One of the more impressive policies of the Albanese Government has been to back AUKUS and initiate a defence review, which most people expected to recommend some immediate, much-needed improvements to our ADF and significantly increased defence expenditure. Sadly, the review did neither and the government’s response was to kick the can down the road and actually decrease defence expenditure over the next four years by $1.5 billion. It also reduced by two-thirds the new vehicle fleet of armoured personnel carriers (APCs) to replace our clapped out 1960s-era M113s.
There is nothing more important than being able to defend your country. We currently spend two per cent of GDP on defence. I believe to defend this country, we need to spend at least three per cent of GDP on defence and it doesn’t matter where the funding comes from: abolishing stage 3 tax cuts, pruning back other government expenditure, whatever it takes.
My old friend, the late Senator Jim Molan, constantly stressed the need for Australia to have sufficient reserves of fuel, sufficient war stocks and, in more recent years, the need to spend three to four per cent of GDP to adequately cover likely contingencies.
The Albanese Government should not have cut anything from defence. The Australian Army needs new armoured fighting vehicles, including tanks (the war in Ukraine proves that), plus sufficient war stocks to be able to fight for more than the two weeks they could do at present. We need to produce our own missiles (at least some progress is occurring in a limited way on that front) and to buy the 100 F35 Joint strike fighters originally planned, not just the lower revised total of 72. Whether we opt for 28 F35Bs – the V/STOL version or not – is a moot point. If so, we would probably need an aircraft carrier (I defer to the experts on that). However, we urgently need lots of unmanned drones (submarine drones, aircraft attack drones) plus missiles with a range of 1,000-2,000 kilometres that can be launched from aircraft, ships and land, to make it so prohibitively dangerous for an aggressor that any country would baulk at attacking us.
The government needs to build here, now, 12 or more corvette-size vessels instead of the 12 underarmed patrol boats of about the same size it is building. Properly armed with surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, this would give us a critical mass offensive capability in our northern approaches. Whether we proceed with the F26 Hunter class frigates we are building jointly with the UK is a moot point, but any new frigate we buy must be fit for purpose.
I suggest we plan now for a worst-case scenario: what happens if Australia is overrun by a hostile power and how do we resist? Maybe we need to plan for a competent ‘home army’ force, like the Polish Home Army in WWII.
