Peter Dutton (right) with Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie (left) in Perth. Photo: Peter Dutton Facebook.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has pledged to increase Australia’s defence spending over the next five years by an additional $21 billion if he’s elected on 3 May.
While short on detail, Mr Dutton’s announcement would take defence spending to 2.5 per cent of Australia’s GDP, ahead of Labor’s planned 2.3 per cent by 2033.
On top of that, he says he aspires to further increase spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2040, which would see Australia’s annual defence budget easily exceed $100 billion.
Mr Dutton said it had been more than a decade since Australia had a National Security Strategy, and that the world looks very different today than it did back then.
“It is past time we confronted our new strategic reality, and our Strategy will serve as a roadmap to guide the difficult decisions we will need to make to protect Australia’s interests in the years ahead,” he said.
Perhaps because it too was short on detail and was essentially a collation of announcements already made, Mr Dutton appeared to overlook the fact that the Labor Government released a somewhat underwhelming National Defence Strategy in April 2024, just a year after publishing its Defence Strategic Review.
And despite both sides promising to increase spending, a large proportion of that new money is going towards the planned nuclear-powered submarines Australia will acquire under AUKUS Pillar 1, while neither side has been able to articulate how it will address ongoing shortfalls in ADF recruitment targets.
“It will be an important expenditure because we need to keep our country safe,” Mr Dutton told the media alongside Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie in Perth.
“And if we’re to preserve peace and stability in our region — and to be a good ally with partners — Australia needs to invest in defence.
“We need to make sure that whatever confronts us in the coming decades, we can stare it down and that’s exactly what a Coalition government will do,” he said.
Shadow Minister for Home Affairs Senator James Paterson said the government’s most important duty is to keep Australians safe.
“In an increasingly uncertain world, we need to be clear-eyed about the challenges facing our country, and we must fiercely protect our values and interests,” he said.
“An overarching National Security Strategy will prompt a long-overdue national conversation about what security means for Australia, and provide clarity to our security agencies and policymakers as they navigate the challenges in the decades ahead.”
The allocation of the additional funds has yet to be announced. However, Mr Dutton has previously stated he would look to buy an additional squadron of Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning combat aircraft to augment the current three combat and one training squadrons the RAAF already operates. But that announcement failed to say whether these would augment or replace the RAAF’s current 24 F/A-18F Super Hornets.
He said that a new Coalition Government’s Defence Strategic Review would examine an overarching vision for Australia’s security, the core objectives that support this vision, the key risks to Australia’s national security, an assessment of the global threat environment, and Australia’s national security priorities. Interestingly, all of these issues were taken into account in Labor’s 2024 Review.
In response to Mr Dutton’s announcement, Defence Minister Richard Marles questioned how the figure of 2.5 per cent would be achieved.
“There is no explanation of how they’re paying for this, where the money is coming from,” he told ABC News Breakfast on 23 April.
“Nor really is there an explanation of what the money is being spent on, and this is entirely consistent with what the Liberals did when they were in government, when we came in.
“We’ve engaged in the biggest peacetime increase in defence spending since the Second World War,” Mr Marles added.
“That’s the fact of the matter, and it’s not some vague commitment. It’s not a target, it’s not an aspiration, it’s in the budget. It is a much bigger increase than anything we saw from the Liberals when they were in government.”
As politicians of both persuasions have been saying since the Morrison Government’s 2018 Strategy, Australia is facing the most complex and serious strategic circumstances since 1945. These risks have been highlighted by China’s increasing belligerence in the region and in particular towards Taiwan, Japan, India, and its Southeast Asian neighbours in the South China Sea.
Further afield, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia has seen new forms of warfare such as cheap drone attacks proliferate, while China, Russia and other countries are increasingly conducting grey-zone attacks in the cyber domain and are disrupting satellite and underwater lines of communication.
