Defence White Paper author Paul Dibb says threats to Australia are real, serious and urgent

Australia faces a threat which has not been seen in 80 years, which will force us to change our defence weaponry and strategy, a former top defence, security and spy boss has revealed.

Australia faces a threat the likes of which has not been seen for more than 80 years, the architect of Defence’s national security blueprint for the last four decades has warned.

Former Defence Intelligence Organisation director and deputy secretary for Defence’s strategy and intelligence Paul Dibb said 35 years ago when he authored the Defence White Paper 1987 the threats were minimal.

But he said Australia’s security outlook had worsened substantially and the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) 2023 was more important than anything he had ever produced or had been done since.

Speaking on the eve of the DSR’s release, he said China’s expansion in the South China Sea, overt aggression toward Taiwan and push into the Pacific threatened to destabilise the region and throw Australia into a vulnerable position.

Former top defence, security and spy Paul Dibb speaking about the implications of Russia's war with Ukraine at the National Press Club in Canberra last year. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The DSR will making sweeping reforms to national security and defence and including a shopping list of an arsenal of drones and missiles, new ships and other long-range weaponry.

It was Dibb’s White Paper 1987 that stated Australia had a warning time in advance of conflict of at least 10 years and he now said the notion clearly no longer existed.

The Defence Strategic Review 2023 will be the most significant military document since the then ground breaking Defence White Paper 1987. Picture: Department of Defence

“The Defence Strategic Review is infinitely more serious and infinitely more urgent than what I faced,” Prof Dibb, now emeritusprofessor at the Australian National University, said.

“We need to prepare … you and I know we face a potential threat from a country starting with C and ending with a and it’s not Cambodia or Canada. It is crucial and absolutely essential, we have not faced a potential threat like this since the Second World War. It’s just as plain and vital and means we really have to get a wriggle on and I would be disappointed if we are now going to get bogged down in acquiring these advanced platforms when the real urgency is to fix something up; short term is to buy lots and lots of long-range strike missiles from whatever launchers we can put them into.”

He noted the Army has long needed to evolve in their mission brief and said a future conflict would be a largely maritime-based contest.

Last month it was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who cited the DSR as being the most critical to Australia’s national defences since the 1987 Dibb report.

Prof Dibb said in his sealed section of his 1987 review the only threat to Australia was a Russian nuclear strike on the joint US-Australian operations of Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape spy base or Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt as it is now known.

He also pushed for defence spending to rise to 3 per cent of GDP.

Paul Dibb, Deputy Secretary of Defence (Strategy and Intelligence), in his office circa the time of the writing of the White Paper 1987

“I knew they were Soviet nuclear targets because they told me so but there was no Asian country capable of directly attacking us – not China, not India, not Japan,” he said.

“We worried in the classified version about a renewal of Indonesia that we experienced in Konfrontasi (Indonesian Confrontation) in the mid 1960s when Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world, it was armed by the Soviet Union with better jet fighters than ours, better bombers than ours and submarines which we then didn’t have … but even I could see it would have to take a significant change in attitude by Indonesians for anything to come from it and Sukarno had been defeated, Suharto was pro western. Now it’s very different.”