Australia is still acting as though it were in deep peace. It needs to throw the lever to anxious peace.
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Even though the country finally realised a few years ago that China's rapidly growing strength threatened to militarily upend the Western Pacific, we're doing hardly anything to immediately beef up our armed forces.
What's deep peace? It's like Europe in 1926, when not much was happening strategically and, quite rightly, people and governments took little interest in military affairs.
Our situation is more like 1936, when Britain and France saw a risk of war and were urgently building up their firepower. It was peace, but it was anxious peace.
We're not in their 1938 situation, when they were just about certain that war was coming and were moving heaven and earth to prepare for it.
Kim Beazley, now governor of Western Australia, was our extraordinarily capable defence minister in 1984-90, back in our long decades of deep peace. He said last month: "The price of failure on my part as a minister or my department was small. Now it may be existential."
But we only have to look at the government's defence planning to see failure - a failure to accelerate the fielding of additional military capability.
The government suddenly likes to talk a lot about national security, apparently for electoral reasons. What a pity that it just likes to talk.
Planning should have been turned upside down in a big defence policy statement issued in July 2020. The document should have said that plans to buy certain weapons had been accelerated, urgent acquisition of another kind of equipment had been added, and all this would be paid for by deferring stuff that was irrelevant to the Chinese threat.
Instead, the policy statement mostly plodded along with previous planning - even though it (realistically) announced the chilling news that we could no longer assume we would not suffer a major attack within 10 years.
Successive defence policy statements add new acquisition plans as the horizon moves further out. In general, it added them out on the horizon, in the 2030s and 2040s, not the risky 2020s.
This is the behaviour of a country that is still in deep peace, one that has no reason to be anxious.
Prime ministers in times of anxious peace do not appoint a succession of ineffectual politicians as defence minister. Malcolm Turnbull knew enough about the growing Chinese threat in 2015, but he still promoted a mere backbencher, Marise Payne, to the Defence portfolio.
In 2018, Scott Morrison handed Defence to Christopher Pyne, a reasonably senior minister. But he was one who turned out to care less about defence than pouring its budget into projects in his home state, South Australia, to improve the government's electoral chances. No doubt that was what Morrison wanted.
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As late as 2019, Morrison decided the next defence minister should be Linda Reynolds, who was at least as ineffectual as Payne. It was Reynolds who presided over that inadequate 2020 policy statement.
Morrison finally acted with responsibility last year when he put heavyweight minister Peter Dutton into defence. Unfortunately, as this column pointed out last month, even Dutton is proving incapable of overcoming the inertia of his notoriously unmanageable department, though he is at least planning to speed up processes for buying equipment.
We can only hope that he tries harder.
What about our promised nuclear submarines? Well, a country in anxious peace doesn't make plans for a critical new addition to defence capability and say it may be fielded almost 20 years later, as the government did when it announced this change in naval planning in September.
At least there's been good news in that evolving program lately. Dutton now says that "the capability" (which should mean operational availability of the first submarine) can be realised in the first half of the 2030s.
What he won't say is that the government will drop the time-wasting plan to build the submarines in Australia. And that brings us to the next example of deep-peace mentality where we should instead see anxious activity.
Paul Keating used to say no one should stand between a premier and a bucket of money. Well, I wouldn't want to get between Scott Morrison and a rack of hi-vis vests.
A government that's anxious about national security doesn't waste the defence budget on unnecessarily making weapons domestically when it could buy more of them faster by importing. But the Liberal-National government has become compulsive in looking for ways to turn defence spending into opportunities for the prime minister to dress up as a factory worker and tell voters that he's creating jobs.
The defence budget is for creating defence, not jobs.
Planning to build nuclear submarines in Adelaide is only the most outrageous example of this irresponsibility.
The government also intends to set up manufacturing of missiles in this country, supposedly because doing so would make us more independent in wartime. In fact, it will do little more than guarantee that our missiles cost more and take longer to deliver.
Dutton was pleased last month to order 30 self-propelled guns - a low-priority kind of equipment if ever there was one. Ludicrously for so small a number of weapons, they'll be built in Geelong. Even if bought by the hundreds, army vehicles should be fully imported.
Disgracefully, Labor raises no objection to this maladministration.
When will such nonsense stop? When will this country cease acting like it is in deep peace and begin to move with anxiety?
- Bradley Perrett was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.