The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!
The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant. Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers of the military industrial complex over the next decade to combat a needlessly inflated enemy. Forget diplomacy and funding the cause (and course) of peace – it’s all about the weapons and the Yellow Peril, baby.
On April 18, Marles and Defence Industry Pat Conroy barraged the press with announcements that the defence budget would be bulked by A$50.3 billion by 2034, with a A$330 billion plan for weapons and equipment known as the Integrated Investment Program. The measures were intended to satisfy the findings of the Defence Strategic Review. “This is a significant lift compared to the $270 billion allocated for the 10-year period to 2029-30 as part of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and 2020 Force Structure Plan,” crowed a statement from the Defence Department.
Such statements are often weighed down by jargon and buoyed by delusion. The press were not left disappointed by the insufferable fluff. Australia will gain “an enhanced lethality surface fleet and conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarines”, an army with “littoral manoeuvre” capabilities “with a long-range land and maritime strike capability”, an air force capable of delivering “long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” with “an enhanced maritime, land and air-strike capability” and “a strengthened and integrated space and cyber capability.” The glaring omission here is the proviso that all such policies are being essentially steered by Washington’s defence interests, with Canberra very much the obedient servant.
The defence minister was firmly of the view that all this was taking place with some speed. “We are acting very quickly in relation to [challenges],” Marles insists. “I mean, the acquiring of a general-purpose frigate going forward, for example, will be the most rapid acquisition of a platform that size that we’ve seen in decades.” Anyone who uses the term “rapid” in a sentence on military acquisition is clearly a certified novice.
The ministers, along with the department interests they represent, are certainly fond of their expensive toys. They are seeking a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as replacements for the F/A-18 Super Hornets. The EA-18G Growler jets are also being replaced. (That said, both sets of current fighters will see aging service till 2040.) Three vessels will be purchased to advance undersea war capabilities, including the undersea drone prototype, the Ghost Shark.
The latter hopes to equip the Royal Australian Navy “with a stealthy, long-range autonomous undersea warfare capability that can conduct persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike.” Importantly, such acquisitions and developments are always qualified by how well they will work in tandem with the imperial power in question. The media release from the Department of Defence prefers a more weasel-worded formula. The Ghost Shark, for instance, “will also enhance Navy’s ability to operate with allies and partners.”
The new militarisation strategy is also designed to improve levels of recruitment. Personnel have been putting down their weapons in favour of other forms of employment, while recruitment numbers are falling, much to the consternation of the pro-war lobby. A suggested answer: recruit non-Australian nationals. This far from brilliant notion will, Marles suggests, take some years. But a good place to start would be the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders resident in Australia. Sheer genius.
The announcement was also meant to offer budget trimmers a barely visible olive branch, promising “to divest, delay or re-scope projects that do not meet our strategic circumstances.” (They could start with the submarines.) A$5 billion, for instance, will be saved from terminating naval transport and replenishment ships intended to refuel and resupply war vessels at sea.
Hardly appropriate, opined some military pundits keen to keep plucking the money tree. Jennifer Parker of the National Security College suggested that, “The removal of the Joint Support ship means there is no future plan to expand Australia’s limited replenishment capability of two ships – which will in turn limit the force projection capability and reach of the expanded surface combatant fleet if the issue is not addressed.”
The focus, as ever, is on Wicked Oriental Authoritarianism which is very much in keeping with the traditional Australian fear of slanty-eyed devils moving in on the spoils and playground of the Anglosphere. Former RAAF officer and executive director of the Air Power Institute, Chris McInnes, barks in aeronautical terms that Australia’s air power capability risks being “put in a holding pattern for the next 10 years.” Despotic China, however, was facing no such prospects. “There is a risk of putting everything on hold. The People’s Liberal Army is not on hold. They are going to keep progressing their aircraft.” (The air force seems to do wonders for one’s grammar.)
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian was cool in his response to the latest promises of indulgent military spending Down Under. “We hope Australia will correctly view China’s development and strategic intentions, abandon the Cold War mentality, do more things to keep the region peaceful and stable and stop buzzing about China.” No harm in hoping.
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10 comments
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Douglas Pritchard
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Phil Pryor
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Hotspringer
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Harry Lime
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GL
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tom
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Clakka
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New England Cocky
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Clakka
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Centrelink customer
Return to home pageIn order to spend, spend, spend, we need to sell a shedload of iron ore, and coal to our primary trading partner , China.
Without their patronage we are pretty bloody average in influence.
