Badmash,
From this faraway vantage point I do recall that Australia has been for a long time the home to a range of ostensibly shared intelligence facilities - although my source is Desmond Ball's now dated book published in 1980 'A Valuable Piece of Real Estate'.
Secondly I understood the USA had made limited, temporary use of Australian bases in the last twenty years, mainly by the USN and USAF.
I noted today The Daily Telegraph ran a short story, which opens with:It cites a former Australian official, now a professor:President Barack Obama is expected to reveal plans to station about 500 to 1000 Marines at a barracks in Darwin and to expand the US navy's use of bases at the Northern Territory capital and in Perth in Western Australia.Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ence-grow.htmlIn Washington and in Beijing, this will be seen as Australia aligning itself with an American strategy to contain China...In the view from Beijing, everything the US is doing in the western Pacific is designed to bolster resistance to the Chinese challenge to US primacy.
Personally I don't think the potential new facilities, not bases, have a role in the strategic equationto bolster resistance to the Chinese challenge
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