Defence Archives - Page 2 of 6

Australia can’t easily lift defence spending to a Trump-satisfying level

30 January 2025

US President Donald Trump has called on NATO members to lift their defence spending from the current target of 2 percent of GDP to 5 percent.

‘They could all afford it,’ he said, warning that the United States would withdraw its guarantees of protection to Europe unless they paid up.

Trump has not opined on Australia’s defence spending, but, when he gets to consider AUKUS, he is unlikely to be satisfied. And there’s no easy way for Australia to lift its spending to a level that would satisfy him.

Australian defence spending was $53.3 billion in 2023–24, which was 2 percent of GDP. The Treasury expects it will reach 2.4 percent of GDP in 2027–28.

Russia, Ukraine, Israel and some Middle Eastern states are the only nations currently spending at least 5 percent of GDP on defence. (China’s data is too opaque to know.) In Europe, Poland comes closest, spending 4.7 percent of GDP this year. US defence spending is 3.4 percent of its GDP.

Trump’s 5 percent figure may be an ambit claim—a Financial Times report suggested he would settle for 3.5 percent. NATO will debate raising its target at its June summit.

For Australia, 3.5 percent of GDP would be $97 billion, about 75 percent more than was actually provided for defence in the budget.

Any increase in defence spending can be funded in three ways: increased taxation, reallocating money from other uses, or debt.

To get an additional $40 billion a year from taxation looks politically painful. To meet that target would require either a 12 percent increase in personal tax collections, a lift in the GST rate from 10 percent to 14 percent, or raising the company tax rate from 30 percent to 40 percent.

The federal government has in fact received an income boost of these dimensions, with total tax collections averaging 23.2 percent of GDP over the past five years, up from 21.6 percent in the previous five. However, this mostly flowed from the extraordinary profitability of resource companies, which will not be repeated.

It is more likely that company tax payments will fall short of treasury forecasts over the next few years as China’s appetite for iron ore and coal fades.

Australia is a low-taxing country—the US, Switzerland and Ireland are the only advanced nations taxing less—so an increase in taxation would not be ruinous to the economy.

It has been suggested Europe impose a defence tax to pay for military preparedness. Denmark scrapped a public holiday to help finance a higher defence budget. Without the immediate threat of Russia at war with a near neighbour, it would be hard to build the political support for such moves in Australia.

Reallocating existing spending looks just as difficult. Cutting social programs carries a high political cost, as the Abbott government learned with its ill-fated 2014–15 budget.

Most of the budget is locked in. There are 412 administered programs with payments governed by indexation. Many programs are driven by legislated entitlements, such as unemployment benefits, Medicare and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

The NDIS is an interesting example: it elbowed its way into a constrained budget on the false assumption costs would be held to $13 billion a year. Instead, it is at $46 billion this year—1.7 percent of GDP—and is forecast to rise to $93 billion, or 2.1 percent of GDP, by 2033–34.

Strong company tax revenue helped fund the NDIS without resorting to debt until this year. Deficits will increase as resource prices soften and the cost of the NDIS continues to rise three times faster than inflation.

Australia is a low-debt country. Its net debt of 29 percent of GDP compares with an advanced country average of 91 percent, so it could afford to borrow more. Poland has funded its expanded military with debt: its deficit is expected to reach a perilous 12.5 percent of GDP this year. There is pressure to ease the European Union’s debt rules to help lift defence spending.

There is an argument for borrowing to purchase assets, including defence equipment, the benefits of which will be derived long into the future. In extreme circumstances, debt forms part of the national security equation through the issue of war bonds.

But with the IMF warning that global government debt is becoming a financial powder keg, surpassing US$100 trillion this year, this may be the wrong time to seek the indulgence of financial markets.

The sorry conclusion is that there is no easy way to achieve the sort of increase in the defence budget that President Trump has in mind for US allies, including Australia.

The geopolitics of Australia Day

24 January 2025

The Founding of Australia 1788 was painted in 1937 by Algernon Talmage. It was commissioned for the sesquicentenary celebrations of 1938. The painting depicts the moment that Captain Arthur Phillip proposed a toast to George III on January 26, 1788.

