Betrayal: Govt. turns us from a middle power to a small power

The first duty of a government is to defend the nation. Not only has the Gillard government lost control of our borders - unless of course this is a deliberate boats for votes policy. It is, as the Australian Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Director Hugh White says, in the process of downgrading Australia from being a middle power to a small power with all the loss of influence that entails. Worse, is not admitting to the Australian people how it is betraying those who defended and built this country. Because the government carelessly wasted the vast assets left to it by the Howard government, and is now bound to borrow enormous sums overseas, it has taken the axe to the defence budget. Hugh White sees no evidence that the Gillard government has a defence strategy at all or even realises the damage it is doing. This is made worse by the ideological obsessions and political deals of this government. Just as the previous Labor governments gave us the virtually useless and massively expensive Collins class submarines, the Gillard government is tied down by the political deal that you submarines have to be assembled here. Then there is the silly ideological decision that we must not have nuclear powered submarines which are ideal for Australia.