Page 4 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2022

4 EDITORIAL
JUNE 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
WINDS OF CHANGE
NIGEL PITTAWAY | MELBOURNE
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WELL, the federal election has been and gone, Australia has an ALP government for the first time in almost a decade and it’s now time to move on and and start looking to the future once again.
As Marcus Hellyer writes on page 42 of this issue, looking at both the March Fed- eral Budget and the commitments made by the ALP during the election campaign, there are challenges ahead if the projects forecast by the 2020 Defence Strategic Update (DSU2020) and Force Structure Plan (FSP2020) are to remain fully fund- ed in coming years.
The Albanese government has indicated it will deliver its own budget in October, but it’s worth noting that during the elec- tion campaign, the ALP publicly support- ed the level of funding in the DSU2020
ADM understands the ALP has prom- ised to review the cancellation of the MQ- 9B, but the money to fund REDSPICE has to come from somewhere if it goes ahead as planned. And of course, the money di- verted from the Attack-class program will have to be reinvested in the proposed nu- clear-powered submarine project – if that survives – down the track anyway. How will this impact the ALP’s October budget and will Defence spending be at least pre- served, if not grown, in the near future? As the saying goes: time will tell, but we will endeavour to cover any changes in coming months.
This is a nice segue into my next topic: that of transparency within Defence. If you’ve read our previous editorials on the subject, you will no doubt be aware that a clamp down on information – any in- formation – coming from the department meant that, unless something was delib- erately leaked to national newspapers, it was difficult to keep abreast of what was happening. That this clamp down began at the very time the previous Defence Minister took on the portfolio is no co- incidence, but I look forward to a greater level of co-operation between specialist media outlets such as ADM and the De- partment and Government from here on. Once again however, time will tell.
On a brighter note, since last month’s editorial was written there have been two major events; ADM’s Northern Australia Defence Summit in Darwin in early April and AMDA’s Indo Pacific 2022 exposition in Sydney in early May were huge suc- cesses and both events broke attendance records. It may have been a post-COVID ‘high’, but there was a buzz around the halls at Indo Pacific that I haven’t expe- rienced in a while. You can read ADM’s coverage of both events on pages 20 & 36 of this issue.
Finally, and speaking of events, this issue will be distributed at our flagship event, the ADM Congress, on 22 June. Please come up and speak to the team, we look forward to seeing many of you there! ■
“THAT THIS CLAMP DOWN BEGAN AT THE VERY TIME THE PREVIOUS DEFENCE MINISTER TOOK ON THE PORTFOLIO IS NO COINCIDENCE”
and remained com- mitted to spending the $270 billion fore- cast for new capability within the plan.
But the DSU2020 was already under sig- nificant pressure as Australia went to the polls, with Defence having to cough up the majority of the almost $10 billion needed to fund the Australian Signals Directorate’s Project REDSPICE cyber se- curity program. Most of the Defence mon-
ey to fund REDSPICE will come from funding allocated for the now-cancelled Attack-class submarine program, but an early casualty has been the $1.3 billion Air 7003 Phase 1 (MQ-9B SkyGuardian) program. This latter project represented Defence’s long-running efforts to acquire an armed medium altitude long endurance (MALE) remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS). With its axing, Defence no longer has a clear pathway to an armed UAS sys- tem something that’s proving effective on a daily basis in Ukraine.