against the amalgamation of state-issued bonds suggesting that ‘a conversion of [state] debts under the name of the Commonwealth, with the national security attached’ would lead to an eventual loss of any advantage such conversion might seem to provide.¹²

But while mentioned once in passing in the 1898 conference, ‘national security’ in any format failed to make it into the constitution, or indeed into any early legislation. The resultant lack of legislative force may explain a distinct lack of official documentation – and thus a lack of archival records – pertaining to ‘national security’.

‘National security’ as sovereign defence in Hansard

When discussing issues of sovereign defence or decisions regarding the capacity of the Australian nation to protect itself, the phrase is used in a similar manner to the contemporary mode, albeit in a broad and often unspecific way.

For example in a debate regarding Australia’s possible reliance on England for its naval defence, then-Prime Minister Edmund Barton argued for Australian self-sufficiency in the following terms:

Taxation without representation is no greater sign of decadence or of the enslavement of a people than is defence without service, paid protection without personal danger. The nation which gives its national security into the hands of another has ceased to live.¹³

Similarly, in debating revisions to the Defence Act of 1909, Senator Lt Colonel Cameron references national security as analogous to ‘an efficient system of defence’:

The country cries out for an efficient system of defence. Does this measure give us what the country wants? I say without hesitation that this Bill is playing for political safety, and not for national security.¹⁴

Indeed, ‘national security’ seems to have been used to refer to the expected outcome of defence, just as it is today. In 1904 West Australian senator Alexander Matheson argued that the new Defence Committee should have permanent members, quoting British military advisor Reginald Brett by saying that, ‘It is not safe to trust matters affecting national security to the chance of a favourable combination of personal characteristics’.¹⁵ In 1919, Senator Matthew Reid suggested that the treaty of Versailles was to be ‘the basis of national security’, and Senator Thomas Bakhap claimed that ‘the proper way in which to [defend Australia] is to first establish our national security by seeing that our Empire is victorious’ in 1918.¹⁶

However even within the twenty-four utterances of ‘national security’ in the first twenty years of the Australian parliament, there stood wide departures from this defence-focused meaning. The most notable of these departures came from discussion of economic policy.

National security as a financial concern

In the early years of the Australian Federation, the aggregate of the nation’s wealth was often referred to as the ‘national security’. The economic sense of ‘security’ – the surety or guarantee of good credit – was applied to something like what we might today consider the gross national product; it was the guarantee of the sum total of the wealth a nation might possess. Indeed it is in this economic sense that the single utterance of ‘national security’ is made in the Third Session of the Australasian Federation Conference in 1898.¹⁷

Interestingly, the introduction of bank notes (as opposed to coins made of valuable metal) incited the first use of the term ‘national security’ in Commonwealth Hansard. In May of 1904, when his political opposition argued that a paper currency would necessarily drive coins out of circulation, MP James Hutchison replied that ‘A national security will not depreciate a currency according to the Gresham law’.¹⁸ In 1909, Labour MP for New England Frank Foster spoke similarly:

when we propose the establishment of a national bank and a paper currency based on the solid bedrock of national security, we are told by some honorable members, who speak with their tongues in their cheeks, that they will support no system that is not based on a substantial gold reserve.¹⁹

However, for the most part the phrase was used more broadly. Senator Stephen Barker suggested that banks might attempt to ‘damage the national security’ if they weren’t forced to carry large amounts of government securities in their accounts.²⁰ In 1910, MP William Kelly claimed that no-interest loans for naval expenditure were said to be irresponsibly ‘pledging the national security and credit’, and accused the Labour party of having a lack of respect for ‘the national security and national credit’.²¹

Indeed Willy Kelly can be found using the phrase ‘national security’ in a variety of contexts. Despite his keen passion for matters of defence – and especially of the navy – Kelly demonstrates that at least in his own estimation, ‘national security’ had a variety of applications.²² As well as finance, Kelly also spoke of ‘national security’ in the context of military competition and defence. In debating Australia’s naval obligations to England in 1905, Kelly proposed that England’s ‘command of the seas’ had given Australia the freedom ‘to devote ourselves to the development of our territories without consideration of the graver problems of national existence’ – a freedom that Kelly labels ‘national security’.²³ Seven years later, Kelly would accuse Labour policies of detracting from the government’s ability to safeguard ‘national security’ through their focus on domestic issues at the expense of international affairs.²⁴

National security as a ‘hybrid’ concern

The use of ‘national security’ in this early period also had ‘hybrid’ utterances – instances where the phrase appears to be not simply military or financial, but a mix of both. As we saw above, Willy Kelly was happy to speak of ‘national security’ as a financial instrument even when referring to the building of a stronger navy.²⁵ As a result, exactly which ‘national security’ Kelly was speaking about is sometimes unclear. This is typified by his comments about foreign merchant vessels being converted for use in armed conflict:

