There’ll be some debate about whether Labor’s announced ramp-up of Defence spending from 2% to 2.4% of GDP over the next decade is justified — though not in the Fairfax papers, where not only is the idea of the need for more military spending against Chinese hordes taken for granted, Labor’s commitment is actually regarded as insufficient.
Let’s leave that aside for the moment, however, and focus on the claim of Defence Minister Richard Marles, made at the National Press Club this week, that there’s a new era when it comes to Defence spending. Attacking the Coalition in his speech, Marles said “there was no consistency in government action … a strategic void … a lost decade. The Liberals were one of the worst Defence governments in our nation’s history at a time when Australia could least afford it.”
This is palpably nonsense. The Coalition was no worse than most governments in Australian history when it came to Defence spending, at least until near the end, when Scott Morrison made his spectacular AUKUS mistake — one that Labor has doubled down on and backed. Indeed, when Marles complains about “the Coalition being in and out of a submarine deal with Japan and then in and out of a submarine deal with France”, he neglects to mention that Labor supported both of those decisions.
In fact, the best decision made in Defence procurement in recent decades was Tony Abbott’s decision to buy off-the-shelf conventional submarines from the Japanese — and that’s one that Labor strongly opposed, and which was eventually overturned by Abbott’s own party in a desperate bid to save the careers of South Australian MPs. Australia’s submarine capability might now be very, very different if Abbott had been allowed to have his way.
Marles characterises the Coalition’s time in office as having “a Defence budget that included $42 billion of spending commitments without the provision of a single dollar. Over-programming which was on track to average around 36% over the next four years. Twenty-eight major projects were running a total of 97 years over time”.
All that will change, Marles insists, with Labor in charge and throwing many more billions at Defence, as well as reallocating funding within the spending — for example, cutting back on our purchases of the flying heap of shit, the F-35 (after two decades, still subject to massive delays).
This isn’t the first time Marles has tried the “there’s a new sheriff in town” stuff. In October 2022 he promised that “quality of Defence spending [was a] top priority for the Albanese Government.”
As we noted back in February, that is off to a pretty inauspicious start. If Marles — a dullard and Labor hack elevated to high office purely by his geographical origin and factional allegiance — is dumb enough to attack the Coalition for the delays in major projects, we should note that project delays have worsened significantly under Labor — from 405 months to 453 months, according to the Australian National Audit Office. Marles, by his own standards, is 11% worse than when part-time Pete (Dutton) was at Defence.
That continued confirmation of the incompetence of the Defence Department has been accompanied by further moves to shield itself from accountability about those delays, which “provides a reduced level of transparency and accountability to Parliament and other stakeholders”, according to the auditor-general.
Marles’ claims that he would be the Hercules of the Augean Stables at Russell were always going to be risky. Defence captures its ministers and transforms them into political shields for its poor performance, appalling culture and the deep aversion to transparency that characterises its bureaucrats — one that runs from refusing to answer embarrassing questions about Defence procurement, all the way through to trying to prevent the Auditor-General from holding them to public account. Any Defence minister — Labor, Liberal, whoever — claiming they have turned around the institutional and systemic incompetence of the Defence bureaucracy should be treated with the utmost scepticism. But few have served up evidence of their failure as quickly as Marles.
All this was bad enough back in February, but now the government is promising to hand extra billions to those very bureaucrats. In present dollar terms, Labor’s commitment will increase Defence spending by nearly $10 billion a year by the mid-2030s — much of it, of course, flowing into the AUKUS project which is already in trouble due to workforce constraints in the US and UK.
Marles argues that he and Defence can now be trusted with all that extra money — despite Defence’s long history of procurement debacles, and despite its performance and accountability materially declining since Labor was elected.
The target of all this spending, of course, is China. Xi Jinping has many serious problems, but the military threat of Australia isn’t one of them. The idea that we will magically alter our record of ineptitude on major project procurement is likely causing howls of laughter in Beijing.
