Defence Strategy Is A National Scandal

The following statement was issued to the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 June 2020:There are major gaps with the Morrison Government’s 2020 Strategic Policy Update and associated Force Structure Review. It is long on rhetoric and short on delivery.My government’s 2009 Defence White Paper was the first to enunciate major changes in Australia’s strategic circumstances because of China’s rise. Malcolm Turnbull dismissed the white paper at the time as a relic of the Cold War. That white paper prescribed the biggest single expansion of the Royal Australian Navy since the war.It also adjusted Australian strategic focus away from the Middle East where the previous conservative government had become hopelessly bogged down - both in its military deployments and in various irrational force structure decisions. The 2009 White Paper announced a doubling of the Australian submarine fleet. Eleven years later, that project has been comprehensively botched. The building of the first vessel has not even begun. In our current strategic circumstances, this is a national security scandal.Second, Morrison’s 2020 Update talks about the so-called “Pacific Step-Up.” This is the second scandal. Only now are they attempting to restore Australia’s real aid level to the Pacific to where it was in 2013. This has opened the door far and wide to China’s aid presence because Australia was seen as an unreliable aid partner, which did not care about our friends in the region and which was dismissive of the island states’ existential concern about climate change.Third, Morrison pretends that his government somehow invented Australia’s whole of government cyber capabilities. That is just wrong. Our white paper established the Cyber Security Operations Centre which was purpose-built for national responses to cyber incidents across government and critical private sector systems and infrastructure. The 2009 Cyber Security Strategy also established CERT Australia to provide the Australian government with all-source cyber situational awareness and an enhanced ability to facilitate operational responses to cybersecurity events of national importance. The current government has been slow in expanding these capabilities over recent years to keep pace with this rapidly expanding threat.