Imagine that this scene never took place. Imagine that the government of William Pitt the Younger decided in 1786 not to send the First Fleet to Botany Bay but instead to the other site for a penal colony that it was considering, Das Voltas Bay in present-day Namibia.

Would the Indigenous people of the Australian continent and their lands have been left undisturbed? Or would Europeans have inevitably arrived at some later point? Instead of a British colony, might several different colonies have been established under Britain, France, The Netherlands and Spain, each of which had, at various times, explored the continent’s coastline and its surrounding seas?

We assume the present was always going to be. That the past was destined to lead to the inevitable present. Counter-factual thinking prompts us to examine alternative historical timelines to better understand the contingent choices, forgotten circumstances and patchwork of occurrences that constitute the history of the present.

Those who consider Australia Day to be ‘invasion day’ have to ask: had the British not arrived in 1788, would there not have been an ‘invasion’ later? It would have been a different ‘invasion’ – possibly less violent, possibly more violent – but nonetheless it still would have led to the dispossession of the Indigenous people. That is not to justify dispossession but to better understand it in historical terms.

Those who celebrate the day have to ask: is the Australia that has emerged across the course of almost 250 years the only possible version of Australia that might have come into being? Might other possibilities have played out?

Instead of Australia as we know it, might several nations today inhabit the continent, each with different histories, national cultures and geopolitical world views and strategic interests?

It is almost certainly the case that in every plausible alternative historical timeline, the land that is known as Australia was always going to be occupied by one or more of the European powers of the 19th century, in some form or another. When, by whom and how is not certain. We will never know because history is run only once.

Had the colony not been established in 1788, it is most likely that Britain would have occupied points on the eastern seaboard of Australia and perhaps on its northern coastline, probably within 50 years.

In this altered timeline, Talmage might well have painted the scene of the establishment of a British base in Sydney in 1838, as the first European settlement on the Australian continent. From that base, Britain could have challenged the Dutch in the East Indies and the Spanish Empire in the Pacific and South America, in the event of a war with either or both.

From Sydney and from other bases in Port Darwin, Singapore (colonised in 1824) and Hong Kong (colonised on January 26, 1841), Britain could have better protected its trade with China, which had to pass through or close to the Dutch East Indies.

In the event of war in the region, British ships sailing to and from China could have been routed around the east of Australia and protected by a Sydney-based fleet.

What of the western and southern seaboards in this altered timeline? Perhaps after the Napoleonic Wars France might have claimed the southwest and southern portions of the continent. In the real historical timeline, France was certainly interested in the possibility.

Concerned about French intentions, in 1825 Britain extended the western edge of its territorial claim to Australia from the 135th meridian to the 129th meridian. Afterwards, it claimed the rest of the continent when it established the colony of Western Australia in 1829. In an altered timeline, imagine the French tricolour being hoisted over the Swan River, perhaps also in 1838, as the British Union Jack was being raised for the first time over Sydney Cove.

Now let us change the timeline again by supposing that no occupation of the Australian continent had occurred in the days of sail. By the 1870s, when steamships were replacing sailing ships, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and when undersea telegraphy cables were being laid around the globe, the strategic value of a continentally sized territory located at the hinge of the Indian and Pacific oceans would have been irresistible to numerous European powers. Locations around the coastline of the Australian continent would have been occupied, if only for the purpose of coaling trading ships and warships, securing telegraph cable connection points and protecting sea routes.

A scramble for Australia might have taken place, as occurred in Africa during the 1880s, when the quest for empire was at its peak, and European powers were seeking to extend their reach to all quarters of the globe for resources, markets, bases and strategic advantage. It would be ahistorical to think the Australian continent would have been left undisturbed. By 1888, it would have been occupied, with its fate and that of its Indigenous people perhaps determined by negotiation among the imperial powers, as occurred in the case of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85.

If we take a step back and consider these alternative timelines, there is a strong case to be made that because settlement began when it did in 1788, Australia’s colonial-era development benefited from the fact it occurred under the protection of British sea power and with access to British capital and markets, when Britain was at the peak of its powers. Settlement in 1788, followed by exclusively British colonisation (and with no other flags flying over the continent), also meant that Australia’s development occurred within a single framework of British institutions – especially parliamentary democracy, responsible government and the common law.

