Nation aware of rising security risk, says Richard Marles

Australians are fundamentally aware of the strategic risks the country faces as a result of rapidly changing global circumstances and the need for the government to focus on national security, Richard Marles said.

Indonesia Defence Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin receives an Australian hat as a gift from Richard Marles. Picture: AFP

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Australians are fundamentally aware of the strategic risks the country faces as a result of rapidly changing global circumstances and the need for the government to focus on national security, Defence Minister Richard Marles said in Jakarta on Thursday as he wrapped up a four-nation trip aimed at strengthening defence ties across the Indian Ocean.

Mr Marles’ comments follow a sobering warning from Australian defence chief David Johnson this week that the nation needed to be ready for the prospect of launching combat operations on its own soil, and that a radical rethink was needed on Australia’s readiness to face rising strategic threats.

“Perhaps, finally, we’re having to reconsider Australia as a homeland from which we will conduct combat operations,” Admiral Johnson said on Wednesday at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute defence conference in Canberra. “That is a very different way – almost since the Second World War – about how we think of national resilience and preparedness.”

Mr Marles acknowledged there had been intensive discussions in recent days “around the strategic circumstances Australia now faces and what we need to do to meet them”.

“I would also say at the level of main street, when you’re talking to people across Australia as we were doing during the election, there is a broad sense that we live in a much more complex world, that this world is uncertain and that we need a government focused on national security,” he said. “Which is of course what the Albanese government has been doing since we came to power, and that’s why we have engaged in the increase in defence spending we have.”

The federal government is under intense pressure from the US to lift defence spending to as much as 3.5 per cent of its budget following talks between Mr Marles and US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last weekend.

The issue is expected to be a focus when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 this month in Canada.

Mr Marles flew straight from weekend defence talks in Singapore to the Maldives on Monday, where he gifted the northeast Indian Ocean country a Guardian patrol boat to support its maritime security capability and a multi-beam sounder to help it map its own ocean bed – interesting offerings for a country whose strategic alignment has shifted sharply away from India and towards China in recent years.

He then went to Sri Lanka, a country only just emerging from a pandemic-induced financial emergency and which bears a heavy debt burden to Beijing, to urge closer co-operation on defending the rules-based order against a rising China.

“I would note the very important statement of the Sri Lankan government that it’s not going to allow Sri Lankan territory to be used in any way to undermine India’s national security interest. And we think that’s a very important statement in terms of stability in the region and within the Indian Ocean,” Mr Marles said.

In New Delhi he met with Indian PM Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to mark the fifth anniversary of the India Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and to discuss a further deepening of the two nations’ military and security relationship.

While the Defence Minister’s itinerary has raised some eyebrows, with suggestions Australia is “vice-captaining” India in the region to shore up its influence, Mr Marles pointed to the government’s most recent Defence Strategic Review, which identified the Indian Ocean as a priority area of interest.

He rounded out the tour in Jakarta on Thursday where he met his Indonesian counterpart Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin to discuss ways to increase opportunities for military engagement between the two nations’ military forces on each others’ soil.