Tracey Roberts (Pearce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Deputy Prime Minister. What is the importance of the Defence Strategic Review and how will the review influence Australia's future military capability?

Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Pearce for her question and congratulate her for election to this place and the wonderful first speech that she gave last week. In 1985, the Hawke government and defence minister Kim Beazley commissioned the head of joint intelligence at the time, Paul Dibb, to undertake a defence strategic review, which he handed down in March 1986. It was the underpinning of the strategic settings for the 1987 Defence white paper and every white paper since, including the most recent in 2016. It was a seminal piece of work, which has given us strategic thought around defence for the last 35 years. Central to it is an idea that if anyone means to do Australia harm we will be given a 10-year warning. The 2020 Defence strategic update observed for the first time that we are within that 10-year window. It was a profound observation, and one with which this government agrees. It has left a very big question hanging. Given that, what are we going to do about it? And the job of answering that question has been given to the Defence Strategic Review that the Prime Minister and I announced this morning.

You could not want two more eminent and qualified Australians to undertake that review: Professor Stephen Smith, the former defence and foreign affairs minister, and Sir Angus Houston, the former Chief of the Defence Force. This review will look at issues of force posture—this is the force posture review that we committed to during the election—but it will do much more. It will look at questions of structure and capability and ask and answer foundational questions. Given the complexity of the strategic circumstances that we face, given the difficulty of those circumstances, what is the job that we want our Defence Force to do? In that sense, this review will be much more significant even than the Dibb review of 1986.

We've asked Sir Angus and Professor Smith to report in the first part of next year, and this will happen concurrently with the body of work that is being undertaken with the United States and the United Kingdom under the banner of AUKUS to provide Australia with a nuclear powered submarine capability. That's important, because it will allow both bodies of work to apprehend each other and will allow them to cross-pollinate.

Together, these bodies of work will provide the strategic foundation for defence thinking for decades to come. Underpinning both will be a core mission: how do we keep Australians safe. That will always be the first priority of the Albanese government.