Exclusively British colonisation, and the British territorial clean sweep of the entire continent that was achieved finally by way of the claim in 1829 to the western portion, meant there were no European co-inhabitants.

With no land borders with the colonies of other empires (imagine, for instance, a border on the 129th meridian between British Australia and French Australia), the six colonies were able to pursue political, economic and social development in a stable and peaceful environment, even when one allows for the violence of frontier clashes with Indigenous people. No wars were fought between the European powers on the Australian continent. The colonists did not have to fight for their independence or to create a unified nation.

It is little wonder that Douglas Pike titled his history of Australia, which was first published in 1962, The Quiet Continent.

That Australia is a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation, is a direct legacy of 1788 and Australia’s political development in the 19th century, which of course culminated in Federation in 1901.

Having a single nation on the Australian continent is today a source of geopolitical strength. One might imagine, for instance, the challenge that would be involved today in trying to shape a common defence and foreign policy at an imaginary Council of Australian Governments that was the supranational co-ordinating body for a confederation of four sovereign Australian nations, whose proceedings were conducted in English, French, Dutch and Spanish and whose deliberations were shaped by different and possibly conflicting strategic interests.

For all of its locational advantages, Britain never seriously exploited the strategic value of the Australian continent for the purpose of sea control or indeed for any other related purpose. Australia was never home to a significant British fleet. The closest that British sea power ever came was in the form of the great naval base in Singapore (1919-41) that was designed primarily to protect India against Imperial Japan. Australian governments of the interwar period naively hoped it also would provide for the naval defence of Australia. They were wrong.

Writing in 1883, British historian John Seeley famously said of the expansion of the British Empire that the “mighty diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state” had been undertaken indifferently, so much so that Britain had “conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind”. His point was that while Britain had acquired a great empire, its thinking was still unimaginative, concerned more with the affairs of Europe than with the wider world, where the future would be determined by enormous political aggregations, such as the US and Imperial Russia.

Seeley argued a ‘Greater Britain’, by which he meant a transnational union of Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, could rival these two behemoths. Of course, this never came to pass. Instead, it was Australians themselves who led on local matters of strategy and defence, acting more independently than our national myths would have it.

For instance, in 1883 Queensland annexed New Guinea to thwart Imperial Germany’s interest. The British government disallowed this action, although it did establish a protectorate in New Guinea in 1884 that became a colony in the southeast portion of New Guinea in 1888. It was transferred to Australia in 1902. In 1889, Henry Parkes used a report on the parlous state of the defences of the colonies to drive the strategic case for Federation.

Alfred Deakin championed the building of a powerful Australian navy, for use in the Pacific and the Indian oceans, a cause that was given impetus after the victory of Imperial Japan over Imperial Russia in the war of 1904-05.

Australia attacked the Imperial German base at Rabaul in New Britain in 1914, as part of a broader campaign to force that country’s squadron out of the Pacific. In 1919, Billy Hughes aggressively pursued Australian interests at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, prevailing on winning territorial control over New Guinea.

At least until the 1920s, Australians were more independently minded in strategic and defence affairs than we might think today.

However, and unfortunately, as a result of feeble political leadership in the interwar years, independent Australian thinking was not much in evidence at precisely the time when Australia was coming into its own as vital strategic space – that is, when sea and air power were coming together with the advent of aircraft carriers. As a result, by the time Talmage was painting his scene in 1937, Australia had become geopolitically vital in military terms, as was soon to be seen in the Pacific War.

Imagine in another timeline, where the French tricolour flew over the Swan River, what would have happened had French Australia in 1940 been the dominant power in the southern Indian Ocean? What if French Australia had gone with Vichy after the fall of France in June 1940, as had French Indochina? Britain would not have tolerated the resultant threat to India, Ceylon and Burma. Winston Churchill even might have decided to attack French Australia, probably from the British naval base in Ceylon. He did not shy away from doing so in the case of French Algeria in July 1940 and French West Africa in September 1940.

Today, Australia is one of the most vital strategic spaces on the planet, that being first demonstrated in the Pacific War of 1941-45. Its value as vital space started to be fully realised in the 1960s, with the establishment of US communications, space-based surveillance and intelligence facilities at North West Cape, Pine Gap and Nurrungar.

