The pantomime make believe of the Albanese government’s defence policy was laid bare in a fun filled fantasy speech by Defence Industry Minister, Pat Conroy, at the National Press Club.
Once more the minister solemnly warned us that: “this is Australia’s most challenging strategic environment since the Second World War.”
Consequently, he said, “Australia’s 10-year warning time has evaporated, just as it had in the mid-1930s.”
Then he spent the entire speech on the nuclear powered submarines Australia is notionally going to acquire. But even if, miraculously, everything goes exactly to plan, we don’t get even the first of those for ten years. In that decade we get no new surface combatant ship, no new missiles on the Collins subs, no new air combat fast jets.
So he Government proclaims the end of the ten year warning period, then predicates its entire defence capability program on the assumption we don’t need any extra fire power for ten years.
If you’re confused, you’re not as confused as the Government.
Conroy’s speech was entirely about nuclear submarines and projected a tone of urgency and gravitas. The figures sound impressive, hundreds of billions of dollars, 20,000 jobs.
But it’s all so far away, and all dependent on so many hundreds of things going just right.
In the mean time, nothing. To take Conroy’s own comparison. It’s as though a leader in 1935, seeing the rise of Adolph Hitler and imperial Japan, and began a rearmament program that would not deliver its first weapon until 1945.
The government’s own figures are full of internal contradictions, calculations that just plainly don’t make sense. Conroy proudly declares that building nuclear subs will be “the greatest industrial undertaking Australia has ever attempted…” which will “drive the modernisation of Australian manufacturing” and create “20,000 highly skilled, secure jobs”.
You think?
Canberra plans to buy the first three subs from the US, starting in a decade’s time (at the end of our non-existent warning time). But if there’s trouble with the AUKUS subs we’re going to co-design with the Brits, we might buy five US Virginia subs.
Trouble in the British subs seems certain. It took the Brits decades to get the Astute class submarine from concept to serviceable boat. So we would build from scratch a vast nuclear submarine construction industry in order to build a total of three boats?
Even all that rests on the heroic assumption the Americans will actually part with three to five of their Virginias. The program looks like it will face decades of delay, while we do nothing else.
There’s no reason to think we’ll produce the necessary work force or crews. We’ve had to temporarily retire one of the Anzac frigates because we can’t crew it. Despite receiving extra money to grow the defence force since 2016, it has shrunk by about 1000 a year.
In questions, Conroy was forced to say what the Government will do over the next ten years.
He said the Government was bringing forward long range strike and missile production.
Australians would be aghast at just how puny these efforts are. A tiny number of missiles will be bought for the three Air Warfare Destroyers which are our only modern warships. No Tomahawks for the Collins. And a few upgraded missiles for our 100 fast jets.
So far, that’s it.
We’ve bought or ordered zero long range ground launched missiles.
The so-called missile production effort doesn’t get going for another couple of years and will produce only land artillery rockets, with a range of 70 to 90 kilometres and which can only strike targets on land, with no maritime application.
For the Government, the AUKUS subs are a magic pudding, so far away you don’t have to spend any real money on them, and so impressive sounding they convince people you’re doing something on defence when you’re doing nothing. And if a few lefties complain, all the better.
But it still produces no defence capability for Australia over the next ten years, and quite possibly nothing after that either.
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