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Transcripts
April 17, 2026
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Great to be with you.
GRAEME GOODINGS: Do you support increased defence spending?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I do, but it's not really clear just how much the government has increased defence spending and how much they've changed how they measure defence spending as part of the Deputy Prime Minister's announcement yesterday. He said that we're moving to measure defence spending in the same way NATO does and we're now going to count things like military pensions as part our defence spending. Well, that is spending that was already happening, and just counting it as part of a different measure of defence spending doesn't put any new capability in the hands of our men and women in uniform and doesn't make us any safer, it's just an accounting trick.
GRAEME GOODINGS: So you see it as an accounting trick, the money isn't going where it needs to be, should there be more money spent, or are we allocating it in the wrong areas?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: We should absolutely be spending more money, much more quickly. This government asked Sir Angus Houston, a former Chief of Defence Force, Professor Peter Dean and Stephen Smith to do a review of our defence strategy, and they produced a report for them. Since that report has been completed, both Sir Angus and Professor Dean have publicly said Australia needs to be spending 3% of GDP on defence. Now they don't mean by that, we need to change how we measure how we spend defence and start counting things we're already spending and let's call that 3%, they meant an increase in defence spending to 3% of GDP on actual defence capability, not just changing how we count things, and that's what the government announced yesterday.
GRAEME GOODINGS: What you're saying effectively is that a Coalition government would commit to the US requested 3.5%?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: No, I'm saying that we need to increase our defence spending and our best informed Australian experts tell us that we need to be spending about 3% of GDP if we want to successfully deliver AUKUS without cannibalising the capability of our other military forces. I mean it's very clear this government has cancelled a lot of military capability in order to pay for AUKUS because they've refused to sufficiently increase defence spending. So, for example, things like infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled howitzers, military satellites, hunter-class frigates, F-35 jets, they have even told reservists that they can now no longer do 200 days of service each year, they can only do 150 days of service. If they were properly funding defence, they wouldn't need to have cuts like this.
GRAEME GOODINGS: Australia and the world is probably in a more unstable state at any time since the Second World War. What capability gaps in the current strategy worry you most?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I think one of the biggest is our inadequate air and missile defence and to the government's credit they say they're going to spend more money on that. But they've been in government for four years now and this is not a new problem, it's a problem that's been very obvious at least since Russia's invasion of Ukraine has become much more stark in the war in Iran. So that includes both air and missiles defence of our northern bases and cities and key infrastructure like ports. It also includes our own drone and counter-drone capability, and the government says it's going to spend more on this, but a lot of this spending is backdated; a lot of it's not going to happen until the 2030s, and that's just not fast enough.
GRAEME GOODINGS: Do you think that in the future we can rely on the US the way we have in the past?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I'm a big believer in the US alliance, and although I understand that the current administration is an unconventional administration, I think the alliance fundamentals are still very strong, and we're strongly supported by the US. I think we're also in a different moment of history than we were, say, in the 1990s. This is not the unipolar moment anymore, it is a more multipolar environment. And that means that countries have to do more to protect themselves. We can be both a good ally to the US and do more protect ourselves by spending more on defence.
GRAEME GOODINGS: What do you make of what Donald Trump said only a few hours ago? I'm not happy with Australia because they were not there when we asked them to be there.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: It's at least a third or fourth time that Donald Trump has called out Australia on this issue, and the Deputy Prime Minister earlier on your program said that we haven't had any official requests from the United States, and the government's been repeating that mantra, but Donald Trump clearly thinks there has been. I think this needs to be clarified. I don't think it's a healthy thing for our relationship to have this public difference in understanding between Australia and the United States and I'd like to know when the last time the Prime Minister spoke to President Trump and whether he's sought to clarify this with him.
GRAEME GOODINGS: Around the nation, there's a lot of high-value defence land. Should that be sold to fund our defence capability?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I think there's certainly some defence land which is surplus to requirements which could be sold without harming capability, but I am concerned about some of the sites that the Albanese government has flagged that they are going to sell. I'm particularly concerned about the Victoria Barracks, which there is one each in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and other really significant military heritage sites around our country. Serious countries don't sell off their military heritage like that. Once it's gone, it's gone forever, and I think it would be a real mistake to get rid of that for a few bucks. Particularly when we could solve this problem just by increasing defence spending from the annual appropriation of the government.
GRAEME GOODINGS: Technology changes by the day. Do you think we should be investing more heavily in drones and autonomous systems? I mean, it seems to be working well for Ukraine and Iran, and it seems to be a cheaper way of fighting a war.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: We certainly must be doing that. We are in the age of missiles and drones, and both Ukraine and Iran have shown that the power of asymmetry, where a smaller country, a less well-equipped military, can make a very bad day for a much larger military with much more sophisticated capabilities by using relatively cheap munitions and drones. And Australia doesn't have enough of it. We need much more of it. The government has indicated they're going to do some of that, but I just think the pace is not where it needs to be. We're moving at a peacetime glacial pace when we are told repeatedly that the warning times are gone for future conflict, and it could break out at any moment.
GRAEME GOODINGS: If the Coalition was in power tomorrow, what would your first steps to bump up our defence be?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well we certainly would be increasing our defence spending much more quickly than this government is and to a higher level than this government has promised to and we would be spending on things like air and missile defence, on drones, on Australia's own long range strike capability, and it wouldn't be necessary to have the cuts that this government is delivering to the Australian Defence Force because we'd be properly funding them. I mean, in the announcement yesterday, the Deputy Prime Minister disclosed $5 billion dollars of cuts in the forward estimates. Apparently, it is now $10 billion worth of cuts over the decade, and the government is only saying one capability that they're cutting to meet those savings, and that's the Spartan aircraft. But they haven't disclosed what the other cuts would be to meet that figure, and it's on top of those other cuts I've talked about before. I mean, this is not the time to be cutting military capability, this the time to be increasing military capability.
GRAEME GOODINGS: Senator James Paterson, thanks for your time today.
ENDS