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Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has appeared visibly rattled in a recent televised interview regarding pressure to increase Australia’s percentage of GDP spend on defence.
The Minister for Defence appeared to be restrained by prime ministerial policy to maintain defence spending at 2.3 per cent, during a recent television interview with ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson on 24 July.
“We live in an era of strategic contest and I think what really shapes the landscape that we face is the very significant increase in defence spending that we’ve seen from China itself, which is the biggest increase in conventional defence spending that we have seen since the end of the Second World War,” Minister Marles began during the interview.
“That’s what fundamentally shapes the region in which we live. It’s happening without strategic reassurance; in a sense that there’s not a clear articulation of why that defence spending is occurring.
“It’s in those circumstances that we clearly need to be making sure that we are facing the complex strategic circumstances that we are in the best possible way and it’s why with we have engaged in significant defence spending to this point in time.”
Outside Australia, there has been significant uplift in global defence spending on military equipment and industrial production as a priority sector among NATO allies (5 per cent of GDP spend by 2035) and the United States to meet growing concerns about deterrence and potential military conflict with Russia and the People’s Republic of China.
The Deputy PM has previously broken rank stating that a 5 per cent defence expenditure is “understandable” and “conversation we (Australia) are totally up for in terms of the way in which we engage with the United States”, during a media conference at the Shangri-La Dialogue on 1 June earlier this year.
In contrast, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly affirmed that Australia will remain at 2.33 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) on defence by FY2033–34, in line with the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, 2024 Integrated Investment Program and National Defence Strategy.
“We have made really clear and the Prime Minister has made really clear that we will go through the (defence spending) process in our own national interests in terms of assessing what our strategic challenge is … And we will resource it,” Minister Marles reiterated during the interview.
“We can point to the process that we’ve been undergoing, which has seen the biggest peacetime increase in defence spending in Australia.
“The process that we’re going to go through is assessing our own needs in our own national interest. And the Prime Minister has been really clear, as have I, that that’s the methodology that we are going to use here.
“People will look to outcomes … we will continue the process of assessing our needs … we’ll continue to go through that in terms of working out how this evolves and what our needs are and then resourcing them. But we have got runs on the board here.
“The last thing I’m going to do is go into the kind of conversations that happen between our two defence forces (of Australia and the United States) ... We speak to each other’s counterparts. So, we are in contact with the Pentagon and those who are running the (AUKUS) review in the Pentagon and again we have a very clear line of sight about what’s happening with the review, the time frame of the review and the way in which it will be conducted.”
