Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles publicly disclose the equipment mess in Australian defence: Robert Gottliebsen

In separate statements, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles have now truthfully disclosed to the public the equipment mess in Australian defence.

For Australia to have outlaid huge sums on defence equipment and made so many mistakes is surely one of our great national scandals, albeit no surprise to readers of The Australian, including my commentaries.

Albanese and Marles placed the whole blame on the Morrison government. While the Coalition governments, under defence ministers prior to Peter Dutton, must accept a chunk of the blame, there are much deeper causes.

If those causes are not isolated and corrected, we will simply repeat the past mistakes in coming decades.

Meanwhile, commentators pinpointing our defence equipment mess do not have the same impact as ministers of the crown confessing that while China has been skilfully building up it’s military over the last two decades, we have been pouring vast sums down the defence drain.

China was well aware of our mistakes and I suspect this led to China’s lack of respect for Australia and perhaps contributed to the trade embargoes

Albanese told The Australian that our defence preparedness is better equipped to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq than defend the nation. We will need drones missiles and missile defence systems urgently.

The Marles’ revelations came in the parliament and were even more critical than his Prime Minister.

Marles revealed that Australia has 28 different programs that are running a total of 97 years overtime

Australia’s frigates are four years late and $15bn over budget; the Spartan battlefield aircraft is four years late and unable to fly into a battlefield; offshore patrol vessels are a year late “and that’s before we even start talking about submarines”, Marles told the parliament.

But Marles did not mention arguably the biggest mistake of all — the Joint Strike Fighter -F-35. Marles loves to point out that in the nine Coalition years, Australia had six different defence ministers at a time when we were facing the most precarious strategic circumstances since the Second World War. But leaving aside Dutton and Marles, Australia has not had a really top defence minister since Kim Beazley stepped down in 1990

Australia’s defence blunders can be traced back to 1999 when the then Defence Minister John Moore sacked the head of the department Paul Barrett. Some years earlier, Barrett had been attracted back to the public service by Prime Minister John Howard, who wanted to improve public service talent.

The Barrett affair sent a message through the Australian public service that defence was a department you should avoid. While we promoted excellent fighting people, the department did not attract forward thinkers who could make and administer big equipment decisions.

In that environment, the 1999 Public Service Act, which signalled greater ministerial roles in decision-making, therefore set Australia on a dangerous path.

Marles has appointed former defence chief Angus Houston and former defence minister Stephen Smith to inquire into what went wrong. Hopefully they will not simply turn their inquiry into a Coalition bashing exercise, albeit that the coalition perform badly in defence.

They need to go back further and isolate those early warning signs, which will not be easy because they both had personal involvement

For example, Angus Houston was deeply involved in the JSF-F35 aircraft purchase, which was then also supported by the government. Around 2001 the US was considering an expanded role for the F-22, but we chose the high risk JSF-F35, which is still plagued with countless problems. While the JSF-F35 may serve some purpose in future air defence, the ambitious aims that came in the 2002 decision to join the program were never realised. The 2002 decision did not contain I clear exit timeline. But Smith, as a later defence minister, could have pulled the plug, but he didn’t.

As occurred in so many defence purchase decisions over the last two decades, politics was deeply involved. In the JSF-F35, the influence of the major contractor Lockheed Martin played a huge role in the US.

The Australian parliament was not told the full truth many times about the progress of the aircraft, and that practice became almost a defence tradition covering many equipment areas.

The good news for Australia is that thanks to the “events” in the previous defence minister’s office, Peter Dutton took over as defence minister in March 2021 and tackled the submarine disaster and created the AUKUS nuclear submarine project and invigorated the QUAD alliance.

While Marles is critical of the Coalition he took those two Dutton initiatives to the next stage and showed the US, the UK and the region that while Australia might have domestic political issues, when it comes to defence, both major parties are headed in the same direction.

And Marles is now setting out that defence purchases must be seen as major undertakings and must have “objective criteria metrics” and proper reporting systems – exactly what has been missing for two decades.

And we also need to recognise that managing major defence projects requires very different skills to those used on the battlefield.