Today Australia is a bastion and a base at the hinge of the Pacific and Indian oceans, from where power can be projected into the rimlands of the Eurasian supercontinent and from where the Western Pacific and the Indian oceans can be guarded. Any conflict fought in the Indo-Pacific inevitably would involve calculations being made, by all protagonists, about how best to use Australia’s strategic space – and how best to neutralise it.

The “tyranny of distance” is one of the most famous and widely understood concepts in Australian historiography. For Australia, distance from war and conflict was for many years a blessing. It long gave us comfort, until the range of military systems and weapons started to eliminate the protective effects of distance. Imperial Japan’s aircraft carriers were the first to overcome the barrier of distance. Long-range bombers and missiles followed later. Today, we are in range – everywhere, all at once, physically and virtually. The sheltered land of our national imagination is no more.

In Richard III, Richard says: ‘All unavoided is the doom of destiny.’ Australia’s ‘doom of destiny’ is to inhabit vital strategic space, whether we like it or not. Our national imagination, which has deep roots in our colonial past and the long period of the solitude of the ‘quiet continent’, is today too conditioned by the comforting but obsolete notion that distance is our shelter and that troubles are far away. This is a strategic illusion.

Different timelines generate different fates. With a different past, there is a different present. The debate about Australia Day is, at its core, a debate about different pasts. Even if it came to be accepted that dispossession was inevitable – if not in 1788, then certainly by no later than the great European imperialist expansion of the 1880s – counterfactual analysis can still enrich the discussion by casting new light on questions such as why in the real historical timeline there was no sustained process of treaty-making with the Indigenous people, such as occurred in New Zealand. Can we imagine other timelines where sovereignty, land ownership and Indigenous rights were dealt with differently?

Or imagine Phillip had not been sent, and later occupation had been limited to the establishment of trading posts and naval bases around the coastline, with little or no settlement. Is it possible to imagine, in that alternative arc, that enough might have remained of the pre-colonial political, economic and social structures of Indigenous life, such that an independent Indigenous Australia might have emerged as a sovereign nation, as occurred when other colonies such as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and Malaya were granted their independence in the wave of post-war decolonisation?

The semiquincentenary of modern Australia will occur in 2038. The debate about Australia Day no doubt will continue to evolve. One thing about Australia Day is certain. The arc of history has seen Australia emerge and evolve as a single, unified political entity, inhabiting a continent on its own. Geopolitically, this blessing means that Australia, whose territory has been free of great-power conflict and whose people have been able to focus on national development in relative solitude and peace, is today in a position of strength to deal with its looming “doom of destiny”. History’s other arcs would have left us worse off.

That is worth celebrating on Australia Day.

From the bookshelf: ‘Who Will Defend Europe?’

14 November 2024

Despite frequent US calls for NATO to lift defence spending, most of its European members kept pocketing a peace dividend in recent years by running down their armed forces and defence industries. They imagined that war would never return to Europe and that in any event they could rely on the US to defend them.

Both assumptions were illusory, as Keir Giles argues in a new book, Who Will Defend Europe? Giles is a senior fellow at Chatham House and director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre. He has been an active and prescient analyst of Russia, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, notably in his books Moscow Rules and Russia’s War on Everybody.

As Giles notes, many commentators argue that Russia can no longer be considered a major security threat. It has not been able to achieve its ambitious goal of conquering Ukraine despite its size advantage and has lost enormous numbers of troops and military equipment.

But this viewpoint is shortsighted, writes Giles. Russia has built back its land forces, offsetting losses. The rest of Russia’s military—its air force, navy and nuclear forces—is relatively unscathed. When hostilities come to a halt, Russia will be able to quickly rebuild its military for more adventurism. Indeed, according to off-the-record interviews with European defence and intelligence chiefs that Giles conducted, Russia will be preparing for its next attack on a European NATO member country in the coming few years.

The enormous challenge of countering Russia beyond the traditional battlefield was also highlighted by British MI5 Director General Ken McCallum in a recent speech, when he said: ‘While the Russian military grinds away on the battlefield, at horrendous human cost, we’re also seeing Putin’s henchmen seeking to strike elsewhere, in the misguided hope of weakening Western resolve.’ He said Russia ‘is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more.’