[Germany] will keep their war fleet for the main purposes of a war fleet: to decide eventually the command of the seas in organized corporate action; but for the destruction of our commerce, and to starve, by holding up food supplies, the heart of our Empire, ships which are now trading in amicable relations with British peoples throughout the world will be converted on the outbreak of war and used to the detriment of our trade, and to the damage of our national security.²⁶

Indeed, Kelly was not alone – neither in mixing the context and import of ‘national security’ across financial and military lines, nor in using the phrase in a ‘hybrid’ manner. Similarly, Home Affairs minister John Henry Keating argued for the use of tariffs for the sake of ‘national security’ in 1921, though in the context of the wide-ranging discussion, whether the security is defensive or economic is unclear:

Duties should be imposed on these machines in such a way that we would promote their production in the Commonwealth in the interests of our national life and national security. A Tariff such as this should have for its object the stimulation of production of this character.²⁷

Beyond strictly military or financial, West Australian Free Trader Edward Harney mixed issues of defence, ‘national honour’ and economics when imploring the Federal government to commit to a national railway system on the basis of ‘national security’. He argued for the railway on a variety of bases: to mobilise troops in national defence, to allow domestic trade, and as a political promise that needed to be kept to fulfil Federation. While it is unclear which of these matters made the issue one of national security, Harney declared that while the railway would require a sacrifice, it would ‘be well made at the price of greater national security, of greater national unity, and … greater national honour’.²⁸

Thus in the early years of the Australian parliament, national security was not an alien phrase; however nor was it ubiquitous or clear. There is nothing in the utterances above that gives us reason to believe the phrase was novel or surprising. However we do see that the phrase referred to more than one thing; it could apply to matters of finance and trade, as well as to matters of defence. However outside the speeches and debates of parliament, the concept of ‘national security’ – whether defensive, economic or both – was used and contested in newsprint of the day. As we will see, ‘national security’ was a phrase familiar to the public at the time, but it enjoyed a breadth of meaning that went far beyond concerns of sovereign defensive ‘national security’.

‘National security’ in newsprint – sovereign defence

There were of course many references to ‘national security’ in newsprint that largely conformed to the uses found in parliament. With regard to sovereign defence, there were many invocations of ‘national security’ in regard to British naval power, often imported directly from reprints of English columns.²⁹ It was used regarding the control of territory, the organisation of defence and defensive infrastructure, and the rise in military strength that would be gained by instituting conscription.³⁰ Indeed in reporting on the very earliest rumblings of Federation, the Williamstown Chronicle reported that the United Kingdom parliament’s Enabling Bill of 1885 (that resulted in the Federal Council of Australasia Act 1885) established a basis to deal with the most fundamental matters of the new state – national progress, the organisation of defence, and national security.³¹

The sovereign defence-focused notion of ‘national security’ was also voiced in less straightforward ways; considerations of the health of young boys were called for to prevent a situation where ‘the national security would be endangered’.³² In discussing the prohibitive cost of domestic armaments manufacture, the Goulburn Evening Penny Post suggested that ‘National security must be attained without reference to cost’, a sentiment echoed in a reprinted tract from the Westminster Gazette that was republished in the Bundaberg Mail.³³ It was a sentiment even broached in church – reporting on an address by an eminent Methodist minister, the Daily Telegraph reported that ‘Armies and navies had their place and uses, but they were never an effective instrument for national security, apart from righteousness’.³⁴

Considerations of political and bureaucratic organisation, and the ability of that organisation to deliver national defence, were also brought into ‘national security’ calculus, with Launceston’s Examiner reporting in 1920 that William Bagnall MLA (NSW) used private member’s time in the New South Wales (NSW) Legislative Assembly to criticise the limiting effect state governments had on the Federal government’s capacity to act in the nation’s defence. Bagnall was one of many ex-Labor politicians now sitting as a Nationalist Party member due to his support for conscription, and his criticisms reflect his concern that the State Labor government that now ruled in NSW was out of step with the needs of the Nationalist Party Federal government.³⁵ Bagnall ‘lamented the difficulty of getting the intention of State Parliaments focussed on the question of national security’ – though exactly what, in his view, constituted ‘national security’ was not made clear.³⁶ In any case, this state of affairs meant that Bagnall and his supporters desired ‘a motion urging, in the interests of national security, the abolition of the State Parliament, and the institution of a national parliament with full sovereign rights to govern the Australian nation’.³⁷

