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Opinion: One year after a 36-point blueprint declared defence Australia’s “no higher priority”, implementation suggests a different hierarchy of urgency.
Twelve months ago, No Higher Priority laid out a 36-point blueprint for immediate action to strengthen Australia’s defence posture between 2025 and 2028.
Produced by Peter Jennings, Michael Shoebridge and Dr Marcus Hellyer, experienced defence strategists at Strategic Analysis Australia, the report was not an academic thought experiment or a 2040s wish list.
It was a practical near-term mobilisation plan built around a simple premise: Australia’s strategic warning time is shrinking, and deterrence in the late 2020s will depend on decisions taken now.
The report’s title was blunt. If the strategic environment is deteriorating as quickly as Australia’s own defence documents suggest, then defence must move money, change timelines, and override institutional inertia – not wait its turn behind climate change initiatives and cost-of-living relief.
One year on, the implementation record offers a revealing test of whether that premise has been operationally accepted.
The underlying argument was that without accelerated action, Australia risks entering a period of major-power instability with insufficient sovereign capacity to deter coercion or absorb shock. Twelve months on: just three implemented, several halfway there, most untouched.
This is a story about how Australia approaches defence policy: we diagnose urgently, we plan extensively, and maybe we act eventually.
Three done, 33 waiting
The three clear wins tell us something about what moves government: visibility, strategic obviousness and regional geopolitics.
Recommendation 7: Reopen the Kyiv embassy with defence representation. This happened because the optics of having closed it looked increasingly untenable as Ukraine’s resistance held and Western support solidified.
Recommendation 32: End the Darwin Port lease. Even a government uncomfortable with singling out China could see that a 99-year lease to a PRC-linked company for Australia’s most strategically significant northern port was indefensible – though notably, the lease hasn’t formally ended yet, just been “committed to ending”.
Recommendation 34: New PNG treaty for stationing Australian Defence Force assets. Delivered through the Pukpuk Treaty signed in October 2025, establishing mutual defence obligations and explicitly facilitating ADF access to PNG facilities including Manus Island naval base and Goldie River Training Depot.
These were achievable because they required announcements, not appropriations.
Then there’s the “we’re working on it” category:
• US Marine expansion to 16,000 in northern Australia? Well, we continue the existing rotation of a few thousand, and people talk about a Marine Expeditionary Brigade, so that’s ... progress?
• Stronger India defence relationship? The Quad exists, we do exercises, ministers meet – all good incremental work, but nothing that matches the step-change the recommendation envisioned.
• Defence spending to 3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP)? Current trajectory reaches maybe 2.4 per cent by early 2030s. Which is to say: we’ve acknowledged the number exists.
• Rapid Acquisition Fund and cutting red tape? Defence is reforming capability development and creating a more independent acquisition agency. Important work.
But no dedicated $1 billion rapid fund, no “Operation Cut Red Tape”, no systematic assault on Defence’s glacial procurement culture.
This is where government announces progress without delivering results. It keeps Defence, Treasury and backbenchers happy while avoiding the hard calls that cost serious money or create enemies.
Most revealing is what hasn’t happened at all:
No B-21 acquisition discussions. No permanent Japanese Self-Defence Force rotations in the north. No formal Pacific Response Force. No 100-day report on National Defence Strategy capability impacts. No PM-convened eminent persons group on the ADF workforce crisis. No Australian-designed armed combat drone in service. No formal mobilisation plan with industry. No F-35B STOVL squadrons. No reduction in senior officer and SES numbers. No ADFA relocation.
These are the recommendations that would require genuine disruption: challenging Defence’s risk-averse culture, spending serious money quickly, confronting capability gaps publicly, or restructuring institutions that don’t want to be restructured.
Translation: We agree the house is on fire. We’ve commissioned excellent reports on fire safety. We’re developing a comprehensive fire response framework. We’ve installed a smoke detector. The house is still burning.
The gap between knowing and acting
Governments prefer decisions that are diplomatically visible, fix obvious vulnerabilities, or can be announced without large, immediate budget shifts. They move far more cautiously on changes that disrupt internal power structures, force hard trade-offs, or require admitting capability gaps in public. This bias shapes what gets done – and what doesn’t.
The 2024 National Defence Strategy warned of a deteriorating strategic environment yet cut air and missile defence programs. Leaders speak of a “decade of concern” while the defence budget is projected to reach around 2.4 per cent of GDP only in the early 2030s – well after any crisis that “decade of concern” might produce.
We acknowledge urgency. We schedule response.
Australia faces a choice: either the strategic environment is deteriorating rapidly enough to justify disruptive action now or it isn’t.
If it isn’t, we should stop using “urgent” rhetoric. Stop writing “deteriorating strategic environment” into defence strategies. Stop talking about a “decade of concern”. Just admit we’re comfortable with the status quo and move on.
But it is. The government’s own threat assessment is likely correct. And therefore the government’s failure to act is either a dereliction of duty or cowardice.
Officials read the intelligence assessments. Ministers review the classified briefs. They write the warnings into public documents. Then they defer the disruptive decisions – the budget reallocations, the institutional restructuring, the public admission of how unprepared we actually are – because those decisions create internal enemies and political cost.
We’re betting Australia’s security on the assumption that our adversaries will wait while we sort out our processes, that deterrence works even when hollow, that strategic warning time will stretch to match bureaucratic comfort. This degree of recklessness is a sign of moral weakness.
When the bet fails, the officials and ministers who chose comfort over capability won’t pay the price. The public will.
Dr Thomas Brough is a City of Albany councillor and emergency medicine specialist. Dr Brough has previously served as an Australian Army medical officer and writes on defence and institutional accountability issues.
