A couple of weeks ago, news broke about Australia's currency deal with China: http://gata.org/node/12407 Now news breaks that Australia is going to diversify their foreign reserves (out of the US Dollar and) into Chinese bonds: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/24/business/australia-buys-chinese-government-debt/?hpt=hp_bn1
is this means that aust dollar is going to come down ? since there is outflow of fiat from AUD to yuan ?
I learned something earlier this year which I'd never considered before and it made me reassess my views of defence and alliances. Australia as a trading nation requires the high seas protection of a larger power however our navy is completely inadequate to undertake this task. Currently our sea lanes protector is USA, but if USA is not there, Australia still needs warships on the high seas to protect its traders which means some other alliance. Interesting to consider in view of this current development.
Not trying to imply anything about adequacy, but our maritime dependence was the motivation for Collins subs. Namely, that we need a bluewater submarine capacity (and one that can travel from, say, Perth to the South China seas) but the stupid anti-nuclear policy meant that we couldn't buy any off-the-shelf bluewater subs and had to fully design a unique conventionally fuelled one largely from scratch.
I'm not going to claim I have much knowledge in this area, but how serious exactly is the pirate threat? What kind of equipment do they have? It doesn't seem likely they have anything on the scale of battleships or aircraft carriers. What exactly are we talking about? And why would having trained security forces on the boats not be adequate protection?
Sea lane protection in times of peace can be achieved with onbaord security, sure. In times of war however sea lane security is crucial to allowing freedom of movement to your own forces and merchant navy, for instance the first steps to strangling SEAsia is locking up the Malacca Strait at one end and the South China Sea between mainland China and Taiwan at the other... to lock up sea lanes yourself, or to prevent it from happening you need warships and aircraft. Unfortunately, a naval force isn't something you can just raise at a moments notice, thus you must incur the cost of maintaining a standing navy on the off chance that you will need it. Edit: This picture shows the volume of shipping that passes through the various sea lane choke points around the world Source:www.wired.com