Of course they would never use the steel that we facilitate to turn this into submarines or landing craft ready for the invasion that our second best friend tells us is due any moment.
The sheer hypocrisy that we demonstrate in cosying up to Uncle Sam is laughable, and BLOODY expensive.
We simply wither, and wilt under the Washington directive.
I find these trends sickening, and regret the decline of goodwill efforts in dialogue, diplomacy, consultation, agreements, exchanges, treaties. We have little to do with some nations, but we do not have to have pointless suspicions and exaggerated obligated closeness, much without intelligent reasoning, discussion, analysis. The world map indicates we should be and could be friendly, detached, neutral, open and closed to suit, unthreatening and feeling reasonably secure. We could, and should, give peace a chance. As for Marles, could he coach the under thirteens well??
Spending on health, education, homelessness, poverty can go and hang, we want steam powered submarines!
Geelong Grammar? Lawyer?…I think our Richard joined the wrong party.Not too late to switch,Dickie.
I’m sure he got the job after telling Albo that he once played America’s Army on Xbox years ago.
Never to vote Labor again.
This idiot and the lackeys that are the labour party are going to kill this country, if it’s not %^&*(d already.
The article (long on hubris and tedious political hostility) and the comments strike me as convenient Oz snark derived from view of history that gets in the way of 1960s notions of a coming utopian paradise. A paradise that could never have been met because of the disguised but accelerated affect of the ‘suicide capitalists’ and profiteers of our own and from outside.
That the guile and disguising political rhetoric and blunders ever stopped is nonsense, and we all participated in it, even through and beyond the babbling, incompetent and neo-liberal, neo-fascist, neo-conservative initiations of Thatcher, Reagan et al, and the participation of Oz politicians, businesses and the broader populace. The question remains, what have all of us, the different countries and cultures learned? And with whom would it be best to align?
So Oz, always an insignificant pool of canon-fodder, and cargo-cult suppliers of resources and feckless toadies to the imperia seems to have awoken to the meaning of its natural bounties and its location in Asia and the Indo-Pacific. All well and good, yet we have continued to stand sucking cans and pissing into the wind of complacency and dependence and drunk-on-tin-pot-power bungling.
Now that our once revered ‘western’ suckling sow has bloated itself to imminent destruction, and the wars of global discontent heat up, what are we to do? Wait for tourists that don’t afford to come? Re-open haberdasheries, revive the milk bar and open more cafes and restaurants? Hand-fill the potholes and resort to wooden sleepers? Or paper it all over with joint wrappers, arts and social science degrees (not that I have anything against those)?
Perhaps we can just nationalize everything and adopt totalitarianism. Then perhaps we could operate by economic coercion, tariffs and embargoes like our inscrutable and highly economically successful Chinese trading partners. Even then we might have a different yet still insufficient critical mass. Are we able to draw a line in the sand and convince all that expansionism and jailing non-conformists only leads to bloat?
Are we able to do anything other than dig it up or pluck it from the land and ship it out? Seems we didn’t need to think too much about that as we were content to live on the crumbs, until the profiteers and cling-on agents swept up those too into their vaults. Leaving the madding crowd of recent also-borns and old curmudgeons screaming “What to fuck am I?”
The world is utterly interdependent. We are totally dependent on others for the critical acoutrements of the modernity to which we have become accustom, so complacency and pissing into the headwinds of global change and instability doesn’t seem like much of a plan to keep the wolves from breaking down the doors.
Given that all the machinations of man are devices which deserve consideration, can we not at least utilize the devices of the system already available (but precarious) to achieve an urgently needed churn for the near term and the essential pivot demanded by mother nature? It’s been clearly stated, and obvious, that it is a race, and just what devices we need to facilitate a reasonable position for ourselves in that race requires some very careful and deliberate calculus.
Nothing these days that governments have to manage are simple. Albeit, we can see the price we now have to bear from having profiteer-guided clueless simpletons in government. All significant endeavors require a plan, otherwise chaos and unwelcome externalities will reign.
Properly constructed plans, as best as possible must have contingencies for the unexpected, but be grounded in contemporary realities. Yet all planners well know that their plans are models by which to benchmark progress and be as ready as possible to adapt to liabilities that may arise. As such, we will certainly depart from the plans which we conceive.
Should we stand still, agog, as we have for the past 10-15 years, the stir-craziness and mistrust that is recently being egged by the olde worlde pirates will surely lead us into an inert asylum of bickering scroungers ripe for the picking. A stimulatory auspice and a reasoned plan has a much better chance of leading us to a new and better beginning, and then further plans from a better base.
