This morning, the AFR reported that at the Australia-Japan Joint Business Conference in Perth on Monday, Resources Minister Madeleine King “said Australia’s gas exports had helped keep it relevant in regional security discussions and the government would not let any future domestic gas reserve stand in the way of that.” The headline? “Australian gas keeps the peace in Indo-Pacific: King.”

Please. This claim that Australia needs to export gas “because security” isn’t new. The idea that both Australian and regional security rely on the continued or even expanded extraction and supply of gas by multinational companies have been around for quite a while.

It’s both wrong and dangerous.

It suggests that stable security relationships require supplicant trade relationships – doing whatever gas-buying countries want, like Korea and Japan. 

Really, it suggests that if Australia doesn’t do that, the region will become insecure and that Australia might become irrelevant.

Never mind that Japanese companies routinely pay no tax or royalties for Australian gas. Same for US companies. Often, they on-sell this free Australian gas at a profit – see IEEFA estimates that this scored Japanese companies profits of AU$1 billion last year.

The implication here is that if this situation doesn’t continue, security relationships will become unstable and might even collapse.

This argument is a clever attempt at stifling opposition to Australian gas expansion. But again, it’s wrong. Australia and Japan, for example, have longstanding security agreements that have broadened and deepened under the Albanese government.

Both countries see their deepening security ties as critical to stability in the Asia-Pacific, and to managing the role of China. No tension or change in the bilateral trade relationship over one supply line would put this at risk, and any changes could be managed with the most basic diplomacy.

Refuting this “security” argument on its own terms, though, also reveals something even more duplicitous at play.

In this framing, “security” means “stability” – that is, the maintenance of the status quo. “Security” means nothing more than the temporary prevention of inevitable, direct conflict. It has nothing to say about genuine and lasting peace, human flourishing, or ecological security. It has nothing to say about how Australia is making the very real regional security of climate change much worse.

With its approval of Woodside’s North West Shelf gas extension, legislative favours for Santos, and subsidies for American frackers, the Australian government appears to care about the genuine security of Australia and the region just about as much as a sub-imperial petrostate can be expected to. Which is to say, not much at all.