In speaking of ‘national security’ in its sense of sovereign defence, discussions of the period also entertained issues of freedom and the social cost of such ‘national security’. The tension between freedom and security can be seen in a discussion on the viability of Australia as a sovereign nation published by The Argus in 1896, with the author suggesting that ‘Sometimes it was necessary to sacrifice personal liberty for national security … ’.³⁸ In the same year, the Queanbeyan Times lamented the futility of arms and mutually assured destruction, opining that ‘It really does seem a monstrous thing that the nations of the world would be … destroying humanity to preserve national security’.³⁹

Critical reflections on the costs of pursuing ‘national security’ in the sense of sovereign defence remained after World War I. In 1921, an author writing under the pseudonym ‘Australian Worker’ quoted an address by Senator Herbert Pratten as saying that despite recent diplomatic efforts, ‘No treaty between nations would give Australia anything like the national security she had hither-to enjoyed’. From the perspective of ‘Australian Worker’, this lack of national security meant that ‘Australia’s terrific sacrifice in the recent war has been in vain’, given the number of dead, the sick, and the massive debt now having to be shouldered by the nation.⁴⁰

Similarly, we can see use that reflects concerns regarding the grasp of ‘national security’ as sovereign defence over extra-legal and exceptional circumstances, especially regarding subversion, sedition and foreign influence. Regarding a legal challenge to the banning of the communist flag in the supreme court of Queensland, the Courier reported that the Chief Justice presiding over the case found that the executive of the Federal government was the sole authority that could determine what was ‘national security’. According to the report, the Chief Justice made clear that ‘Those who are responsible for the national security must be the sole judges of what the national security requires’.⁴¹

Economic uses in newsprint

Just as the sovereign defence notion of ‘national security’ was present in public media, the strictly fiscal notion of ‘national security’ put forward at various stages in early parliamentary debate was also present in news media from before Federation was finalised.⁴² It was reported in the Western Star that Henry Parkes had argued for federation on the basis that it would be beneficial to ‘every consideration of national-security and of commercial advantage’, and the Adelaide Advertiser questioned the role of paper currency in ‘national security’ in 1895.⁴³ The Westralian Worker published an article entitled ‘A National Security’ that opined in 1914 that ‘The bonds of the nation deposited in the Commonwealth bank are good security upon which the bank can issue currency’.⁴⁴ Similarly, the phrase was used to speak of trading tariffs and the dangers of free trade, mirroring the policy difference, expressed in colonial parliamentary debates, between ‘free traders’ and ‘protectionists’.⁴⁵

However while the Hansard uses of the phrase we saw earlier had been neatly contained by the considerations of bonds, paper notes and trade income, the ‘national security’ in news media could be land, or gold, as much as it could be government bonds.⁴⁶ Indeed, it could also be individuals, as can be seen in the Tasmanian Democrat in 1891. Railing against conservative commentators praising Henry Parkes, the author parodies the praise by expanding it to hyperbole;

He is the pivot on which the whole suffering country turns, and the moral is that if you take away the pivot the country won’t turn worth a cent. Moreover, Parkes is, according to the paper in question, the bulwark of our liberties, the keystone of our constitution, and the national security on which we raise all our loans.⁴⁷

Analysis of newspaper reporting in the early years of Federation shows that public discourse on ‘national security’ encompassed a broad view of the concept; one that included various aspects of sovereign defence and economic policy. However, beyond these issues, there were also many instances of ‘national security’ raised in the context of broader social issues. Concerns over the effect of property ownership, immigration and population size, industrial capacity and social consciousness are all raised in news media between 1881 and 1921, sometimes in isolation, sometimes in the context of defence and war, and sometimes in an amalgam of numerous perspectives and contexts.

Social cohesion as ‘national security’ in newsprint

Concerns over population, cultural exchange, property ownership, and gender relations all feature in early ‘national security’ language in Australia; unsurprising given its status as a political society emerging from a complicated colonial past.

