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In his fireside with former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon at the 2026 ASPI Defence Conference, Senator James Paterson took the view that Australia\u2019s political and military leaders had arrived at a largely correct diagnosis of its strategic problem: the country remained, in important respects, unprepared. But they hadn\u2019t fully broken the news to the patient. The question for elected officials in particular was what to do about it.<\/p>\n
Paterson, the shadow defence minister, wasn\u2019t alone in that opinion. Fitzgibbon, who as defence minister in the prime minister Kevin Rudd\u2019s government delivered the 2009 Defence White Paper, found little to disagree with him about. Bipartisan consensus, as both observed, is highly characteristic of Australian defence policy.<\/p>\n
That can be useful: it can help avoid a level of politicisation and instability that would ultimately be damaging. But the subtext of Paterson\u2019s remarks was that bipartisanship, at least in the current sense, is no longer enough. Its tendency to depoliticise has lent itself to a style of elite management of defence policy that speaks to the voting public in reassurances, to Parliament in selective opacities and to Beijing in the language of stabilisation. In all three, Paterson would prefer candour.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s much to be candid about. Preparedness, or the lack of it, has many aspects. Looming in the background is the serious possibility of a major war in the region \u2013 most likely a war prompted by China\u2019s ambition to conquer Taiwan.<\/p>\n
This would not be a war of choice, as has been Australia\u2019s consistent experience in recent decades, but a war, as Paterson said, \u2018brought to our doorstep through no choosing of our own\u2019. It\u2019s this possibility that throws more immediate issues of preparedness, many of which aren\u2019t new, into sharper relief.<\/p>\n
Delivering capability to agreed scope, schedule and budget remains a deeply fraught enterprise. Indeed, it would be hard for an opposition senator to be more critical of the acquisition enterprise than the government is, as is implicit in the ambit of its ongoing reform effort. The depth of the Australian Defence Force\u2019s munitions inventory is likewise the object of concern. In Paterson\u2019s view, no one has spelled out to the public the implications of modern warfare\u2019s rapid consumption of supplies and equipment, as seen in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n
Talk to any person in uniform, in private, not in Senate Estimates, and they will tell you they\u2019re worried about their service\u2019s level of preparation for conflict, that they don\u2019t think we are ready, that we are not spending enough on sustainment and maintenance, that we have limited supplies and stocks of munitions and other things we need, and that it would only take a matter of weeks of a high intensity conflict in our region before we find ourselves unable to resupply ourselves. That\u2019s diabolical.<\/p>\n
Diabolical, yes, but the truly wicked problems don\u2019t arise until you start trying to solve those described above. That takes money, and a public mandate for higher defence spending will need to be built. Scaremongering, Paterson and Fitzgibbon agreed, cannot build it. Nor can an elite politics \u2013 \u2018in\u00a0language\u00a0which is inaccessible to [the public], conducted in places where they are not\u00a0participating\u00a0in, including in rooms like this\u2019, in Paterson\u2019s words \u2013 do the job if it remains walled-off from the public, giving reassurances with one hand, taking fractions of GDP with the other.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s tempting to collapse the question of candid defence policy into a question of how often the government does, or should, call out China\u2019s aggressive behaviour. Naturally, as a member of the opposition, Paterson argued that there was more room for such criticism. But his call for candid conversations was more about the quality than the quantity of what the government airs in public.<\/p>\n