Fascinating… I would never have imagined that Australia would allow a military intelligence base run by foreigners on their soil.
The US, Australia, UK and New Zealand have the closest human and signals intelligence relationship of possibly any group of countries in the world, even including NATO as a whole. The practice of close cooperation in intelligence operations between the US and UK goes back to before the First World War, and the other Commonwealth realms inherited a lot of that.
ANZUS dates back to the early 1950s, for example.
And of course there’s the whole ECHELON system, about which speculation runs rampant, which is run jointly by pretty much the whole English-speaking world.
Exactly. You can’t spell Australia without US!
Our two countries have a long history, close ties and Australia has always been geographically convenient for the States. Remember, the radio telescope at Parkes helped with the Apollo missions.
Well, yeah! We have for quite a while. You didn’t know? US Space Command has a presence there too.
Tripler
My wife says, “We are not going there!” after seeing the Google Map link in the Wiki. 
Is it the crocs or the spiders that are spooking her… or the snakes, or the cane toads, or the jellyfish, or the platypus or … well everything?
Thank you for the link, but I’m not opening that. If I do, she’ll look over my shoulder and prolly think its Arizona. :smack:
Tripler
Hell, I like it out West. AFAIK Austrailia’s like the Über-West.
Now look up the joint base at Northwest Cape. Then do some research about Woomera and Nurrungar.
I’m surprised that there’s any surprise about Pine Gap – Australia is still a close defence partner with the US. New Zealand’s own two controversial spy bases are Waihopai and Tangimoana, both also linked to ECHELON. These in a country which still officially bans nuclear warships – but our own links with the US go back more than 180 years.
On a side note, AUSCANZUKUS is the greatest acronym ever.
We let foreigners (the poms) test nukes here, so what’s a few antennas between friends?
***“Flat chat, pine gap, in every home a big mac
And no one goes outback, thats that” ***
from: Midnight Oil’s song The Power And the Passion (1982). The lead singer is now a minister in the federal government. It’s a conspiracy! 
Shush for gods sake!
Now that you’ve mentioned ECHELON we have to kill you and then eat you.
Pine Gap has been controversial for more than 30 years – it has been alleged that it played a part in the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government in Australia. But the justification for it is in Australia’s close defence relationship with the U.S., which goes back to WW2, when Australia felt that it had been abandoned by Churchill and the U.K. after the loss of Singapore, and turned to the U.S. to keep the Japanese out of Australia. (The Japanese got very close – last week, I visited a fort in Newcastle which exchanged fire with a Japanese submarine, which was presumably interested in the steelworks there). As in every relationship, there’s a quid pro quo: the U.S. promises to help Australia against invasion, and the Australia gives the U.S. a nice place to listen to Asian telecommunications.
Wow. In secret squirrel school we were told that this relationship was supposed to be classified.
Old news to me. I always wished I could get stationed there.
What are friends for, anyway?
The equivalent in the UK is RAF Mentwith Hill, north Yorkshire, operated by the NRO and NSA, and believed to be the largest electronic signals intelligence installation in the world.
It really is.
It’s something a lot of folks here in Australia should really try to understand a bit better: the United States and Australia are allies. This is a good thing, and it doesn’t mean we can’t change this if one of our countries decides to deviate from the path of democracy. I guess what I’m saying is that I got annoyed at the short-sighted “we’re kissing American arse” cries during the Howard era. The alliance pre-dates Howard’s administration by many decades, and is (naturally) still there under Labor. Doesn’t mean we always have to agree, but if a stronger nation is compatible with our beliefs, why not form an alliance? We form alliances with weaker nations too.
It’s a good one, but there is stiff competition out there:
All the LGBT stuff (with its variants) just sounds to me like something you’d order in a deli. And then there’s the power utility that supplies Canberra: ACTEWAGL.
Well as one of the people who complained about the aforementioned ‘arse kissing’, yes, I appreciate that we’re allies. The problem I have is that the alliance (in my view) is meant to be one of mutual respect and trust but not for us to be a dumb, blind, dogmatic follower of all-the-way-with-the-U-S-A. Most of the world knew the Bush administrations claims about Iraq were rubbish, but Howard would follow everything Bush said without question and dragged us into a place we had no business nor resources to be in. Worst still, I firmly believe that Howard’s blind faith in Bush has damaged Australia’s reputation abroad and positioned us on the world stage as America’s lapdog.
With all that in mind, I have no problem with Pine Gap; I think it makes sense to have a significant intelligence installation and for us to have such close ties to the US military and intelligence institutions. That is how I see our alliance working in a practical day-to-day sense.
[quote=“mecaenas, post:19, topic:479523”]
Well as one of the people who complained about the aforementioned ‘arse kissing’, yes, I appreciate that we’re allies. The problem I have is that the alliance (in my view) is meant to be one of mutual respect and trust but not for us to be a dumb, blind, dogmatic follower of all-the-way-with-the-U-S-A. Most of the world knew the Bush administrations claims about Iraq were rubbish, but Howard would follow everything Bush said without question and dragged us into a place we had no business nor resources to be in. Worst still, I firmly believe that Howard’s blind faith in Bush has damaged Australia’s reputation abroad and positioned us on the world stage as America’s lapdog.[\quote]
QFT. After all, Bush called Australia his ‘deputy sheriff’ for the region with good reason. And as for mutual respect and trust - Australia has supported America in countless military operations since WWII, but the only time we asked for help of that nature (peace keeping in East Timor) they refused.
Again I agree. Mutual benefit from the utilisation of different resources (geography plus security capabilities) is a good alliance.