In a piece entitled ‘A Colonisation Society’, published by Adelaide’s Express and Telegraph in 1889, it was argued that increasing the population of the colonies would be crucial to the national security of the future nation.⁴⁸ This concern for the nation’s security through population was key to the formation of the Immigration League of Australia, a community body which championed the cause of maintaining a growing population through immigration. In 1911, the then-president of the Immigration League wrote that Australia must increase immigration if it hoped to provide enough personnel for defence such as would achieve a level of national security.⁴⁹

But while a rise in population might bring national security in the eyes of some, it was not without problems; to some, it was crucial that only the correct ‘colour’ of immigrant be permitted into the country on the basis of national security. In an editorial in the National Advocate, the lack of a poll-tax on Chinese immigration in Western Australia was decried as a threat to ‘thorough national security’. While the author claims that the Eastern colonies ‘woke up to the fact that the leprous Chinaman was not a desirable citizen … ’ it was their view that it was ‘[unfortunate] for our thorough national security’ that Western Australia did not place the same barriers for entry.⁵⁰ Not simply an issue of community desire or simple moral outrage, the author of the piece concretely ties the issue of such immigration to the formation and maintenance of the new federated nation, and its ongoing success.⁵¹

Similar abhorrence can be seen in matters of gender. In an editorial in the South Australian Register decrying the women’s suffrage movement, an anonymous author posits that if women were allowed to vote, it would destroy the family unit. Beyond simply being a spiritual or social concern for the sanctity of family, the author claims that the family (as traditionally construed) must be protected, given that it is the ‘basement of all forms of national security’.⁵²

In addition to a concern regarding the nature and quantity of the nation’s inhabitants, ‘national security’ was also connected to the way property was held by those inhabitants. From the late nineteenth century into the first two decades of Federation, national security was invoked regarding the distribution of property holdings, and the relationship of that distribution to the nation’s continuing viability. For the most part, such references to ‘national security’ argue for the wide distribution of small holdings and the rejection of a landowning class. A succinct example of this use can be seen in the Daily Telegraph in 1893: ‘there is national security, peace, and power in small holdings. There is national danger, discontent, and weakness in useless land monopoly’.⁵³

Similarly, the Western Star reported on advocacy by Ipswich’s parish priest Rev. Father Andrew Horan, who had publicly called not for land tax, but for the direct provision of land to workers. While Horan did not himself invoke ‘national security’, the reporter made a direct correlation between the priest’s statements and the concept:

But there is greater significance to be attached to Father Horan’s practical advocacy of land settlement, for it touches the bedrock of national security. Once let a man acquire a fixed stake in the country and he ceases to be a socialist … ⁵⁴

An amalgam of these perspectives on property ownership as ‘national security’, as well as an amalgamation of the issues of population and social/racial cohesion, can be seen a decade later in the Australian Star in 1909. In a cartoon entitled ‘NATIONAL SECURITY, AND HOW TO OBTAIN IT’, an overweight man labelled as a ‘monopolistic landowner’ is booted out by a figure with ‘Australia’ on his hat and ‘tax’ written on his boot. ‘Australia’ then gives the land to hard-working ‘British settlers’. Below the cartoon, the caption reads ‘Without the land we cannot get the people, and without the people adequate defence is impossible’.⁵⁵ Discussion of these issues in the context of ‘national security’ continued in the next decade; in a discussion of a housing shortage in 1919, a reporter of the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate suggested in an article entitled ‘National Security’ that this issue of ‘national security’ was not so much a housing problem, but a ‘house owning problem’.⁵⁶

The Star’s cartoon may give us an insight into how these issues of property and population contributed to a concern for ‘national security’. While anxiety regarding foreign aggression played a major part in the consideration of population as a security issue, it is evident that matters of taxation, ownership and social cohesion were real and direct considerations as well. The interplay between these aspects is in full display in the cartoon published by the Star; population is essential to defence, but raising the capacity for defence is an economic and social outcome in itself. Tax is the instrument by which this defence through population will be achieved – assuming the immigrants gained are of the right colour and social inclination.

Hybrid uses in newsprint

As we saw above, within the walls of Federal parliament, ‘national security’ could refer to matters of defence or to matters of national wealth. Further, in some instances, it was unclear exactly which of the two it was referring to; in some instances the phrase referred to both at the same time. As we have seen, this situation also existed within popular discourse as recorded in newsprint.

One marked difference between use in newspapers and political speeches, however, is the level of clarity that is achieved in what would otherwise be ambiguous uses. While active political debates regarding trade, tariffs or infrastructure do not lend themselves to detailed explication, news reporting on similar subjects necessitates context and a clear point of reference. For this reason, readers (such as a historian studying such sources after the fact) can see with considerably more clarity the sense in which an utterance of ‘national security’ was employed in newsprint, than is possible with Hansard sources.

Thus when examining relevant news articles from the period, we are left with no ambiguity as to what ‘national security’ is being invoked, or how it is used or contextualised. As we will see, this clarity will allow us to confirm that there were indeed ‘hybrid’ uses – uses that today might be called ‘geoeconomic’. Examinations of the role of economics, industry, of technological advantage, and of various modes of production in ‘securing’ the nation politically and militarily can be found from the 1890s into the 1920s. In the following section, we will examine these various aspects of ‘national security’ in print media to demonstrate the great breadth of ‘national security’ thinking in early Australia.

