Acting PM Richard Marles addresses the Defending Australia conference at Parliament House on 16 June. Photo: Kym Smith/ADF.
The Australian Defence Force should be focusing on quality, not quantity, as it seeks to provide a viable counter to regional and global threats, according to Defence Minister Richard Marles.
Speaking to a large audience at the Defending Australia conference in the Great Hall of Parliament House on 16 June, Mr Marles was reluctant to commit to an arbitrary percentage of GDP when determining Australia’s future defence budget.
Instead, he reinforced comments made by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week that Australia would determine what defence capabilities it required based on the threat.
The comments come after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, on the sidelines of last month’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, called on Australia and other US allies in the region to raise defence spending to 3.5 per cent of their GDP – significantly above the current 2.1 per cent Australia spends and the planned 2.4 per cent it aspires to.
No doubt that would have been part of any conversation Mr Albanese and US President Donald Trump were scheduled to have at the G7 meeting in Canada. But that meeting now won’t go ahead, after Mr Trump departed the event early, supposedly to deal with the growing conflict between Israel and Iran.
Mr Marles said it had been previous practice to benchmark other countries around the world based on their expenditure as a proportion of GDP, while other countries benchmarked Australia in the same way.
“But when it comes to our own defence planning, our own defence spending, the only logical way we can do it is to think about what our needs and our capabilities are, and then to go off and resource those needs,” he said.
“That’s how other countries do it without saying anything about the future, historically, that is how we’ve done it when we have been preparing for conflict.”
Mr Marles used last year’s move to reduce the planned number of Infantry Fighting Vehicles for the army from 450 to just 129 as an example of difficult capability-based decisions that had been made.
“This is just one example of why the Prime Minister has been so insistent about the idea that the way in which we think about funding defence is through first articulating what our defence needs are, what our capabilities are, and then resourcing that,” he said.
“And to simply think about a number means there is no debate around the quality of that spend, which in turn is so important in terms of the numbers over the last few years.
“I can understand the level of analysis and the debate there has been around the quantity of the defence spend. But just as important is the quality of that spend.”
Forum moderator and former ABC and Channel 9 journalist Chris Uhlman questioned the government’s current spending profile, pointing out that while both sides of politics had stated the threat of war in our region was imminent, the vast bulk of any increases to the defence budget would only flow at the back of the next decade.
“We spent more in the last financial year than we ever have – not a factor which gets reported that much, but is a fact nevertheless,” Mr Marles responded.
“And we will spend more again this year.
“So, in the here and now, we are spending more. We are increasing our defence spending in what is the most, as I said earlier, the largest peacetime increase in defence spending in Australia’s history.
“Defence spending doesn’t happen in any country overnight. And no country out there is announcing an overnight increase in defence spending. It is something which is built up over time.”
Mr Marles also tiptoed around naming China as Australia’s biggest threat, especially in light of a Chinese Navy taskforce completing a circumnavigation of the continent earlier this year while conducting exercises that some analysts have said were clearly focused on Australian population centres and military bases.
He said any speculation as to the intent of those exercises was “not helpful”.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate or helpful for me in this situation to speculate about it, for a range of reasons,” he said.
“And the most significant being what we did with the Chinese task group was to engage in an unprecedented level of surveillance on that task group. So, we do know exactly what they were doing and exactly what they’re rehearsing.”
But when pressed that the task group sent a “very loud message” to Australia, Mr Marles conceded that he was “very clear about what they were doing”.
“Perhaps I would say that I don’t think there are any capabilities that were put on display there which are a particular surprise,” he said.
“And we were also, I say – being able to surveil that task group in the manner which we did also sends an important statement.”
