*** Acknowledgements omitted ***

We revere John Curtin as Australia’s great wartime leader – standing up to Winston Churchill to bring our troops home to defend the country; his clarity of vision as early as November of 1936 about what conflict in the Pacific would mean for Australia; his understanding of great power relations with the United Kingdom, but also with the United States. And then on assuming office on October 7th in 1941, the way that, in short order, he organised our national defences, our national security in what would be our most perilous year, 1942.

Yet in the popular press, John Curtin was an unlikely pillar of Australia’s national security. He had grown up literally spruiking the virtues of socialism on soapboxes on the street corners of Melbourne. He was a union leader, Secretary of the Victorian Timber Workers Union, and played a leading role in the anti-conscription campaign in 1916 plebiscite that occurred during the First World War. But Curtin was not a pacifist. Curtin was strategically intelligent. Curtin was utterly committed to the Australian project, to Australian identity. In short, Curtin was an Australian patriot. And in all of that, Curtin was Labor to his bootstraps. Because one of the unheralded lineages of labour philosophy is that the Labor Party is the true party of Australia’s national defence.

You can look at the great Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, and the creation of the Royal Australian Navy in 1913, which to this day, is the single biggest leap that’s ever been taken in Australia’s military capability.

You can look at another Labor Prime Minister, a veteran of World War Two, Gough Whitman, who unified the three service departments into a unified Department of Defence in 1973.

You can look at Kim Beasley, who gave rise to structured strategic thinking through the Dibb Review and the 1987 Defence White Paper, which really has served as the blueprint for defence policy for 35 years.

One of the great contributions that the Labor Party has made to our nation is through national security and defence. And yet again in the popular press, there would be a perception that defence is the brand strength of the conservatives, of the Liberal Party. There’s no doubt that the Liberal Party certainly believe in their own publicity. They have a defence conceit. But the consequence of that defence conceit is that in respect of defence, it has made the Liberals lazy. This was never more exemplified than in the nine years of the Abbott Turnbull Morrison government. Over that period, there were three prime ministers, but perhaps just as significantly, there were six, really seven, different defence ministers. Because they did not see the job of the Minister of Defence as a responsibility, they saw it as a trophy.

Toward the end of the Rudd Gillard government, a decision was made that we needed to settle on a replacement of the Collins class submarines – the most important military platform that the Australian Defence Force has – with its end of life coming in the 2020s, right now. Yet, the Abbott government were in and out of an arrangement with Japan. Then the Turnbull and Morrison governments were in and out of a deal with France. It would not be for eight years before the Abbott Turnbull Morrison government finally fixed on a solution. Indeed, we might argue that the only reason they fixed on that solution is that they were voted out of office six months later, and it was Labor who fixed it.

They made an art form of making grand Defence announcements without putting any funding behind it – in relation to ships, missiles, more soldiers. By the time we came to office, there were $42 billion worth of defence commitments that they’d made without a single dollar behind it. Fully one quarter of what defence was required to procure, there was no money for. Obviously that represented an enormous deceit on the Australian people. But what it also meant was there was an army of public servants who were working on various defence projects in the complete knowledge that not all of them could come to fruition, because there simply wasn’t money. But which project succeeded and which failed was not a matter of strategic necessity, but simply which public servants were doing better. And in that moment, the Liberals let go of the strategic levers of our nation.

When they did spend money, they spent it badly – 28 different projects running a combined 97 years over time.

They appallingly mismanaged relationships with our nearest neighbours. They literally made jokes of our neighbouring countries in the Pacific.

They presided over a shrinking Defence Force. In the time that Peter Dutton was the Minister for Defence, the Defence Force shrunk by 1,400 personnel. And what we now know through the Defence Strategic Review is that in those final years of the Abbott Turnbull Morrison government, secretly but effectively they cut defence funding.

All of that meant that the legacy of the Abbott Turnbull Morrison government was to give to this country a lost defence decade at a time when we could least afford it.

When we came to office in May of 2022, it was clear that under the AUKUS arrangements there was no expectation of a new nuclear‑powered submarine entering into service in the Royal Australian Navy until the early 2040s. Even with an extension in the life of Collins class, a capability gap had opened up of a decade. So one of the first challenges that we faced was reaching an arrangement, which we did, with the United Kingdom and the United States, which will see us purchase Virginia class submarines that will be in service in the Navy, not in the early 2040s but in the early 2030s, closing the capability gap.

We engaged in a root and branch review of our strategic landscape, understanding that the former government was really operating on a set of strategic assumptions that dated back to the Cold War. And yet we live in a very different world, one where we are seeing great power contest play out within our region, a contest the mode of which and the outcome of which is uncertain. And where we’re seeing China engaging in the single biggest conventional military build-up the world has seen since the end of the Second World War.

All of that means that our strategic landscape is far more complex, and it is far more threatening. The threat is not that Australia is about to be invaded, the threat is that Australia can be coerced. Because as an island trading nation, with a growing percentage of our national income being dependent on trade, we are very reliant on a rules‑based order which underpins the physical economic connection between Australia and the rest of the world, our sea lines of communication, those sea lanes. And so the challenge for our Defence Force, for our military capability, is to defence those lanes. As it is to make our contribution to the collective peace and security of the region in which we live. Because it’s very hard to conceive of the defence of Australia without conceiving of the defence of the countries to our north.

The insight that comes from those two observations is that the geography of our national security lies less on the coastline of our continent, but much further afield. And what that in turn means is that in terms of the military capability we must have, it must be able to project. That’s why we need a capable, long‑range submarine, but it’s also why we need a highly capable surface fleet.

What we inherited was the oldest combatant surface fleet since the end of the Second World War, with no prospect of a new surface combatant entering the Navy until the mid-2030s. We’ve changed that. We’ve put the Navy on a trajectory to doubling the size of our surface combatants, with the newest of them being received by Australia in the 2020s.

