Defence and Trump shape Australia’s election

Australia’s cost-of-living election has a khaki tinge and an uneasy international tone.

You know defence is having an impact when a political party promises to raise taxes to buy more military kit, and makes defence its largest election promise.

The domestic dimensions of the campaign have been decisively disturbed by forces beyond the borders.

The broad defence consensus between Labor and the Coalition has always had tacit and explicit dimensions. But much that was once implicit and inferred is now declared. Taboos fade. Sacred cows topple.

The international mantra of the 2022 election was ‘China has changed’. This time it’s ‘the United States has changed’. China and the US are destabilising forces in different ways, but are equally disturbing.

Each pushes Australia to think about defence more and spend more. Thus, the Coalition has promised to spend an extra $21 billion over five years, taking defence’s share of GDP from just over 2 percent to 2.5 percent within five years.

Labor’s plan is to lift defence spending to 2.3 percent by 2033–4, making the point that this is more than 0.2 percent higher than the spending trajectory it inherited. So, in opposition, the Coalition has become more ambitious for military might than it was in office. How times change. The 2.5 percent trek is the new policy norm. With the target agreed, only the timeline is in question.

The Coalition has reversed the standard election question ‘where’s the money coming from?’ Instead, it has announced the cash and said it’ll decide the details in office. The money answer is that Coalition will raise taxes by repealing Labor’s $17 billion tax cuts.

Labor has the military shopping list, the Coalition has the budget. Although coming from those two different directions, the campaign shows a consensus for more defence money, even as politics-as-usual argy-bargy continues over which side has the better record and the smartest plan.

The shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie, said he’s ‘agnostic’ about what to buy with all the extra cash: ‘We’ve got to work out where the most pressing problems lie and then resource them.’

Reflecting the view that political parties are supposed to detail what they’re offering, Defence Minister Richard Marles argued that the Coalition policy has ‘no strategic direction, no strategic purpose’, offering only ‘vague numbers, aspirations, targets, but not one iota of substance’.

A generous view would be that the holes in the Coalition policy don’t show a lack of preparation, but an understanding of the rolling revolution in military affairs. Perhaps Hastie’s hesitation shows he wants to ask big questions about our future defence force. If so, it’s a brave move, because elections demand colour and movement, not a plea for time to think.

To caricature these complex debates about future defence kit, reduce them to a simple either/or equation: missiles and drones versus ships and submarines. Now there’s a proposition to light up The Strategist forever: sure, we want all of them, but even big budgets must make choices about rolling demands.

The other revolution in this campaign is Hurricane Donald. The decade-old Liberal-Labor consensus on the China problem now has a new twin, the understanding that Donald Trump makes the US a less reliable friend, testing the three core elements of Australia’s international policy: the US alliance, the region and multilateralism.

Explaining the Coalition’s defence spending plan, Andrew Hastie referenced the America First shift, stating: ‘We have a strong relationship with them but can’t take anything for granted.’

Journalist and academic Mark Kenny called the Coalition’s $21 billion defence boost the most consequential policy pivot in the election, based on a ‘terrified’ diagnosis that Trump’s US has ‘shifted from a global force of stability to a net creator of instability’.

The twin fear of China and the US is on show in Labor’s announcement of a critical minerals strategic reserve. Australia will stockpile rare earths to protect against ransom demands from China, as the dominant supplier of the minerals. The reserve will be offered to ‘key international partners’, so it becomes an important card in dealing with the transactional Trump.

The US has featured as a strategic factor in other Australian election campaigns: Harold Holt’s ‘all the way with LBJ’ campaign in 1966; Gough Whitlam in 1972 affirming the value of the alliance while proclaiming an Asia-focussed foreign policy; John Howard standing with the US after the 9/11 attacks; and Kevin Rudd in 2007 holding firm to the alliance while promising to depart the ‘bad’ war in Iraq while committing to the ‘good’ war in Afghanistan.

In those previous elections, alliance management stressed the enduring value of the alliance. In this campaign, Australia contemplates the US president as an unreliable bully, and the defence consensus adjusts accordingly.