As I wrote last week, highly-respected former Hawke government Defence Minister Kim Beazley dropped a bunker buster on successive governments over the dereliction of our nation’s defence capabilities. Australia, Beazley warned, has to immediately up its defence spending from its current, woeful, under two per cent, to at least three to 3.5 per cent.
Far from sitting up and taking notice, though, Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles are trying to sneakily slip through a tight-arse con job on our vital maritime defence.
A $5bn plan to extend the lives of the navy’s Collins-class submarines is in disarray as the government-owned shipbuilder ASC warns it won’t be ready to fully upgrade the first boat, raising the prospect of a capability gap before the arrival of the nation’s nuclear-powered subs.
The Australian can reveal the Albanese government is now considering a scaled-back “life-of-type extension” for the first overhaul from next year, which won’t deliver the extra 10 years of operational life the boat needs.
The proposed “LOTE lite” upgrade plan has been kept secret by Labor as it prepares for a khaki-tinged election campaign, which will throw a spotlight on its management of the defence portfolio.
No kidding they’re trying to keep it secret. Australians were shocked with a cold, hard dose of reality salts earlier in the month, when a Chinese fleet somehow managed to park themselves in the Tasman Sea and start firing rockets and torpedos in a ‘live-fire drill’ with no one in Canberra any the wiser. Defence and government only learned of the exercise when a commercial airline pilot happened to eavesdrop on Chinese communications.
To really drive the point home, elements of the Chinese fleet later broke off and conducted a pointed circumnavigation of the country.
The Albanese government wants us to face up to such a clear threat with… well, what, exactly?
Multiple sources said the revised upgrade scope would leave the first boat in line, the 27-year-old HMAS Farncomb, with its main motor, diesel engines and generators in place, rather than having installed new ones as planned. Failure to replace the critical systems would undermine the boat’s reliability and shorten its planned lifespan, degrading the submarine force ahead of the transition to nuclear boats in the 2030s and 2040s.
Which may well be too late. Australia and its allies have to navigate the dangerous waters of the ageing Xi Jinping’s ambitions now. Xi has long dreamed of establishing a ‘greater China’. At 71, he’s running out of time. The next decade will be the years of living dangerously.
And the Australian government is asleep at the wheel.
The Australian sought a response from Defence Minister Richard Marles, but none was provided. Instead, a government spokeswoman blamed the coalition for the problems facing the Collins fleet […]
Former Defence official Michael Shoebridge said […] “They’re trying to make a new submarine out of the old submarine”.
It’s not just the submarine fleet, either. The surface ship capability has degraded alarmingly as well. As Shoebridge says: if we think the Chinese navy was badly monitored this time, next time will only be worse the way things are going.
Our key ally is facing similar problems, also going back decades. A decade ago, then-president Obama sneered at the idea that a strong navy was important. Now, the Trump administration is warning that the US is also grappling with a moribund naval construction industry, as is Britain. The US is only currently building one Virginia-class boat per year. Consequently America faces ‘a very difficult problem’ in meeting its pledge to supply three such boats to Australia from the early 2030s.
They certainly won’t be prioritising feckless allies who, like Europe, fail to pay for their own defence.
A smarter government and defence department would be looking to the lessons of the Ukraine war, and throwing their weight behind a drone program. Not just aerial drones, but robotic submersibles, as well. Faster, cheaper and potentially deadlier than manned submarines, Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are fast shaping up as the weapons of the future.
Australia even has its home-grown vehicle: the Anduril Australia-designed and built Ghost Shark.