We can see this more broadly construed ‘national security’ as early as 1898. In an article discussing lessons that could be learnt from recent conflicts around the world, the author builds a case for seeing the acquisition of wealth as an increasingly important aspect of ‘national security’:

There was a time when it appeared that a wealthy nation offered the most tempting object of plunder to needy adversaries, and that the possession of wealth tended to the decay of nations. In the present stage of the world’s history, it would seem that the wealth of a nation is one of the bases of national security.⁵⁷

In reaching this conclusion, the author specifically considers recent conflicts – specifically from the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan, and the Spanish-American war – to argue that modern arms and economic power make a nation more secure than traditional militarism. Through economic means, the victors had increased their technological advantage, the health of their soldiery, and could better support, supply and transport their forces. Through these economic means, the victors had secured success despite being far from home and often extremely outnumbered.

Additionally, we can also see early examples of what might be called ‘geoeconomics’. In an 1890 article entitled ‘War Clouds’ (likely republished from an English paper by Launceston’s Colonist), the author decries England’s reliance on imported food. Given the ‘war clouds’ glowering over Europe, it was crucial to maintain ‘the national security … ’; this would require a change to England’s free trade stance to prevent the possibility of ‘the imposition of prohibitory Customs Duties for the exclusion of British productions’.⁵⁸ In this context, ‘security’ is required in the face of war, but is attained by preventing a situation in which trade and industry are used to cripple a nation.

A similarly ‘hybrid’ use can be seen some ten years later, although the relationship between economic and military security is more of a constraining (rather than facilitating) one. Brisbane’s Telegraph reported in 1904 that Count von Bulow, Chancellor of Germany, had described his nation’s recent prodigious military expenditure ‘as the insurance premium on national security’. It was not clear whether the ‘national security’ in question was military or economic in nature, nor whether the ‘insurance’ described was the money spent or the military hardware produced. However the author suggests that ‘it is more than probable that if the people of Germany were consulted, they might express an opinion … that the premium rates which they have to pay for their national security are extortionate to the degree of unbearable-ness’.⁵⁹

Regardless, the author of the piece takes aim at the claim and attempts to rationalise the relationship between ‘national security’ (as military defence) and the economic cost of that security in a fashion that challenges von Bulow’s claim. In so doing, we are given an insight into one way in which ‘national security’ was simultaneously an economic and military consideration:

Fortunately amongst Anglo-Saxon peoples, the conviction daily is growing stronger and stronger, that the premium to be paid for insuring national security should be paid per medium of invoices and bills of lading, [i.e. by trade] and that the ‘national security’ which cannot be adequately covered in that way, is hardly worth talking about anyhow.⁶⁰

This nuanced view of the cost and benefit (or ‘insurance’) of security seems equally informed by the financial ‘security’ as it does by the security granted by military might, as in the context of the author’s assertion, neither can exist without the other. While the considerations of the author are certainly more geared toward fiscal responsibility, there can be no doubt that the security being gained is of the military type; thus the author is claiming a security that is military in nature, but financial by necessity. In this way, we can see that the author’s dispute with von Bulow’s claim is a sort of inversion of the analysis presented in the Goulburn Herald regarding the value of economic power in recent wars. Just as the article in the Goulburn Herald claimed that victory in the Spanish-American war and the Sudanese conquest was gained through economic power, this criticism of von Bulow questions the capacity for security to be gained when it is not underwritten by economic means.

However we can assume that at least in the view of the author of the von Bulow article, the connection between economics and defence was not widely appreciated in contemporary public discourse. The author makes plain their view that while the public did not yet understand security as contingent on economic capacity, its grasp of the connection was ‘growing stronger’. Indeed, even within the examples uncovered by this study, we can note that this economically contingent sense of ‘security’ stands at odds with the idea that ‘National security must be attained without reference to cost’, as quoted in the above section from the Goulburn Evening Penny Post some eight years earlier.⁶¹

These hybrid uses reach their peak during the years of World War I. In a letter to the editor of the Tweed Daily entitled ‘National Security’, T. Brooks questions how the nation can be secure – especially in the midst of war – without maintaining or improving levels of production.⁶² Similar anxieties surrounding the nation’s war performance and production capacity were voiced in 1915, with an author writing for the Sydney Construction and Local Government Journal arguing that Australia’s lower levels of production were not simply a failure to produce, but were instead caused by ‘the evils of State Enterprise’.⁶³ In the author’s view, state-owned enterprise had ‘assailed our system of defence and imperilled our national security’.⁶⁴ Thus while the object of security was still sovereign defence, the economic issue of state enterprise was concretely tied to the successful prosecution of that security.

