Australia is at one of the most dangerous crossroads in the nation’s defence since the early 1930s. And we’re being led by idiots who couldn’t organise a root in a brothel.
The Albanese government is poised to cancel a planned $7bn military-grade satellite communications system it gave the green light to just 18 months ago because there is no money in the Defence budget to pay for it.
This, barely a week after Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy’s ‘fatuous and preposterous speech’ to the National Press Club, Making Australia Safer:
Reshaping Defence Capability In The New Missile Age. The speech, as the Australian’s Greg Sheridan notes, ‘exemplifies everything that is wrong with defence policy under the Albanese government’.
The speech groaned with big numbers, big statements, tens of billions of dollars tossed around like confetti, and missiles seemingly everywhere.
But almost nothing specific, in a meaningful time frame. Almost nothing that goes bang in the actual physical world.
Australia has had some capable defence ministers in past decades, on both sides of the aisle. In particular, Kim ‘Bomber’ Beazley, as Hawke government defence minister, revolutionised Australia’s defence and built “an enduring model of self-reliance”. In 2009, Rudd government minister Joel Fitzgibbon issued sought to update the Beazley legacy in order to face the rising threat of China.
Events intervened: the disastrous turmoil of the Labor in-fighting, precipitated by Julia Gillard. Partly as a result, “the 2009 White Paper stands in the arc of Australian defence strategy as the road not taken, when we still had time”.
We’re fast running out of time – and we no longer have a minister of the calibre of a Linda Reynolds, let alone Kim Beazley. Instead, we’ve got Richard Marles, the hack deputy of one of the most inept governments in living memory, and blowhard buffoons like Conroy.
Conroy made a big deal about the government’s decision to acquire Tomahawk missiles. They have a range of 2500km. We’ll be only the third country after the US and the UK to have them. We’ll get the first of them by the end of this year.
Sounds great – except that we’ve got hardly any ships to launch them.
The government decided not to make serious upgrades to our decrepit ANZAC frigates so the only ships to carry Tomahawks will be our three Hobart class Air Warfare Destroyers. We might think about putting them on the Hunter frigates, the first of which arrives nearly a decade from now. Even the Hobarts will soon go in for long-term upgrades. That means we’ll have only two ships that can carry Tomahawks.
On Opposition, Labor indicated it would likely put Tomahawks on our six Collins subs. If you had Collins and Hobarts with Tomahawks, that would be nine Australian Tomahawk platforms. Instead it will be three, two as the Hobarts go in for refurbishment.
That’s urgency? No, that’s a government which decided, in order to save a few bucks, not to have Tomahawks on our major platform. By the way, how many Collins boats are available for service at the moment?
Let’s not even go there.
Then there’s the Albanese decision to kill a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
Adding the F-35s, the Super Hornets and the Growlers, we have about 100 fast jets to defend the whole of Australia. A government that believed even one per cent of its faux Churchillian rhetoric would have expanded the air force by one squadron.
Generals are often accused of fighting the last war. The Albanese government isn’t even prepared for that. Conflicts from Ukraine to Yemen are demonstrating the absolute strategic importance of drones.
We are still one of very few militaries without an armed maritime drone to attack ships.
As for a future in space-based warfare, just forget it.
US defence giant Lockheed Martin was selected in April last year to deliver what was to be the nation’s biggest-ever space project – a hardened sovereign system of three to five satellites boasting the highest-level protection against cyber and electronic warfare attacks.
But the Australian can reveal the government will announce early this week – under the cover of the Melbourne Cup and the US election – that the project will not proceed.
Woke, broke and wide open to China: welcome to Albo’s Australia.
