Page 135 - Australian Defence Magazine October 2019

tralian government with more than ten years advance notice to prepare its defence policies. The economic woes of the day hampered policymakers’ efforts to refocus on defence and foreign affairs.
Regrettably, the February 1942 Japanese attacks on Darwin proved that Australia’s defence plans for the north were woefully insufficient, despite 10 years’ grace to pre- pare for such an eventuality.
44 years later, Professor Paul Dibb’s landmark 1986 review of Australia’s de- fence capabilities provided the much-need- ed intellectual rigor to firmly cement the importance of Northern Australia in our collective strategic psyche. And till this day
it’s hard to dispute Dibb’s argument that ‘If we are to project credible military power in the most vulnerable part of the continent, we require a larger permanent presence in the north of Australia.’
Defence White Paper 1987 affirmed that Australia faced ‘no presently identifi- able military threat, except for the remote possibility of global war’. It also asserted that no regional country had the ‘capacity, nor the motivation, to sustain high level military operations against Australia’.
Such thinking was underpinned by as- sumptions that Australia would have more than 10 years notice of a serious decline in our strategic circumstances: and as such
more than enough time to prepare, should such preparation be deemed necessary.
For some Australian strategists at the time the Darwin attacks had left a lin- gering suspicion that a decade is a short period in defence policy terms. So, DWP 1987 noted that Australia might be vul- nerable to a low-level campaign of harass- ment across its large coastline and sea ap- proaches and as such a need to think about defending the North.
Collectively Dibb’s review and DWP 1987 provided Australian policymakers with an intellectual foundation for de- fence capability development and policy. They also made clear statements on the
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