Writing before the 5 November presidential election, Giles says that, regardless of the results, the US will likely be less committed to defending NATO’s European members. Through the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, it is apparent that the US is more committed to defending Israel than Ukraine, with fewer restrictions being placed on Israel’s use of American military equipment. US military leaders in the Indo-Pacific are also competing with NATO for resources as they consider the possibility of a conflict with China in 2027, widely deemed to be a greater priority than Europe.

Ukraine is a shield holding back Russian aggression from Europe, writes Giles, but European reactions are quite diverse. Frontline states such as Poland and Finland are taking the Russian challenge seriously and ramping up defence expenditure. Germany has announced a major increase in defence spending, but it will take a long time for this to translate into improved capabilities. Moreover, while most European NATO countries are now aiming to achieve the organisation’s defence spending target of 2 percent of GDP, it seems that much higher contributions will be necessary.

Giles is rather despondent about the state of the military in Britain, his home country, where it seems to be in a shambles. While the new Labour government’s strategic defence review is welcome, conducting it postpones the timing of reform of the military by one year, and the government has announced that it will not be increasing defence spending.

Another area of concern is Giles’ perception that, because of their soft and comfortable lifestyle, Britons may not come together to defend its nation and values, as it did during World War II. While the same concern would apply to some other European countries, the need to defend your country and values is a relatively easy sell in Sweden, Finland and Poland.

Giles also laments the reluctance of some leaders to speak openly about the gravity of Europe’s security situation. Most European economic and political systems have not woken up to the threat, or if they have, they are not doing anything about it. European populations are mostly unaware of threats to their countries’ security.

Overall, Who Will Defend Europe? is a well-written book, offering detailed insights and perspectives on the gravity of Europe’s security situation, which will have spillover effects worldwide.

Making the AUKUS partners interchangeable takes a defence ecosystem

25 October 2024

To make the AUKUS partnership successful, the three partner nations will need to shift, as Defence Minister Richard Marles said in a speech in 2022, from interoperability to interchangeability.

Interchangeability goes beyond the ability to operate together; it means components and systems from different manufacturers and countries can be effortlessly swapped and integrated. It means any capability acquired by one of the AUKUS partners can be seamlessly introduced into service and operated by the others.

And to achieve this, we need our defence industrial bases to become a well-functioning ecosystem. Defence firms need to work closely with their defence departments and capability organisations and engage with universities and one another. This applies to primes and to small and medium enterprises.

Moving from interoperability to interchangeability is not a distant aspiration; it is an immediate necessity. By adopting an ecosystem approach, reforming export controls, and empowering our workforce, we can forge a defence industrial base that is both resilient and flexible.

Take for example, nuclear powered submarines (SSNs). Our firm, QinetiQ, leads on the test and evaluation and operational assurance of British submarines, and our ranges and skills are being adapted to also provide UK regional assurance for visiting United States SSNs and, eventually, Australia’s.

This can accelerate Australia’s acquisition of capabilities in test and evaluation and in training and mission rehearsal—not only for Australian SSNs but also to enhance interoperability for each nation’s SSN deterrence capabilities.

We recently announced the formation of Team TECSA, a collaborative initiative bringing together industry and academia to address Australia’s requirement for test and evaluation, certification and systems assurance.

This task is beyond the capacity of any single company, making collaboration across the entire defence ecosystem essential.

Interchangeability also raises the question of where we can augment our supply chains and create efficiencies. The progress made in the guided weapons and explosive ordinance enterprise is an example of establishing Australia as a reliable second source for critical munitions.

There are also opportunities in critical minerals, quantum computing, AI and in vital components as diverse as ball bearings and rocket motors.

In the same way that Australia has been a major beneficiary and a key market for the US defence industry, opportunities are emerging for Australian businesses to play a bigger role in supporting US defence production.

Take for example, the Australian Department of Defence’s Global Supply Chain (GSC) initiative. In the past, Australian companies were able to access niche opportunities in the US. Under AUKUS, the objective is to seamlessly integrate Australian industrial knowhow into a common market.

We are talking about a new wave of opportunity for Australian businesses that is unprecedented.