Rather than old racial and cultural stereotyping, it seems to me that seeking to understand the stimulatory auspice, and assessing all the lines of the plans and sub-plans might provide for an objective discourse.
There appears to be little doubt that Retched Mediocrity is the least capable of the leaders within the Albanese LABOR government that seems to be crawling towards the next feral elections with the intention of achieving an astounding defeat that will make the Queensland Campbell Newman political debacle look like a kindergarten picnic.
Throwing money and national sovereignty at the US NE military industrial complex immediately places Australia as a third world export economy paying tribute/vassalage for little benefit to Australian voters.
Just think what achievements could be made with $368 BILLION spent on hospitals, health care, medical staffing and staff training. Now what about a very fast train project linking Sydney to Canberra to Melbourne? What about renovating railways to reduce the number of heavy freight vehicles destroying the highway pavement at subsidised cost to the ratepayer?
Our greatest worry since the US Vietnam imperialist war has been the US NE military industrial complex undermining the best interests of Australian voters. Now add the rampant American based FRWNJ organisations with post-truth media reporting that bears no similarity to the facts of any matter (provided by a former Australian now US citizen billionaire) and the corrupt maladministration in Canberra for the nine (9) years of the RAbbott to Turdball to Scummo COALiiton misgovernment implementing policies that create inequity for the benefit of aspiring middle class voters …. Australia is starting to look like the present state of politics in any African third world state.
NEC I have doubts about your rhetoric and view that the constructive multifarious attempts by Labor to re-balance the abject mess left by a decade of slothful inaction, rorting and deceit by the LNP government, on top of the much needed but strangulated attempts of the Rudd / Gillard / Rudd to affect at least some industrial reform in the face of the GFC and the treasonous and belligerant attacks by Abbott, and a decade before of the LNP neo-conservative, anti-science, climate denying corruption and pork-barrelling. And needless to say their leaving of our defense aparatus and m.o. in parlous state of disfunction and waste.
The unrestrained free-market nonsense touted by the LNP has seen the profiteers run amok over the entire globe leaving a trail of wreckage, emptied state treasuries, loss of determinative power and purposeless economic stagnation. But not in totalitarian China, where they are not afraid of their military posture, and have preferred science and a might-backed mode of economic coercion.
Whilst everyone well understands America’s weird paranoiac blood-curdling history, and the sacrifices it made significantly contributing to re-stabilizing democracy against fascism. We also remember the subsequent 50 years of America’s blundering hubris and destructive guile as self-appointed world’s copper and the NE Military Industrial Complex becoming, rather than a tool, but a cause celebre, then a seat of corruption and the enervating source of Amercia’s woes.
To hold Britain and America to account for their post Thatcherite / Reaganite stupidities is reasonable, albeit not discounting the fact that all the other state aspirants participated. Luckily, the march of science and education have informed a significance of decision makers of the errors of those ways, and the necessity of implementing alternatives.
Oz, like Europe and America are not starting to look like peasant states, they are on the brink of collapse, economically, socially and environmentally. The monetary and social chaos has reached fever pitch, even as devices and plans are set in motion to turn the unwieldly ship to avoid running aground. It might be somewhat easier to achieve were it not for the opportunistic criminals like Netanyahu, Putin and the olde profiteering pirates of fossil fuel industrialization.
Your list of suggestions for spending, are all very well, and ongoing, but to a large degree are patching the symptoms of past neglect, as opposed to devising an auspice and a plan for the hugely expensive pivot needed to set in place a renewed and safer industrial setting to secure a productive future.
Oz has never demonstrated a will to go it alone, and now we’re so bound in we can’t. We have made both good and bad choices.
How would you suggest we make our pivot, and with whom?
For Services Australia and ACOSS
Dear Amanda Rishworth and Cassandra Goldie,
In mid 2022, when Services Australia pushed me to a lower rate of payments, I applied for an internal review. Instead of a formal review decision, Services Australia sent me an objection decision made by an anonymous “delegate or authorised officer” and drained thousands of dollars from my payments and via debt repayments. I call it the Fake Review debt scheme but you may have a different name for it.
Every scheme affecting welfare payments has to be published. For instance, when the Robodebt scheme was approved, it was published from the start of the abuse. What about the Fake Review debt scheme? What are the eligibility criteria? What groups of people does it apply to?
Amanda Rishworth and Cassandra Goldie, please explain. Transparency is crucial.