Peter Dutton, more than Anthony Albanese, faces a critical moment of truth this week.
In his budget reply speech on Thursday, Dutton must commit to increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP within one parliamentary term or, sadly for us, we’ll have to conclude the Liberals are nearly as flaky and hopeless on defence as the Albanese government.
My colleague Paul Kelly recently asked: What are the Liberals actually offering in terms of reform and substance at this election? Nowhere is this question more urgent than defence.
This entire term, the Dutton opposition has criticised Labor for military cutbacks, but not given any commitments of its own.
This was partly remedied when the Coalition announced it would buy a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, and commit at least $3bn extra to that end. That’s a good, long-overdue decision. But it’s one small part of the bare minimum.
The opposition didn’t even make it clear that this means a substantially bigger air force, though that’s the case. The new F-35s won’t lead to the retirement of the Super Hornets squadron. The air force will expand from four squadrons to five. Dutton, Andrew Hastie, Sussan Ley and David Littleproud should be shouting this from the rooftops. Instead they don’t seem to have understood its significance themselves.
Dutton has been tongue-tied on what Lenin rightly judged the only question that matters: What is to be done? The Libs have made no case for specific defence capabilities. Dutton must commit to immediately raising defence spending from its paltry 2 per cent of GDP to at least 2.5 per cent within three years, and 3 per cent by the middle of a second term. Media reports suggest the Liberals are thinking of 2.5 per cent by 2029. That’s an unbelievable, pathetic fudge, which would demonstrate the Liberals are not much better than Labor.
The Albanese/Marles fantasy commitment is to raise the defence budget to a dismal 2.33 per cent of GDP by 2032-33. Some 2.5 per cent by 2029 is so little different as to be meaningless. More importantly, by running beyond one parliamentary term, with money doubtless back-loaded to the end of the forward estimates, the Liberals would continue the Albanese/Marles practice of monstrous defence funding fudges, worthless commitments beyond electorally meaningful time frames.
The bulk of Marles’ claimed defence spending increases are in the distant future. ABC interviewers are utterly clueless in letting him get away with claiming future daydreams as though he’s taking action today. If the Liberals don’t commit to 2.5 per cent inside one term, they’re as big a fraud as Labor.
The Liberals have been crippled on defence policy for four reasons. The shadow cabinet is deeply divided. Free-market dogma is gravely misapplied to the strategic situation. The Coalition can’t work out how to deal with its own appalling defence record over 10 years in government. And for all its talk, it doesn’t yet seem to really take the strategic crisis seriously.
Dutton, Marles and others routinely say these are our most dangerous strategic circumstances since World War II. This is now the strategic welcome to country ceremony, a vague theological ritual with no meaning or consequence in the real world.
Coalition free-market types are already unhappy with Dutton’s free-spending ways. They don’t want more money for defence, on top of Dutton’s efforts to match almost all Labor’s profligate social spending.
The free-market types have got defence badly wrong for a long time. They tend to think fuel security, supply chain security and a merchant fleet that a government could command in a national emergency are a big waste of money because markets provide these things more cheaply.
Given that their main interpretative tool for political analysis is money, they can’t believe international actors will allow the market to be fundamentally disrupted. They still think market considerations guarantee no serious conflict with China. They also privately hold, very conveniently, that Australia can’t actually do anything significant to provide for its own defence.
They’re dead wrong on all these propositions, of course, and deeply unhistoric.
They also believe Defence spends money so incompetently it shouldn’t get any more.
It’s true Australian defence is staggeringly wasteful and inefficient. But a government must provide for national security straight away. The Liberals must change the nature of Defence. That surely means changing the leadership of Defence. On all of this we hear nothing from the Liberals except cliches.
We desperately need to fix and increase our defence effort. China’s militarisation and regional assertiveness grow by the day. The Trump administration has made it clear old US security guarantees can no longer be taken for granted and that allies must make a serious effort in their own defence. Yet in 2023-24 our defence budget was a dismal 1.99 per cent of GDP. The Australian Defence Force has atrophied to a pitiful state.
We have faux-passionate, utterly meaningless defence debates – will we send peacekeepers to Ukraine – to avoid having the real, hard debates on the need to rapidly acquire deterrent capability. AUKUS itself is a sideshow beside the urgent need to create an ADF with serious deterrent power, an issue neither side of politics engages substantially or honestly.
No one could accuse this column of being soft on the Albanese government on defence. But almost every criticism it makes of its Liberal predecessors is true. The Liberals in 2013 inherited a shocking defence budget from Labor of just 1.56 per cent of GDP. Over 10 years – 10 years! – the Coalition increased that to 2 per cent. An increase of 0.44 per cent of GDP over a decade is just about as slow and hopeless a record as the Albanese government’s performance now.
When Scott Morrison announced AUKUS he didn’t tell the Australian people that in order to buy nuclear submarines and simultaneously develop a credible defence force we would need to raise defence spending to at least 3 per cent of GDP.
Indeed, when the Coalition lost office its plans were for the first nuclear submarine to appear in the 2040s and navy officers were briefing Senate estimates that the Collins-class subs could have not one but two successive life of type extensions. The current shambles in the LOTE program reflects on both the Albanese government and the governments that preceded it.
Morrison should have made Jim Molan defence minister and Mike Pezzullo secretary of the Defence Department. That might have got results.
But the Liberals were scared of Molan’s honesty, passion and commitment, and treated him appallingly. The Liberals produced poor defence results. Only rhetoric and politics were strong.
Dutton’s brand is security. He must stand for something. The nation desperately needs powerful defence forces.
There are billions needed straight away just getting the ADF deployable again. Then there’s missile defence, new surface ships, massive work on drones and missiles, supply ships, countermining ships and much, much else.
These require genuinely tough decisions. Left-wing British socialist Prime Minister Keir Starmer took 0.2 per cent of GDP, real money today, away from the aid budget to immediately increase defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP (a minister resigned in protest).
Dutton must care as much about Australian security as Starmer cares about British security. If he doesn’t, the case on defence policy for voting Liberal is very feeble.
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