A critical enabler of this vision is export control reform. Export controls serve as the rules of engagement in our industry, ensuring that technology and information flow securely and responsibly across borders. Reforming these controls is crucial to facilitate true industry interoperability.

By harmonising export regulations, we create an environment in which defence partners can share technology and collaborate without unnecessary barriers. This reform not only strengthens alliances but also accelerates innovation by providing access to a broader range of resources and expertise.

Much progress has been accomplished since Marles’s declaration of intent two years ago. These reforms are the foundations of our enhanced partnership. They form the high external walls needed to protect the most sensitive information and technology that is the lifeblood of our sector and lower the internal walls to foster co-operation and innovation.

There is still work ahead of us to realise the aspiration for an AUKUS defence industry free-trade zone, allowing for seamless collaboration by commercial, industrial and research entities from all three nations.

None of these advances can happen without addressing our most valuable asset—our workforce.

Our people are the driving force behind innovation and transformation. To achieve interchangeability, we must harness their full potential and address the gaps in skills and capabilities.

Fostering the best possible talent pipeline is not solely the job of our governments.

It requires policymakers, defence forces, industry, universities and unions to do their part.

QinetiQ runs a sovereign skills program that transfers our employees from Australia to Britain to participate in live test and evaluation environments. This knowledge transfer ensures our employees learn about QinetiQ’s global test and evaluation and threat mission rehearsal capabilities so that they return to provide the skills needed to meet Australia’s defence priorities.

By investing in training programs and cross-border collaborations, the defence industry can ensure that our workforce is equipped to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. This exchange of expertise enriches our collective knowledge base, making us more adaptable and proficient.

A world where defence equipment can be quickly adapted to meet the evolving demands of modern warfare, regardless of its origin, requires us to transcend traditional boundaries. It demands open standards, common platforms and aligned objectives across nations.

This is no longer about competition between our countries; instead, it is about ensuring that the sum of our parts is greater than if we acted alone. Our strategic circumstances demand this new approach.

It’s a national priority: get more labour into the Northern Territory

14 April 2024

Skilled and unskilled labour is already scarce in the Northern Territory construction-project sector, and it will soon get scarcer. With the Australian and US defence departments well into upgrading bases in the territory, two big gas projects are also about to go ahead.

Immediate action is needed to alleviate the Northern Territory construction-labour shortage. The rest of Australia is hardly in a position to supply the people, so we must accelerate arrivals of foreign workers and train more apprentices in the territory.

The largest Defence projects are upgrades of Royal Australian Air Force base Tindal, near Katherine, and RAAF Darwin, both partly to meet US requirements and partly paid for by the United States. Australia’s Defence Strategic Review of 2023 called for an urgent program to improve the readiness and robustness of bases across northern Australia and on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, so more defence projects are coming to the territory soon, putting yet more pressure on its constructor sector.

Meanwhile, Santos is going ahead with development of the Barossa gas fields off the Northern Territory coast, with construction due to begin as soon as possible, while work on the Beetaloo Basin coal-seam gas project of Empire Energy, 500km south of Darwin, is expected to begin this year. Both are very large gas deposits and will feed demand in Australia and Northeast Asia.

The territory has often been through booms and busts, but coming under pressure to simultaneously support two huge natural-resources projects and also several large-scale defence developments is unprecedented. Tradespeople and unskilled staff, especially, will become extremely hard to find.

The existing shortage of skilled and unskilled labour in the territory has already caused significant delays to the work at Tindal.

Many of the skilled workers at the gas projects will probably come from elsewhere in Australia, employed under fly-in, fly-out arrangements. But that’s hardly a complete solution, because most of the rest of the country is also suffering a shortage of building workers amid extensive infrastructure construction projects, notably for wind and solar electricity generation and railways.

For the Northern Territory, coordinated action is needed. To work through solutions to the problem, the territory government and Defence must bring together the resources and heavy construction firms, the federal departments responsible for home affairs and energy, and relevant territory agencies.

The fastest possible measure is to accelerate unskilled migration from Papua New Guinea, Pacific island countries and Indonesia. All of those nations have significant pools of unskilled labour and are looking for employment for their people. Providing job opportunities in the Northern Territory would have the side benefit of strengthening economic and personal links between those countries and Australia at a time when China is competing for regional influence.

