Solar Panels, Submarines, and the National Security Strategy Nobody's Talking About
There’s a cartoon doing the rounds online that stopped me mid-scroll the other day. It depicts what looks like a military tank, but decked out with solar panels and wind turbines — a kind of renewable-powered war machine. The comment sections are predictably chaotic, with people arguing about whether it’s satire, a serious policy proposal, or just someone having a laugh. Honestly, the ambiguity is kind of the point, and it got me thinking harder than most actual political commentary does.
The core idea — if you squint past the jokes about Tesla coils and Red Alert references — is genuinely worth sitting with. What if energy independence is national security? Not in a bumper sticker way, but in a cold, strategic, hardheaded way?
Think about it. Australia is absurdly exposed. We’re a resource-rich island continent that somehow managed to dismantle our oil refining capacity, gut our manufacturing base, and become deeply dependent on global supply chains for things that actually matter. One commenter put it bluntly: if a major power wanted to bring us to heel, they wouldn’t need to fire a single shot. Just squeeze the fuel supply. We’d be on our knees within weeks. That’s not fearmongering — that’s just the uncomfortable arithmetic of our current situation.
And yet the dominant conversation about national security in this country remains stubbornly fixated on hardware. AUKUS submarines that may or may not arrive before the 2040s. Fighter jets. Missiles. Billions flowing toward American defence contractors for weapons systems that, as some observers have pointed out, could well be obsolete by the time they’re delivered. Meanwhile the actual foundational vulnerability — our energy dependence and hollowed-out industrial capacity — gets a fraction of the political attention it deserves.
The manufacturing question is genuinely thorny, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. The comment threads around this cartoon got pretty heated on exactly this point. Someone raised the Holden ghost almost immediately — the painful reminder that we did build cars here, and the market essentially shrugged. The counterargument, which I think holds more water than it’s given credit for, is that we’re not operating in some pure free market. Every major manufacturing nation subsidises its industries to varying degrees. When China or the US supports their manufacturers, pulling Australian subsidies isn’t “letting the market decide” — it’s unilaterally disarming in an economic contest where everyone else is playing by different rules.
But here’s where I think the conversation gets muddled. People hear “bring back local manufacturing” and immediately picture 1970s-style protectionism — inefficient factories, featherbedding, costs spiralling out of control. And look, that’s a legitimate concern. Poorly designed subsidies absolutely can produce that outcome. But modern manufacturing in highly automated industries doesn’t have the same wage-cost dynamics as it did when we were hand-assembling Commodores in Elizabeth. The calculus has genuinely changed.
The smarter frame, I think, is to ask: what specific industries represent both a genuine security vulnerability and a plausible domestic capability? Fuel refining. Battery storage. Solar manufacturing. Grid infrastructure. These aren’t vanity projects — these are the things that determine whether the lights stay on and whether our economy functions if global shipping gets disrupted for any reason. Climate-related, conflict-related, pandemic-related — the reason almost doesn’t matter.
One comment stuck with me: “We could spend another billion on defence, or another billion on reducing our exposure to shipping. Which adds more security?” That’s the question I’d love to hear asked in Question Time. Instead we get theatre.
The other piece that doesn’t get enough airtime is what we’re sitting on. Australia exports extraordinary quantities of raw materials — minerals, gas, agricultural products — often at prices that feel almost embarrassingly low given what those resources eventually become. There’s a version of this country that captures more of that value chain domestically, funds genuinely strategic industries, and builds real resilience. It requires long-term thinking that extends beyond the electoral cycle, which is precisely why it’s so hard to achieve. As one commenter noted with some resignation, it requires a parliament that isn’t willing to trade our future for short-term political gain. Make of that what you will.
None of this is to say the cartoon’s tank-with-solar-panels is a literal defence policy proposal. But the underlying provocation is sound. A country that generates its own clean energy, maintains sovereign manufacturing capacity in critical sectors, and reduces its dependence on potentially hostile or unstable suppliers is a country that has genuine strategic depth. That’s not a left-wing talking point — it’s just sensible national planning. The fact that it also aligns with climate action is a bonus, not a contradiction.
We’re at an interesting moment here. The energy transition is happening whether the culture war participants like it or not. The question is whether Australia captures the strategic and economic benefits of that transition, or whether we sleepwalk through it and find ourselves dependent on a new set of imports — batteries and panels instead of oil — while congratulating ourselves for going green. There’s still time to get this right, but it requires taking the question seriously rather than leaving it to cartoon tanks to make the argument for us.