Crikey’s abiding memory of Stephen Smith is the hair: a full bouffant of black turning to grey adorning the head of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd defence minister, who was last sighted retreating to his home state of Western Australia, the Labor government a smoking ruin in the rear-vision mirror.
It was a surprise to see the Hair’s head bob up again as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s captain’s pick to run the rule over Defence, alongside the former Chief of the Defence Force, Sir Angus Houston, who received his knighthood as a captain’s call of former prime minister Tony Abbott.
Professor Smith, to give him his full title, was immediately rounded on by the Australian Defence Association’s long-serving executive director Neil James, who labelled him “easily in the worst-five defence ministers of the last seven decades”. Take that, buff-head.
So what has Smith been up to for the past 10 years? In short, he has burrowed deep into US-Australia defence networks.
Smith’s first move out of politics was to the University of Western Australia where he became a professor of international law and later chair of the UWA defence and security program. But it is his role as a director of the Perth US-Asia Centre that has opened up a whole new set of powerful relationships. The centre has close links to Sydney’s US Studies Centre. One of its key focus areas is Australia, Indo-Pacific and US relations. Former Labor defence minister Kim Beazley is also on the centre’s board.
According to official returns, the US-Asia Center receives the bulk of its support from the American Australian Association Ltd, which is a founding member of the centre and which last year channelled $1.5m in funding to the centre. The American Australian Association was founded by Sir Keith Murdoch in the 1940s as a vehicle for promoting cultural and business ties between the two countries and has grown in influence since with close to $10 million in federal funding, some of which it provides to the centre.
In 2018 Smith made his corporate move when he joined the board of ASX-listed cyber security company archTIS. The company’s clients included the Defence department and Attorney-General department. Smith left the company in 2020. In the same year, he was appointed to the federal government’s Cyber Security Industry Advisory Committee.
Smith is now chair of a new WA-based cybersecurity venture called Sapien. Other board members include former US Director of Intelligence James Clapper AO, who had served as the principal intelligence advisor to then president Barack Obama.
Cybersecurity, it happens, is among the top of Albanese’s defence priorities. Albanese has been close to Smith dating back to the Howard years when the two were in opposition. Close observers will have noted that Smith was on hand to help Albanese during the last election campaign, with Smith acting in the role of political “elder”.
So what’s on the table under the Smith-Houston defence review? Speaking at the Lowy Institute during the election campaign, Albanese cited a list of “procurement fumbles”. They included the future frigates, which were $15 billion over budget and delayed into the next decade.
“There are now 30 major defence projects that are running a total of 79 years late. Seventeen major projects are running $4.3 billion over budget. And some projects that have been completed don’t deliver what taxpayers paid for — such as helicopters that can’t shoot their weapons,” he said.
Albanese also cited the “billions of dollars wasted on the French [submarine] contract”, which he said was “the greatest defence procurement disaster we have seen in this country”.
“We now have no contract for any submarine, and a looming submarine-shaped capability gap,” he said.
There are also questions of defence force structure, capability and “foundational questions” about Australia’s “strategic circumstances”.
For all that, the biggest expense of them all — the nuclear-powered submarines to be built under the (yet to be fully detailed) AUKUS agreement — will go untouched, while a separate task force wrestles with the almighty gap looming in Australia’s defence.