The critique of enterprise and production as a concern of national security was not limited to those supporting state-owned enterprises; the following year it was argued in Brisbane’s Daily Standard that it was in fact private enterprise (rather than public) that imperilled ‘national security’. The report is also notable for further establishing the economic basis of ‘national security’, as well as its insight into the progress (or lack thereof) of that economic basis in public discourse. It would seem that at the time of writing, ‘national security’ was still understood predominantly as a military matter; before beginning their argument against private enterprise in matters of national security, the author conceded that, ‘To some people anything that does not directly deal with the purpose of crushing the immediate enemy is not attractive’. However the author continues by suggesting that, ‘The implied regulation of the placing of capital may appear irksome at first blush to the money-holders. But this war has shown that national security and prosperity are the first considerations’.⁶⁵

Even more so than with the previous example, the argument given in the Daily Standard makes clear that the ‘national security’ in question is one of sovereign defence. However it makes the case that the maintenance of that security extends beyond ‘directly dealing’ with crushing the enemy, and must also include the extent to which industry is under public control.

While the economic dimension of ‘national security’ may not have been popular comparative to its sovereign defensive use, it remained in use until the 1920s. Indeed a similar claim is made in the Australian (a now defunct publication from Western Australia) in 1920; in discussing the production and supply of sugar, the author suggests that the adequate provision of the foodstuff is no matter of luxury, but is in fact crucial for the success of the nation. Under the heading ‘BEATING BY BEAT’, it is claimed that ‘A country which depends on a foreign country for sugar loses to that extent its economic, and therefore its national, security’.⁶⁶ While this rather specific example of production-as-security lacks quite a bit of qualifying information, it is clear at least that the author holds economy and sovereign defence as separate, but nevertheless linked considerations.

Thus the connection between production, industrial capacity and the realities of ‘national security’ (as sovereign defence) was established in public discourse in the formative years of the Australian Federation. As we have seen, the relationship between economic capacity and sovereign defence was examined in terms of both international conflict and national defence. Given that the term ‘national security’ itself was used in specifically economic or military contexts in parliament, the ‘hybridisation’ evident in this ‘geoeconomic’ use provides evidence that these differing contexts were not necessarily disjointed or separate.

Overall, however, this more nuanced notion of security, along with uses involving population, family, prestige and other less concrete considerations, gives the impression of a far richer palette than simple considerations of sovereign defence. Far from being absent from discourse, or being simply a defence-oriented consideration, ‘national security’ was used in a wider variety of settings, invoked in a number of contexts, and used in service of many different aims.

Conclusion

The uses of ‘national security’ that I have examined above are not an exhaustive account of the term in Australian news media within the period 1882 to 1921, but rather a targeted survey of readily available Trove sources. From this survey, we can see that the term national security was in use in the Australian political domain long before the 1950s. In many cases, the use of the phrase also demonstrated a conception of ‘national security’ that went much further than simple strategic or defensive matters, and instead encompassed issues of social cohesion, immigration, wealth disparity, industrial capacity and international trade.

Further, we can see that especially in the early years of Federation, ‘national security’ was a term that could hold a distinctly economic meaning – the sum total of a nation’s prosperity, and its capacity to deliver and retain finance. This much more economic notion of ‘national security’ came to be sometimes conflated or combined with ‘national security’ as a defensive notion, as well as with other more nuanced contexts (such as trade and international relations).

As such, in the years immediately before and after Federation, ‘national security’ was a phrase that held political relevance, even if what it was speaking about in any particular use could vary widely. In this way – and due to the specific cases of variety – the use of ‘national security’ in early Australia is analogous to the ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ of security claimed to be a feature of ‘security studies’ in the late 1980s and 1990s. The interplay between the economic notion of ‘national security’ and this capacity for the phrase to signify broadly and in a variety of contexts likely contributed to the notable number of uses that may be called ‘geoeconomic’ – utterances of ‘national security’ that tied together the security of the nation’s wealth and industry, and the capacity of that wealth and industry to deliver political and strategic outcomes. Given the rising relevance of geoeconomics to contemporary Australian security studies, ascertaining the degree to which relevant early uses of the phrase were replaced or displaced is of importance to scholars currently attempting to rationalise ‘national security’ to these ‘new’ economic considerations.

