Page 58 - Australian Defence Magazine July-August 2022

58 DEFENCE BUSINESS VIEW FROM CANBERRA
JULY-AUGUST 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
VIEW FROM CANBERRA
With each new government comes many familiar faces, plus a new band of politicians, some with interesting pre-politics life experiences. But at this early stage,
it seems the new parliament features a record low number of MPs with actual military experience.
A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | CANBERRA
STARTING with the new Labor ministry. Prime Minister An- thony Albanese has no military experience. Neither does De- fence Minister Richard Marles, Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy, Veterans Affairs Minister Matt Keogh or Assis- tant Defence/Veterans Affairs Minister Matt Thistlethwaite.
Going down the list, the first with actual military experi- ence is former Labor leader Bill Shorten who served in the Army Reserve 1985-86 and now minister for the NDIS.
And that’s it.
On the other side, Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Has- tie is a former member of the SASR who served in Afghani- stan. That makes him a very rare MP indeed, one with actual combat experience.
Equally rare is Shadow Assistant Defence Minister Phil- lip Thompson, a former infantryman who deployed to East Timor and Afghanistan, where he was severely wounded in an IED explosion.
Starting at the top of the coalition, Opposition leader Peter Dutton – who might have been Defence Minister – is a for- mer policeman. Deputy Opposition leader Sussan Ley has no military experience and neither does Nationals leader David Littleproud.
But deputy Nats leader Perin Davey is another Army Re- servist with service in the Ordnance Corps in 1990-93 and 1998-2005.
The next with actual military experience is Shadow Assis- tant Treasurer Stuart Robert, a former Army officer who de- ployed on the peacekeeping mission to Bougainville in 1998.
Then there’s Gavin Pearce, Shadow Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services, a 20-year Army veteran and signaller who served in East Timor.
This is just the members of the Labor government min- istry and opposition shadow ministry, drawn from profiles published on the parliament website. It doesn’t include back- benchers and hasn’t been updated with details of newcomers elected on May 21. This correspondent isn’t expecting too many more with military experience.
This is very different from the aftermath of the world wars when Australian politics was dominated by men who had fought in the trenches of the western front and later in North Africa, the Pacific and the skies over Europe.
Does this matter all that much? It depends. In an era of increasing regional and global uncertainty, it helps if those making the decisions have a grasp of the realities of military service.
On the other hand, politicians are the ones in charge, not the military, and a little distance between the two would ap- pear to be not a bad thing.
Some members of the commentariat suggest the advent of Labor is an opportunity to lay down the law to Defence, to demand it look outside its traditional paradigm of large, expensive and increasingly vulnerable platforms which take decades to acquire; and a force structure which ultimately relies on the US to gallop to the rescue.
Labor may well get that opportunity. New governments typically want to make their mark on Defence, usually by way of a new White Paper or Force Structure Review, or both.
Sometimes the timing is just right, sometimes not.
For example, the Howard government released its Defence 2000 White Paper in December 2000. Just over nine months later came 9/11 and more than a decade of engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, for which the ADF wasn’t espe- cially well equipped or prepared.
The immediate issue for Labor will be sustaining de- fence funding on the trajectory initiated by the former gov- ernment. It’s said it will but that may be supremely chal- lenging in the face of other policy priorities like climate change and inflation.
For those politicians with no defence experience, there’s always the ADF Parliamentary Program, launched in 2000 in recognition that diminishing numbers of politicians had served in the ADF.
Each year, the ADF offers a range of activities – fly in a fast jet, go to sea on a submarine or warship, even deploy overseas. Many MPs have participated, some enjoying it so much they’ve been back on multiple occasions. ■
ABOVE: Now leader of the National Party, MP David Littleproud is shown the use of a Blaser Tac 2 sniper rifle in Iraq during an ADF Parliamentary Program in 2017
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