Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad that the coalition have brought forward this MPI motion this afternoon. I think that much too often this hour is a total waste of oxygen and I tend to avoid it, but this particular subject does deserve further scrutiny. I listened carefully to Senator Johnston's remarks and I found myself in agreement with some of them, particularly where he refers to the direction taken by the 2009 Defence white paper but then the decisions taken subsequently to avoid grappling with some of the priorities that it set out. I think in essence what we have done is set the Australian Defence Force and the Defence Materiel Organisation an impossible task. I was hoping for a contribution from Senator Crossin that would maybe take us back to first principles. Maybe Senator Bishop or Senator Feeney, who do know a fair bit about this area, can help answer some of the questions that I am going to put this afternoon about why we write white papers in the first place and even go back to first principles as to why we maintain the degree of defence spending that we do. Minister Smith put forward, at an Australian Strategic Policy Institute event, fairly recently the standard, which I think would be acceptable and understood by most Australians as to their expectation, that the purpose and the reason why we do this is for 'the defence of Australia against a direct armed attack'. However, the 2009 white paper significantly confuses this. The traditional and most clearly understood explanation of the reason that we maintain the defence forces that we do is for 'the defence of Australia against a direct armed attack'. Actually it is not the direct experience of the deployments in the post-war era, which are obviously a very significant marker and a way to define the period. That is not at all what the Australian Defence Force has been doing. I want to quote an article by Hugh White in the September issue of The Monthly. He is somebody who does an enormous amount of thinking about these issues. He says:

… few people in government or Defence think that Australia faces any credible risk of major military attack, and fewer still believe we could defend ourselves if we did … Of course, apart from defending our shores, the ADF has always had something to do—peacekeeping in the Middle East,—

I suspect he uses that term euphemistically, if the invasion of two countries on the other side of the world could be described as peacekeeping, but we will let that go—

nation-building in East Timor, tsunami relief in Indonesia or fighting bushfires in Victoria—but these aren't reasons enough to have a defence force.

It is an extremely thought-provoking article. To my mind, it goes to an enormous degree to how the 2009 Defence white paper set an impossible range of strategic goals. Since then, as Senator Johnston quite ably demonstrated, the Australian government has failed to provide the resources needed. In effect, that might be a good thing because I think in fact some of the positions taken in the Defence white paper of 2009 are significantly flawed. The procurement decisions that go back several decades and the force structure that prevails at the moment are significantly confused and do not pay regard to the idea that this is about 'the defence of Australia against a direct armed attack'. In fact, what we are kitting ourselves out for is providing force elements to expeditionary invasions by the United States government on the far side of the world or the more prosaic, but to my mind far more important, interventions in our regions where in many instances the ADF were welcomed or, for that matter, those domestic interventions, such as after the floods in Queensland or the Victorian bushfires, where in many instances the first boots on the ground are those of the Australian Defence Force. But the white paper sets us on a path of building 12 gigantic submarines and sets us on a path of procuring joint strike fighters at the cost of billions and billions of dollars. We have kitted out main battle tanks apparently for fighting battles of World War II. There are the air warfare destroyers that appear to be aimed at giving us significant offensive capabilities in the region. But, to my mind, that goes directly against defence minister Smith's observations at the ASPI event. I think there is substantial confusion at the very headwaters, if you like, that then leads to all the ongoing procurement decisions and debacles that we have seen in recent years as to what kinds of security challenges and genuine security threats, of the century that we are now in the second decade of, look like and therefore how we should kit ourselves out particularly, in a more narrow sense, for the role that we want the ADF to play.

There is one issue that I would like to raise and I suppose senators will understand why I raise it. I am going to quote the Lowy Institute, who pointed out as long ago as in 2006:

Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century, overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to cause mega-death and contribute to state failure, forced population movements, food and water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases …

I was reading from a document so I could not tell whether there was eye-rolling around the chamber over the fact that a Greens senator would seek to link climate change as a genuine security threat, because in fact the 2009 white paper reduces that issue to a footnote and suggests that we do not need to worry about climate change as impact on national security until the 2030s, which I think is absolutely delusional and quite dangerous.

If you look at the literature you see that a large number of situations around the world at the moment in various trouble spots and regions of great political and military instability already have the fingerprints of climate change on them. This is not something abstract about parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; it is about water resources disappearing. It is about changes in the ability of given regions to produce food, which can then have direct impacts on political stability.

I understand this from a book which I would thoroughly recommend—I would table 76 copies of it if I had them with me—called Tropic of Chaos, which goes through trouble spots around the world and identifies the fingerprints of climate change. It does not matter whether or not you believe it is human induced. I will come to that in a moment. The ADF apparently developed a classified report in 2007 identifying the threat of climate security, but the white paper, for reasons I cannot fathom, said that it should be dealt with in 2030. The attorney for US Army Environmental Command states:

For the military, whether the warming is caused by man, is naturally occurring, or is some combination of the two is immaterial. The military cannot wait for the science to be perfected to begin planning for the potential effects of global climate change.

We know that budgets are tight and resources are not endless, but I am extremely concerned that we are nonetheless posturing our defence forces for the wrong kinds of conflict. Of course we have to be prepared for direct armed attack, but I believe we have to be prepared for the kind of low-intensity conflicts that are already arising around the world as a result of instability brought on in fragile states by climate change. It is something that I do not believe can be ignored any further.

I do not believe the traditional state-to-state war scenario should be the sole focus of defence spending, particularly in the context of the kind of situations that we are already sending the ADF into, in which some of the gigantic procurement decisions made by this government will be utterly useless. While we are spending money on things like a gigantic fleet of submarines to put us into the South China Sea, air warfare destroyers or Joint Strike Fighters, the enormous opportunity costs of those spending decisions mean that we cannot do certain things. I think that, in fact, directly undermines our defence capabilities. The lack of a consistent, coherent, honest and independent national security strategy is seriously a threat to us at the moment. Defence spending without that national security strategy really undermines our security.

With greatest respect to Senator Johnston, simply quoting defence spending as a ratio of GDP is utterly valueless. Who cares? Are we getting value for money? Are we getting the kind of capabilities that we are going to need to confront the security challenges of this century? Those are the things that I want to know. The financial metrics that Senator Johnston is putting before the chamber I dismiss as completely irrelevant. What matters, I think, is whether we are going to be properly positioned to face up to the genuine security threats, what our strategy is for meeting and responding to those threats, mitigating those that we can, adapting to those that we cannot mitigate and only then coming to the decision of what role we want the ADF to play. The opposition have declared themselves not competent, because the senior leadership team is infested with climate change deniers. Can you imagine if you took into national security debates denial of the most significant security threat of the 21st century and simply pretended that it was not happening?