We know that we need longer range missiles, and we know that we need a quantity of them which will make our arsenal relevant. But to achieve that, we simple have to make them here. So we’re investing heavily in the establishment of a guided weapons and explosive ordnance industry in this country, and this is not in the never, never. Indeed the beginnings of that manufacture will happen this year.

We have totally changed the relationships with our near neighbours in defence terms – a step up in what we’re doing with Korea and Japan; for the first time, joint sails with the Philippines; a Defence Cooperation Agreement with Indonesia; deeper and more extensive training with Singapore; the prospect of a Defence Cooperation Agreement now with Papua New Guinea; much greater engagement with Fiji and New Zealand; for the first time, the Indian initiated Malabar exercise is being held in Australia; remarkably, we’ve signed the first ever Defence Cooperation Agreement between Australia and the United Kingdom, and; force posture initiatives between Australia and America have also grown.

We are dealing with defence recruitment. This year we will enlist 5,800 personnel. That’s the biggest enlistment into the Australian Defence Force since 2008. It means we can stand here on this day and say that at last, again, the Australian Defence Force is growing. And because we have a strategic clarity in what we’re doing, we’re able to make difficult decisions which makes the defence budget sharper, and makes the quality of the defence spend so much better. And yet we also understand that we have to increase that spend, and that’s what we’ve been doing – $50 billion in the budget over the next 10 years, more than $5 billion in the forward estimates. Together they represent the single biggest peacetime increase in Australia’s defence budget since the end of the Second World War. And it’s actually happening right now. If you look at the financial year ‘23-24 defence has spent its largest ever amount out the door on defence procurement and this year will be larger again.

But while we’ve been doing all of this, there is absolutely no sign that the Liberals have put their defence house back in order. They are still making policy on the run. 

We saw a couple of weeks ago an idea that if elected they would seek to purchase a new squadron of F-35s, as if there is an F-35 shop, which I can tell you there isn’t. There is no prospect of any of those planes entering into service for years and years to come. But even then, the $3 billion which they have put aside for this, they acknowledge will not cover the maintenance or sustainment of the aircraft, will not cover the housing of the aircraft, or, more importantly, will not cover the pilots who will fly them. The F-35s are an exquisite platform. They greatly increase the capability and lethality of the Royal Australian Air Force. But it is to state the obvious that an F-35 sitting on the ground doesn’t do anything. 

We have watched the Liberals breathlessly wave their fists at China, as we have seen a Chinese task group in the vicinity of Australia over the last few weeks. They have implored our government to do something, but exactly what they would have us do is not at all clear. What we have done, is we have surveilled that task group in an unprecedented way, with both Navy and Air Force assets, so that we know where it has gone, what it has done and the exercises it has practiced. And that has stood in stark contrast to what the Liberals did not do three years ago when there was a Chinese navy warship in the vicinity of Australia. They’ve utterly missed the point that the Royal Australian Navy operates much more in the proximity of China than the Chinese navy operates in the vicinity of Australia. And this is not gratuitous. That’s because this is where our sea lanes are, that’s where we need to be asserting freedom of navigation. But they would have had us fall into the trap of establishing a standard in relation to the Chinese task group here, which would have greatly inhibited the activities of the Royal Australian Navy there.

Then, in the last two weeks, we have seen the astonishing and shameful stance that Peter Dutton has now taken in relation to Ukraine. 

Let’s be clear, three years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. Not by reference to international law, but by reference to power and might. And so, what is happening there is a defence of Ukraine, but what is happening there is also a defence of the global rules‑based order upon which we rely. And so first the Morrison government and then ours, has stood in steadfast support of Ukraine over the last three years. $1.3 billion worth of military support. And we’ve understood that we have been doing that, with the bipartisan support of the Liberal Party.

In the last two weeks, that now appears to be changing. There is the prospect from our friends and allies of a request for Australia to provide peacekeepers in a certain scenario. And what we have said in relation to that request is that we would consider it in good faith, seeking to do what we can, as we have considered every request that we’ve received over the last three years. But already Peter Dutton has utterly ruled that out. He cites capacity constraints with the Australian Defence Force. He says that he doesn’t want to see Australian personnel based in Europe. And yet, there are already Australian serving men and women in Europe, in Great Britain right now training the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And we hear, astonishingly, his shadow minister now say that he believes the rules-based order is dead and buried. We have a very different view. We stand with Ukraine and we stand in defence of the global rules‑based order.  

What we are seeing from the Liberals right now is a shameless attempt to create political division in respect of defence. Because for them, defence is not about Australia’s national interest. Defence is only about their political opportunity. 

Perhaps most astonishingly is the stubborn refusal of the Liberals to support Labor’s increase in defence spending. All we get are these vague assertions that they will always spend more, they will always be better than Labor when it comes to defence. They ask us to accept the vibe of the thing – defence philosophy straight from the mouth of Dennis Denuto. 

This next election will principally and rightly be fought on the basis of cost of living, on access to affordable healthcare, to education, on jobs and real wage increases. We really look forward to that contest.

But as you look at news abroad, as you feel a sense of unease about what is happening to the world today, it is completely obvious that who governs Australia over the next three years will have a profound impact on our national security, over our defence and strategic policy. It will have an impact on the country that we hand to our children and to our grandchildren. 

The Liberals are offering nothing more than a chaotic set of ramblings, a return to the lost defence decade. When it comes to defence, they are lazy and indolent. Their ideas are hair brain and they are populist.

What we offer is an Albanese Government that will be thoughtful about our strategic circumstances. That will protect our national sovereignty. That will defend Australia. A Labor government in the grandest tradition of John Curtin.