Additionally, we can see through these early uses links to modern scholarship that has sought to uncover the less ‘standard’ elements of security – especially in consideration of immigration and social cohesion. As well as supporting this scholarship, the uses uncovered here also give avenues for further study, and greater contextualisation to other areas of policy and society.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term ‘geoeconomics’ has grown to encompass a wide gamut of use but in broad strokes speaks of the capacity of a state to leverage economic factors in the pursuit of power and influence. For an example of its use in Australian security studies, see Jane Golley et al., ‘Geoeconomics and the Australian University Sector: A “Geoeducation” Analysis’, Security Challenges 16, no. 4 (2020): 24–40.

2 Michael Sheehan, International Security: An Analytical Survey (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005), 2.

3 James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2010); Allan Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World since 1942 (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 2017).

4 Joan Beaumont, ‘Fighting the “Enemy Within”: Australian Police and Internal Security in World War I’, in European Police Forces and Law Enforcement in the First World War, eds Jonas Campion, Laurent López and Guillaume Payen, World Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 211–26, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26102-3_15; Evan Smith, ‘The Bureaucratic Limits of a National Security Agenda: The Winding Road of Alien Registration in Interwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies (online ahead of print, 3 November 2022): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2022.2125544; David Lowe, ‘Security’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, eds Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 494–517, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107445758.052; David Lowe, ‘Australia’s Atomic Past: Memories, Mistrust and Policy Legacies’, Journal of Applied History 2, no. 1–2 (December 2020): 98–111, https://doi.org/10.1163/25895893-bja10010.

5 See for example Emma Rothschild, ‘What Is Security?’, Daedalus 124, no. 3 (1995): 53–98; Anthony Burke, ‘Aporias of Security’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 1 (2002): 1–27; James der Derian, ‘The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard’, in On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 24–45; David A. Baldwin, ‘The Concept of Security’, Review of International Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 5–26; Jonathan Herrington, ‘Philosophy: The Concepts of Security, Fear, Liberty, and the State’, in Security: Dialogue across Disciplines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 22–44; Matt McDonald, ‘Securitization and the Construction of Security’, European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 4 (2008): 563–87; R.B.J. Walker, ‘Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics’, International Security 146 (2007); Holger Stritzel, ‘Security, the Translation’, Security Dialogue 42, no. 4–5 (2011): 343–55, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010611418998.

6 Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998).

7 Alan Dupont, Australia’s Threat Perceptions: A Search for Security, Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence, no. 82 (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1991).

8 Stewart Firth, Australia in International Politics: An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy, 3rd edn (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 134.

9 Ibid., 135.

10 Anthony Burke, Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9–10.

11 Ibid., 11.

12 ‘Third Session – Australasian Federation Conference’ (Australia: Parliamentary Library of Australia, 28 February 1898), constitution/conventions/1898-1118, 1614.

13 ‘NAVAL AGREEMENT BILL: Second Reading’ (Australia, 7 July 1903), 1815.

14 ‘DEFENCE. BILL: Second Reading’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 5 November 1909), 5684.

15 ‘DEFENCE BILL 1904’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 1 December 1904), 7708.

16 ‘QUESTION – TREATY OF PEACE’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 26 September 1919), 12730; ‘SUPPLY BILL (No. 1) 1918–19’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 14 June 1918), 5999.

17 ‘Third Session – Australasian Federation Conference’, 1614.

18 ‘QUESTION: MINISTERIAL STATEMENT: PAPER’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 24 May 1904), 1460.

19 ‘MOTION OF WANT OF CONFIDENCE’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 2 July 1909), 798.

20 ‘AUSTRALIAN NOTES BILL: Second Reading’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 17 October 1913), 4550.

21 ‘NAVAL LOAN REPEAL BILL: Second Reading’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 26 July 1910), 721.

22 Martha Rutledge, ‘Kelly, William Henry (1877–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kelly-william-henry-7091/text12017, published first in hardcopy 1983 (accessed 30 March 2021).

23 ‘QUESTION: COMMONWEALTH NAVAL EXPENDITURE’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 7 September 1905), 1988.

24 ‘CONSTITUTION ALTERATION. (TRADE AND COMMERCE) BILL: Second Reading’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 29 November 1912), 6203.

25 ‘MOTION OF WANT OF CONFIDENCE’, 768.

26 ‘QUESTION: ARMED FOREIGN MERCHANTMEN’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 21 September 1911), 1146.

27 ‘CUSTOMS TARIFF BILL’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 24 August 1921), 11241.

28 ‘QUESTION – GOVERNOR-GENERAL’S SPEECH: ADDRESS-IN-REPLY’ (Australia: Commonwealth of Australia, 29 May 1901), 357.

29 ‘FOOLISH OPTIMISTS’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 8 December 1917; ‘THE STATE OF THE NAVY’, Geelong Advertiser, 15 December 1888; ‘Empire and Supremacy’, Delegate Argus and Border Post, 13 February 1896.

