Page 22 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2021

22 DEFENCE BUSINESS PARTNERING
JUNE 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
PARTNERING
FOR SUCCESS
SARAH PAVILLARD | SYDNEY
How Australian manufacturing businesses and
Defence join forces to unlock latent Sovereign Industrial Capability and secure Australia’s future will be key if the government and industry are to deliver a truly capable ADF.
TAKE a moment to consider the challenges facing Australian businesses right now, particularly in the technology and man- ufacturing sectors. For some, the challenges are existential.
Many have hit a major slump. Their key market, oil and gas, is not just contracting, it’s tanking. They believed that key customers would never shut down, but in 2020 – the year of COVID-19 and devastating bushfires and floods – many of them did.
Now, more than ever, Australian businesses need to se- cure supply chains and become more resilient.
The decline of Australian manufacturing, driven by glo- balisation, high labour costs, changing markets, technologi- cal transformation, economic protectionism, shorter prod- uct lifecycles, and supply chain uncertainty, is accelerating.
In parallel, megatrends centering on climate change, accelerating urbanisation, and shifts in economic power require markets and demand to be re-evaluated, and new products and capabilities to be developed and evolved.
Thankfully, sovereignty and resilience are now well and truly on the national agenda – not only because of policy tweaks responding to the triple-shock fire, flood, COVID crises, but also because it’s in Australia’s strategic inter- ests to do so.
A FORCE FOR GOOD
The Australian government detailed a new approach in its 2020 Defence Strategic Update & 2020 Force Structure Plan, evolving the strategy set in the 2016 Defence White Paper. This update identified key changes in Australia’s strategic circumstances, most notably that:
• the most important strategic realignment since WWII is happening in the Indo-Pacific (Australia’s neighbour- hood) right now
• the potential for high intensity conflict, whilst still un- likely, is increasing
• we no longer have a 10-year strategic warning time for that potential conflict, therefore, Defence planning has to change.
This new approach recognises the need to grow ‘the
ADF’s self-reliance for delivering deterrent effects’, and sets as a priority ‘more durable supply chain arrangements
and strengthened sovereign industrial capabilities to en- hance the ADF’s self-reliance’.
Defence is pivoting to respond to this rapidly changing and increasingly complex international strategic environ- ment, with government committing $270 billion over the next 10 years to fund investment in support of the future force’s capability required to meet these challenges.
In addition, there will be approximately $180 billion al- located to the long tail of sustainment, with a total of $575 billion allocated to the Defence budgets alone.
The government is driving Defence to deliver on its
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