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June 21, 2025
Saturday 21 June 2025
Ben Packham and Sarah Ison
The Australian
Richard Marles will come under fresh pressure at next week's NATO summit for a substantial boost to Australia's defence spending, taking the heat for Anthony Albanese who has decided against attending the conference to seek a meeting with Donald Trump.
The Defence Minister will fly into a raging debate on military funding at the June 24-25 summit in The Netherlands, after his US counterpart Pete Hegseth warned America's allies had to urgently "step up" defence investment.
"As the President has rightly pointed out, it is only fair that our allies and partners do their part. We cannot want their security more than they do," the US Defence Secretary said.
The Prime Minister earlier suggested he might fly to The Hague for the NATO conference to have another crack at a meeting with the US President, who cancelled their scheduled sit-down at this week's G7 conference in Canada to return to Washington to deal with the worsening Iran war.
But senior government sources confirmed Australia would be represented at the summit by Mr Marles, not Mr Albanese. They added that the Prime Minister would continue to seek a meeting with the President at the earliest opportunity.
Mr Hegseth recently called for Australia to lift its defence budget to 3.5 per cent of GDP a massive increase from the current 2 per cent level but well under the 5 per cent the US is demanding of its NATO allies.
Mr Albanese pushed back at the demand earlier this month, declaring: "We'll determine our defence policy."
The US Defence Secretary told the Senate Armed Services Committee that America needed its allies to become "force multipliers".
"We applaud those allies who are stepping up, but others need to do so and quickly," he said. "At the NATO heads meeting next week, we expect NATO allies to commit to spending 5 per of GDP on defence and defence-related investment.
"With NATO stepping up, we now have a new standard for allied defence that all of our allies around the world, including in Asia, should move to."
Mr Marles and Mr Hegseth will likely discuss the US's snap 30-day AUKUS review at the summit, following its announcement last week. There is growing anxiety in Canberra over the exercise, given the importance of the pact to ensuring Australia's future submarine capabilities, and wider concerns that Australia's influence in Washington DC is waning due to a lack of a solid leader-level relationship between Mr Albanese and Mr Trump.
Former Defence official Michael Shoebridge said Mr Hegseth's latest comments gave Mr Albanese and Mr Marles "nowhere to hide".
"They need to be making some rapid calls to Treasurer (Jim) Chalmers," the Strategic Analysis Australia director said.
"No wonder the PM has cancelled any plans he had to be at the NATO chiefs' meeting next week. Being the lonely outlier who's unwilling to invest in his own nation's defence while NATO leaders around him lift their game would be more than awkward.
"That's a job for the Deputy Prime Minister."
Mr Albanese's next likely opportunity for a face-to-face with the US President is in September, coinciding with a sitting of the UN General Assembly in New York.
That timeline would leave the Prime Minister unable to directly lobby Mr Trump before the completion of the AUKUS review.
Mr Trump left this week's G7 summit in Kananaskis early to focus on the chaos in the Middle East, scrapping his planned meeting with Mr Albanese without a phone call courtesy afforded to other leaders who missed out including India's Narendra Modi and Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum.
Mr Trump is scheduled to attend the NATO summit but there was a risk he could be called away again or fail to show up, forcing him to cancel on Mr Albanese for a second time if the Prime Minister tried to arrange a meeting.
Australia is part of a NATO partner grouping known as the Indo-Pacific Four, which includes Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and New Zealand's Christopher Luxon will be at next week's summit, while South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is reportedly considering attending.
The Coalition urged Mr Albanese to attend the NATO summit regardless of Mr Trump's plans to discuss the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Opposition finance spokesman James Paterson said a meeting with Mr Trump would be a "bonus" but urged against decisions on summits to be based on hoped-for presidential meetings.
"Frankly, I think his approach of now waiting seven months to go and see the President and not going to see him in Washington DC, relying on a chance meeting on the sidelines of an international forum, is a very risky strategy as we saw at the G7," Senator Paterson told Seven's Sunrise.
He said Mr Albanese should attend the summit to talk to European leaders about the consequences "of failing to invest adequately in defence industry in peacetime".