Labour mobility schemes are hardly new: sugar cane and fruit growers in Queensland have successfully employed Pacific Islanders for many years. The federal government could adapt such existing programs as the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme to help supply the Northern Territory with workers.

Meanwhile, training of apprentices in the Northern Territory must be expanded. Since completion of a construction-sector apprenticeship typically takes at least two years, action is needed now to expand and strengthen the territory’s apprenticeship recruitment and training programs.

Australia can also consider increased use of foreign construction companies in the Northern Territory. They would act as subcontractors to Australian firms.

Delaying some of the defence and resources projects is not an option. The Defence Strategic Review is emphatic on the need to move quickly in reinforcing bases to meet Australian’s defence needs, and the facilities play key roles in the United States’ efforts to strengthen its military position in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, development of the gas fields has enormous economic importance to the Northern Territory and indeed the whole country.

So it all comes down to getting more skilled and unskilled labour into the Northern Territory quickly, before all of the projects are adversely affected. It’s a national priority, and there’s no time to lose.

Former defence minister: there’s broad support in the region for Australian submarines

21 March 2024

While helping negotiate the AUKUS agreement with the United States and Britain as defence minister in 2021, Peter Dutton regarded claims that Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) would contribute to a regional arms race as ‘nonsensical’.

And Dutton, now opposition leader, says regional leaders privately supported Australia’s decision to procure the conventionally-armed SSNs. ‘All of them, frankly, in private, are supportive of Australia’s position, and I think we should take comfort from that,’ Dutton tells former ASPI executive director Peter Jennings in a video interview as part of ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series. The interview took place when Dutton was seven months into his role as defence minister in Scott Morrison’s government.

‘They want stability in our region,’ he says. ‘They’re enjoying relative economic success today, stability in their own countries because people are being lifted from poverty, they are joining the middle class. There’s a period of stability that hasn’t been possible since the Second World War, or in the case of Vietnam since the Vietnam War, or on the [Korean] Peninsula since conflict there. And they want that to enjoy, as we do.’

Clearly caught by surprise at the time of the initial AUKUS discussions, some regional nations then expressed strong concern about the SSN agreement.

To put AUKUS into context, Dutton says that every 18 months China is pumping out, on average, naval tonnage greater than the entire British fleet.

Dutton was defence minister from March 2021 to May 2022. He says in the interview he wants to see rapid acquisition of equipment the ADF needs including the intellectual property for Australia to manufacture missiles. And he wants to ensure the presence in the Indo-Pacific of forces from those partners.

‘It was a natural go-to for us because of the interoperability between the three partners, and it builds off the Five Eyes relationship and the trust, the established systems of information and intelligence sharing, joint operations and exercises.’

AUKUS also includes space and cyber. ‘I see the cyber effort as paramount for us because, regardless of what happens in relation to Taiwan, China will continue her grey zone activities. And there will be the continued attacks, the theft of IP from our system, the targeting of people within the defence supply chain.’

Tangible gains from AUKUS will include both offensive and defensive technology with much more on quantum and underwater capabilities, investment across the top of Australia, and the jobs that go with maintenance and sustainment in Australia, Dutton says.

Acquiring eight SSNs is part of a strategy of deterrence and the buildup to the defence of the homeland. ‘We’ve not had to think about that since the 1940s. And we’ve got ourselves on a track where there’s greater capacity to defend ourselves, but to provide deterrence before we got to that point of extremis.’

Rapidly building the skills to safely operate the SNNs is incredibly important, Dutton says, but it’s not going to happen overnight. ‘The US is very serious about nuclear stewardship. The UK has had this capability since the mid-1950s, and they’re still learning through the course of the different iterations, different blocks, and the different platforms that they’ve delivered.’ The US does not want an accident, and the UK had not suffered one. ‘We’re not going to either’, he says. Establishing those foundation stones is incredibly important to the Americans, and to Australia.

Jennings notes that defence is a challenging portfolio renowned for its high workload. Dutton describes the grueling pace in Canberra and constant meetings with figures such as the chief of the ADF and the service chiefs, briefings from the department and agencies including the Australian Signals Directorate, and documents needing to be signed urgently.

