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While a seemingly well-intentioned solution to the workforce challenges facing Australian defence industry, encouraging skilled migration will not help Australia overcome the structural challenges facing the STEM sector and will only exacerbate our allies’ defence industrial backlog, writes Liam Garman.
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This year’s Defence Strategic Review (DSR) spared no detail examining how workforce shortages will impact Australia’s ability to prosecute war, with both Defence and our industrial base feeling the squeeze of staff shortages.
In fact, the document went as far as to outline that the Royal Australian Navy faces a “challenge” ensuring readiness to conduct future operations on behalf of the Commonwealth and even onboarding next-generation capabilities into service.
“Navy faces the most significant workforce challenges of the three services,” the DSR reads.
“Assuring an adequate workforce to sustainably meet enterprise priorities and transformation, government-directed tasking, readiness for future contingencies, and transitioning new and technologically advanced capabilities into service is Navy’s biggest challenge.”
The threat to Australian national security posed by workforce shortages is real.
However, plans by the government to bolster Australia’s workforce through skilled migration overlooks the structural roots of the issue: that we aren’t producing STEM graduates as rapidly as we need, we do not yet have the recruitment infrastructure in place to recruit our future warfighters, and that Australians are seemingly apathetic over national security.
Chilling statistics capturing Australian indifference to our national security were released by the Institute for Public Affairs following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, illustrating that only 46 per cent of Australians were willing to fight for the nation in the event of an attack. The number drops to 32 per cent for those aged between 18–24, with 40 per cent suggesting that they would leave the country.
Regarding Australia’s industrial base, it was reported that demand for engineers in Australia is outstripping supply, with demand tipped to continue growing. Such changes require long-term and phased planning to ensure a steady flow of STEM professionals, rather than short-term solutions.
Meanwhile, it takes some 300 days for prospective Defence members to join the Australian Defence Force. Amid skyrocketing cost-of-living pressures, we can’t reasonably expect young Australian men and women to wait for enlistment day at the expense of long-term employment.
While such structural problems will make it increasingly more challenging to recruit staff, poaching skilled workers from our allies will only worsen their ability to manufacture defence materiel – leaving us no safer.
Speaking to News Corp in an interview last December, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese detailed the government’s plans to rely on skilled migration to plug Australia’s workforce gaps through the introduction of instruments such as the AUKUS Visa.
This will, to the Prime Minister, enable Australia to tap into the expertise available in British and American industry.
However, this logic has a fatal flaw. The US and UK supply chains are experiencing their own substantial backlogs and poaching their skilled workers to bolster our own industrial base following decades of neglect is a zero-sum game.
That is, any immediate win for Australia will be offset by a reduction in our allies’ ability to produce defence materiel.
So much so are workforce constraints harming our allies, that a recent US Congressional Research Service report even questioned whether the sale of Virginia Class SSNs was in the US’ best interests.
“A potential alternative to the proposed sale of Virginia Class SSNs to Australia would be a US-Australian military division of labour under which US SSNs would perform both US and Australian SSN missions while Australia invested in military forces for performing other military missions for both Australia and the United States,” the report queried.
“Such a US-Australian military division of labour might be broadly similar to military divisions of labour that exist between the United States and its NATO allies.”
It isn’t hard to see why our allies are second-guessing these agreements. As reported by Defence Connect senior journalist Robert Dougherty in mid-July, maintenance backlogs in US shipbuilding are growing.
In fact, 37 per cent of the US SSN fleet is caught in maintenance or awaiting depot maintenance, up from 21 per cent in 2012.
This is not to mention the much reported delays in UK submarine building, with the long overhaul period and refuel for the HMS Vanguard three years overschedule and an estimated £300 million over budget.
There are, of course, also the obvious concerns regarding allowing foreign workers to gain access to classified information (no matter how big or small) amid the growth of “citizen spies” who can collect a substantial quantum of information bit by bit, or even Australians working with foreign spies.
Long-term problems ultimately require long-term solutions, this includes encouraging young Australians to pursue a career in Defence and defence industry. Relying on stop-gap solutions, however, will leave us all worse off.
