‘Cross between a damp squib and a huge con job’

Greg Sheridan says the Albanese government will have gone an entire term in Government without producing any significant increase in Australian naval capability.

The Albanese government’s surface fleet plans are a dismal cross between a damp squib and a routine government defence con job.

As predicted, the announcement from Defence Minister Richard Marles offers almost no new money and no immediate acquisition of new capabilities, but abounds in grandiloquent promises for the unaccountable distant future.

Here are a few central facts. The government is dividing the surface fleet into tier 1 ships, tier 2 ships and others. The bottom line is we don’t get a new tier 1 surface combatant ship until the first of the Hunter-class frigates arrives at the now delayed date of 2034.

As everyone has commented, the Hunter frigates, with just 32 vertical launch system cells, are radically under-gunned for modern warfare. Then we build six of these under-gunned behemoths so we don’t actually get a new version of a destroyer with a lot of vertical launch cells until after the sixth Hunter frigate is built and deployed – in other words, well into the 2040s.

A Hunter Class frigate.

But, the government says, we are producing up to 11 general purpose frigates that will have lots of missiles. That, of course, is a good thing … as far as it goes.

The government is already classifying these as tier 2 vessels. In what it will market as an act of tremendous political bravery, the government says the first few of these can be built off shore by the nation that gets the contract.

In one sense, thank God for small mercies. But this is a very small mercy. These general purpose frigates do not yet exist, even in theory. They will have to be designed from scratch. We will no doubt add the usual crippling array of bespoke requirements. There will be a competitive tender. This will go over time. The whole process will take years.

But if this, uniquely in our recent defence history, all goes perfectly well, the government believes it could have four of these vessels in service by 2034.

Let’s remember, every other project we’ve done has seen massive cost blowouts and delays.

Only in Australia could a process like that be described as buying something off the shelf.

And let’s examine the empirical evidence for the delivery of grand defence visions.

In 2009, the Rudd government delivered a defence white paper which said that as a matter of extreme urgency Australia needed to acquire 12 regionally superior conventional submarines.

Here we are in 2024, 15 years later, still without a contract to build a single submarine, and only a fairly provisional and unsure agreement that we might buy one from the Americans in a decade.

The Albanese government will have gone an entire term in government without producing any significant increase in Australian naval capability. And indeed there will be no such increase, almost for sure, for the rest of this decade.

This is our response to the most dangerous strategic circumstances in 80 years?

The cost blowout in the Hunter frigates of $20bn, which might have moved a prudent government to scrap that program and actually buy some real frigates off the shelf, is mainly costs that have arisen over the past two years.

Who can imagine that the piddling bits of money the government has announced over the forward estimates will be enough to produce the entirely notional general purpose frigates?

As for the government’s bigger funding commitments over 10 years, that’s all meaningless. Neither Anthony Albanese nor Marles will be in their current positions in 10 years.

It’s an old, old trick for governments to announce fantastic defence capabilities in a decade or more into the future and seek to give themselves massive political rewards in the mean time. It’s still a con job.