The lack of time to read everything he’d like to is a frustration,’ Dutton says. The day is scripted through the diary from a very early day to a late finish. ‘But, ultimately, it’s about a bigger purpose and you do get a lot of satisfaction.’

Dutton says Defence is ‘an incredible beast’. A former department secretary once confided in him that it was ‘sort of bovine-like—you can lead it to a certain extent, but don’t get behind and start pushing because it’ll react violently’. It’s like anything in politics, he says. ‘The art of the possible and try to nuance the outcome that you want. Sometimes you need to be more direct if you’re frustrated with the processes.’

A big part of the job is to keep the paperwork moving and keep strict discipline on the department to bring correspondence up in a timely way, says Dutton. ‘I want my advisors to deal with it in a timely way, and that obviously imposes the same obligation on me. In some portfolios, I think ministers sit on briefs or they take forever to process.’ That’s not good management, he says.

As a department, Defence can be slow, says Dutton but on operations it can move quickly, and it knows its business very well.

He cites the evacuation of more than 4000 Afghans from Kabul airport in August 2021.

‘I was inspired by the acts of bravery on the ground,’ he says. ‘Many of our people went into harm’s way to help women and children, in particular, find their way onto our C-17s. Quite remarkable people, really.

‘The skill and the expertise of the SAS and other highly trained ADF personnel, the way they worked with their partners, the way we lent assistance to the Brits to uplift some of their people and their assets, the way we helped other countries, that they helped us.’

Dutton says the operation reinforced relationships built up over many years and that’s under-recognised ADF activity. ‘The joint training exercises, the postings, the people-to-people links that mean in these times of adversity, if one of our planes is inoperable, unserviceable, we can go to the Canadians, and they to us, without any hesitation.’

There were constant discussions with ADF chiefs, the foreign minister, the prime minister and the ASIS intelligence agency about people needing rescue including those who ‘had provided assistance to us or had collected intelligence for us who were beyond the wire and how we were going to bring those people in.’

That so many were rescued was remarkable, Dutton says, and Australia should be proud.

Ultimately, none of it would’ve been possible without the United States. No other country could have held Kabul Airport for even a day. ‘And as tragic as the circumstance was, particularly the opening scenes of people clinging to that aircraft, it was the best outcome that we could have hoped for in those circumstances for our country and for our partners.’

Dutton says Defence is steeped in history and the nation benefits from its experience. ‘But, in some cases, there’s an aversion to risk. There’s an adherence to hierarchical structures.’ There are good reasons for that, he says, but it can lead to frustration in terms of timelines and the responses and a danger of becoming bogged down in process. ‘And so, I think you’ve got to make your ground rules clear very early on as to the timeliness and how you want things responded to.

‘But they’re dealing with a lot of money and there’s a lot at stake in terms of protection of our own people. So, obviously, there’s a process to get go through and people are very mindful of that. If there’s a frustration, it’s the drawn-out response times, which I would like to see sharpened up.’

That said, within the department and the uniformed ADF there’s a desire to listen to the government’s agenda and to implement it.

On possible threats to Australia, Dutton says President Xi Jinping and others in China’s Communist Party have been very clear about their intentions for Taiwan. China has also been involved in land border clashes with India. Japan has faced daily intimidation by Chinese military personnel in coast guard uniforms. Other nations, including Australia, face economic coercion when China stops importing certain commodities. Others face corrupt practices in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

‘We want to be a great trading partner and friend with China. We want to continue that relationship. But the cyber attacks and the foreign interference, the attempts to interfere with democratic processes—all of that is not the act of a friend.’

‘We want to see China continue to grow, people to enjoy prosperity, and we don’t seek conflict with China. We never have, and we never will. But if there’s an attack on Taiwan, if there’s an escalation in the East China Sea of tensions there that result in, deliberate or otherwise, escalation of some sort of conflict, then that could well be a reality. And we need to be honest and open and frank about that. And I think the Australian public has a greater level of awareness now than perhaps they have for a long period of time about the direction now.’

Allowing China to take Taiwan by force would see a domino effect and a shift in world power, Dutton says. Australia would be quickly isolated.

ASPI’s ‘Lessons in leadership’ series has been produced with the support of Lockheed Martin Australia.