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Traditional defence spending barriers are being broken as the world embraces grey-zone warfare, according to Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles.
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Deputy Prime Minister Marles made the comments during an interview at the Defending Australia Summit on 28 May.
“Our sense of peace and war is nowhere near as binary as it used to be. I mean, if you look at a graph of Defence spending as a proportion of GDP, going back to Federation, it describes a binary idea of war and peace,” Minister Marles said.
“Essentially, Defence spending has been relatively kind of stable and then there’s a war and then it’s like a step graph and then the war finishes and it comes down again.
“But I think that binary notion of war and peace is being broken down right now. I think that’s in part about cyber, in part which I think drives a much bigger grey zone.
“There is a lot more scope for geostrategic contests now than there has been in the past. And I think that does demand that we think about how we fund Defence going forward. But as a government, we’re doing that.
“The levels of expenditure that we are now putting into Defence, certainly relative to the last decade, but relative to the last decades, plurals, is historically significant and large.”
Earlier this year, the federal government announced approximately $53 billion per year in funding for the Defence budget. Defence funding has also been announced to almost double the Defence budget to over $100 billion in 2033–34.
“As the Defence Minister, I’m going in asking for the most resources possible. But public money is hard won and public money should be hard won," Minister Marles said.
“The money that we have won for Defence, not just over the medium term, but over the short term, is of historic significance. It is the largest increase in decades.
“There is a government process; public money is hard won and it remains the fact that whatever bar people want to set, what we have done is more than has been done for decades now. It is right that that needs to occur given the strategic circumstances that we face.”
Minister Marles said Australian capabilities such as the future Virginia Class nuclear-powered submarine and current diesel-electric Collins Class submarine fleet will play a pivotal role in the future defence of the nation.
“If you look at the capabilities that we have operated and can operate, the most significant capability, which shapes our strategic capability, is long-range submarines,” he said.
“There’s not really any out about that, and so we need to be making sure that from this moment through until we’re operating a fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines, that we are evolving our nuclear submarine capability.
“The day that we have that first Virginia Class submarine with an Australian flag on it will be a grand day indeed.”
