In between the party hacks, the venal and just plain incompetent, Australia is occasionally blessed with a worthy defence minister. John Forrest, Joe Lyons, John Curtin, even Marise Payne… but one of the most consequential and best-regarded defence ministers of recent decades was Kim Beazley. One of the longest serving in the portfolio, ‘Bomber’ was an active and far-sighted defence minister, adamant that ‘survival is a close-run thing for Australia… what we’ve got here is a society worth preserving’.
A strong supporter of AUKUS and a fast-tracked nuclear submarine programme for Australia, Beazley has long argued that successive Australian governments have dropped the ball on defence spending. With US President Donald Trump warning that America will not much longer put up with allies who mooch on their own defence, Beazley is once again warning that Australia needs to lift its game and fast.
Labor’s revered former defence minister Kim Beazley has warned that the Albanese government needs to lift military spending to at least 3 per cent of GDP in line with US demands, as Donald Trump prepares to strain the two nations’ ties by slapping tariffs on Australian exporters.
For all Australia’s proud war history, the simple fact remains that we are a low-population middle power who cannot stand up against an enemy like China on our own. The sea and the Tyranny of Distance, while still formidable barriers, are still vulnerable, as the recent provocative ‘exercise’ by China off our shores proved. Australia needs America and vice-versa (since WWII, America has recognised the absolute need for a reliable ally in the South Pacific), but a two-way street is just that: Australia has to bring something to the table other than strategic location.
‘survival is a close-run thing for Australia… what we’ve got here is a society worth preserving’
Mr Beazley said Australia could not risk going alone on national security, backing the Trump administration’s call for tens of billions of dollars to be added to the defence budget each year. “We can’t afford to run our own game; people are full of piss and wind on that,” the former Labor leader and former US ambassador told the Australian.
“We have to be mindful that we’ve got our limits, but we do have to bear in mind what Trump’s saying and the others are saying. We have to up our spending to 3, 3.5 per cent (of GDP).”
Trump, true to his word as a ‘peace president’, is using economic leverage, not force, to pull mendicant allies into line, in order to focus on the greatest game of facing down a belligerent Communist China.
Mr Beazley’s call came amid rising expectations that Australia would be hit with the full force of Mr Trump’s 25 per cent steel and aluminium tariffs, to be unveiled on Thursday AEDT.
The former Labor leader warned Australia was unlikely to be let off the hook, while another former ambassador to the US, Arthur Sinodinos, put the nation’s chances of an exemption at less than 50 per cent.
“I think the President is pretty determined to go down this route, and therefore he’s been conditioning people to the idea that there’s going to be adjustment costs,” Mr Sinodinos said.
There’s a good reason Trump is ‘pretty determined’: like Europe, recent Australian governments have welched on their defence commitments on the assumption that America would pick up the slack. Instead, since Covid, successive governments have used the American aegis as an excuse to channel more and more taxpayer money into vote-buying welfare schemes. It has to stop.
Peter Dutton warned he would hold Labor responsible if it failed to secure carve-outs for Australia, arguing that “the Prime Minister needs to frankly roll his sleeves up and get this deal done so that workers’ jobs and the economic activity can be preserved”.
“The most important thing is for the prime minister to pick the phone up and speak with the president, and for the trade minister to speak to his counterpart, and for the treasurer to speak to his counterpart, and for the foreign minister to speak to her counterpart,” the opposition leader said.
The foreign minister is too busy denigrating Israel and toadying up to Hamas to be bothered with anything so footling as our most important alliance. The Albanese government is focused on socialist pork-barreling. Beazley is desperately trying to remind them to do the harder, but absolutely necessary, stuff instead.
Mr Beazley said there were few votes to gain by lifting military spending.
However, he said, Labor needed to make Defence a second-term priority if it was re-elected in May […]
He backed Defence Strategic Review co-author Peter Dean, who argued for missile defence systems to be prioritised in a substantially increased defence budget, amid growing Chinese threats.
At this point, our only hope for even the slightest improvement in our strategic position is a change of government next month and former SAS commander Andrew Hastie in the defence portfolio.
