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| Royal Australian Navy ANZAC class Frigates |
By Helen Clark
Subs, shipbuilding, terrorism and the South China Sea…the next White Paper will make for interesting reading.
If you read the security and defense news out of Australia you would have been following a few things: submarines (or the debate over same) and shipbuilding, and the promise of a new defense White Paper. The former has seen a recent A$89 billion ($65.2 billion) pledge from Prime Minister Tony Abbott to build ships in Australia, at the South Australian shipyards, with the promise of 2,500 jobs to come from it, which sounds to most like the first election salvo of the season. The subs remain a more complicated issue.
However the White Paper is delayed again. Could this be linked to the somewhat unexpected news over shipbuilding? It’s possible to infer. The last White Paper was published in May 2013 under Julia Gillard’s tenure as a Labor Prime Minister. The Abbott government’s first stab at a paper has been talked about since last year and was supposed to be here earlier.
Andrew Davies, a senior strategist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) told Oceania that 2013’s White Paper was essentially a bit of a stop-gap, holding document, “only ever intended to be a distraction from the defence funding cuts of the previous government, rather than a serious assessment of defence priorities and the strategic environment.” In 2012, defense was cut to 1.6 percent of GDP, one of the lowest spends in many, many decades and the paper actually came a year earlier than promised (it was apparently to be a five-year plan, with 2014 following Kevin Rudd’s 2009 offering).
Read the full story at The Diplomat