The scale of the debacle surrounding China’s live weapons drills in the Tasman Sea was laid bare this week, not by the opposition or the government but by Greens Senator David Shoebridge.
“I’m trying to work out how it is with a $55.7bn budget, we find out from a Virgin pilot and a delayed notification from New Zealand,” he told Senate estimates on Wednesday.
Shoebridge, despite his political stripe, is well informed on defence matters. His brother, Michael Shoebridge, is a former Defence official and a noted security analyst.
His point was well made. For all the billions taxpayers have poured into exquisite military capabilities, the Australian Defence Force only learned about Friday’s live weapons drill second-hand and after the fact.
Defence Minister Richard Marles says there has been “unprecedented surveillance” of the three Chinese warships that have lurked off Australia’s coast for more than a fortnight.
If that’s the case, why was Australia happy to hive off its some of monitoring of the Chinese warships to New Zealand, which notified Australia of the live fire drill 90 minutes after it began?
And why wasn’t an RAAF surveillance aircraft in the area to hear the Chinese radio warning which was picked up by a Virgin pilot and relayed to Defence 40 minutes after the exercise window opened?
Anthony Albanese’s response to the drill says a lot about his lack of attention to detail and the political strife it gets him in.
He claimed that China provided notice of the drill “in accordance with practice”, when it provided no advance warning at all.
And he wrongly claimed the alert from the New Zealand frigate shadowing the Chinese flotilla was received by Australia “at around the same time” as the Virgin pilot’s notification to Airservices Australia. In fact, the warning came through 50 minutes later.
His looseness on such a serious matter should send shivers down the spines of his colleagues given an election announcement is imminent.
The Coalition has seized on the inconsistencies, accusing Albanese of misleading the public and being “weak” on matters of national security.
Penny Wong was sent in to clean up the mess on Thursday, applying her trademark indignation to accuse the Coalition of politicising the episode.
“What Australians don’t want in the face of these circumstances is reckless political games from people who claim to be leaders,” she said.
But her intervention was as political as those of the opposition, and its forcefulness a reflection of the coming federal poll.
China’s leaders in Beijing must be patting themselves on the back at the merry hell their warships have created while adhering to the letter of international law. This of course was their aim all along.
As Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty told Senate estimates: “The Chinese are signalling. They are practising and rehearsing, and they are collecting (intelligence).”
The presence in the naval task force of one of China’s most formidable vessels, a Renhai cruiser with more than double the firepower of any of Australia’s warships, was designed to send a message to Australia about the nation’s vulnerability.
This is Beijing saying, “We can hit your biggest east coast cities”.
The takeaway for Australia is we are completely unprepared to counter China’s powerful bluewater navy, not to mention its long-range missiles, despite record levels of defence spending.
The navy’s Collins-class submarines are old and unreliable. Its workhorse Anzac frigates are tired and in need of replacement, but the first of nine new general purpose frigates won’t be delivered until the end of the decade.
The botched Hunter-class frigates program won’t produce a ship until the early 2030s, and AUKUS may or may not deliver Australia a nuclear-powered submarine from the early 2030s.
Meanwhile, investments in missile defence have been downgraded and the ADF has virtually no lethal drones.
Defence officials should hang their heads in shame that the ADF is in such a poor state that it couldn’t even keep on top of the activities of three Chinese ships between Australia and New Zealand.
Senior Labor and Coalition figures should join them, having failed to renew the force sufficiently over the course of successive governments.
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