30 ‘Australia’s National Security’, Herald (Melbourne), 31 January 1919; ‘THE DEFENCES OF NEW SOUTH WALES’, Argus (Melbourne), 24 November 1892; ‘The Cadet Corps Movement’, Western Mail (Perth), 19 February 1897.

31 ‘The Chronicle’, Williamstown Chronicle, 29 August 1885.

32 ‘DR. DALE’S ADDRESS TO YOUNG MEN’, Burrangong Argus, 14 December 1887.

33 ‘Stockton Colliery Disaster’, Goulburn Evening Penny Post, 8 December 1896; ‘NATIONAL SECURITY’, Bundaberg Mail and Burnett Advertiser, 29 May 1909.

34 ‘NATIONAL SECURITY. – DEPENDENT ON RIGHTEOUSNESS’, The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 1920, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article239631609 (accessed 2 March 2021).

35 ‘MR. BAGNALL’S WARNING’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 1920, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15875393.

36 ‘National Security’, Examiner (Launceston), 3 November 1920.

37 Ibid.

38 ‘LECTURE ON FEDERATION’, The Argus, 15 February 1896, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8891285 (accessed 8 March 2021).

39 ‘The Queanbeyan Age WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED Queanbeyan Times, Bungendore Mirror & Captain’s Flat Miner’, Queanbeyan Age, 11 July 1896.

40 ‘THE GREAT WAR LIE’, Daily Herald (Adelaide), 25 July 1921.

41 ‘VALIDITY OF A REGULATION’, Brisbane Courier, 21 July 1919.

42 ‘Banks and Credit’, Richmond River Herald and Northern Districts Advertiser, 11 February 1921; ‘THE SECURITY OF COLONIAL LOANS’, South Australian Register, 23 November 1882.

43 ‘Political Notes’, Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 21 November 1894; ‘THE BIMETALLISTS’ APPEAL TO HISTORY’, Adelaide Advertiser, 23 January 1895; ‘The Proposed National Bank’, Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 23 May 1893.

44 ‘A NATIONAL SECURITY’, Westralian Worker, 4 December 1914.

45 ‘SPECIAL LOW RAILWAY FREIGHTS’, National Advocate (Bathurst), 2 April 1896; ‘AUSTRALIAN NATIONALITY’, Australian Star, 15 April 1889.

46 ‘LEASING versus SELLING OUR CROWN LANDS.—X’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 January 1883; ‘Protection to Farmers’, Crookwell Gazette, 10 December 1886; ‘A National Bank’, National Advocate (Bathurst), 17 May 1893; ‘Australian National Security Tied to England’, Age, 14 May 1896.

47 ‘THE USUAL WAIL’, Tasmanian Democrat, 31 October 1891.

48 ‘A COLONISATION SOCIETY’, The Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 8 February 1889, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208524380 (accessed 8 March 2021).

49 ‘NATIONAL SECURITY THROUGH IMMIGRATION’, Evening News (Sydney), 1 May 1911.

50 ‘THE LEPER’S FOOT’, National Advocate (Bathurst), 28 September 1891.

51 Ibid.

52 ‘WOMAN SUFFRAGE. – TO THE EDITOR’, South Australian Register, 21 September 1891, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article48239628 (accessed 8 March 2021).

53 ‘LAND TAX’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 25 November 1893.

54 ‘The Western Star’, Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 23 May 1894.

55 ‘NATIONAL SECURITY, AND HOW TO OBTAIN IT’, The Australian Star, 16 January 1909, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article229387226 (accessed 2 March 2021).

56 ‘NATIONAL SECURITY’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 13 September 1919.

57 ‘WEALTH A BASIS OF NATIONAL SECURITY IN MODERN TIMES, AS OPPOSED TO FORMER CONCEPTIONS OF WEALTH AS A CAUSE OF DECAY’, Goulburn Herald, 12 October 1898.

58 ‘War Clouds’, Colonist (Launceston), 26 July 1890.

59 ‘Premium for National Security’, Telegraph (Brisbane), 8 December 1904.

60 Ibid.

61 ‘Stockton Colliery Disaster’.

62 ‘NATIONAL SECURITY’, Tweed Daily, 4 January 1916.

63 ‘STATE ENTERPRISE AND NATIONAL SECURITY’, Construction and Local Government Journal, 11 January 1915.

64 Ibid.

65 ‘PRIVATE ENTERPRISE OR NATIONAL SECURITY?’, Daily Standard (Brisbane), 28 March 1916.

66 ‘THE SOLDIER SETTLER’, Australian (Perth), 3 December 1920.