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April 16, 2026
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CHRIS KENNY: Let's go to the City of Melbourne and catch up with James Paterson, Liberal Senator and Shadow Defence Minister. Thanks for joining us, James. First up, your critique of the speech today by Richard Marles.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Look, there are some good things in it, Chris. I think there is a form of increased defence spending, although exactly how much is not completely clear on what the Defence Minister said today. I think it's good that they've belatedly acknowledged that we're in the age of missiles and drones, but that's four years after the war in Ukraine and many months after Iran conflict has broken out. And I think that it was good that the Defence Minister called out the PRC and their malign activities in the South China Sea in particular. But against that, you have $5 billion of secret cuts in the forward estimates that we don't know what that is for and an unknown amount of further cuts in the medium term. You've got this accounting trickery of pretending that we're increasing defence spending just by counting things like military pensions in the defence spending that we never previously did. And frankly, a pretty petty and beneath him attack by the Deputy Prime Minister on veterans, including generals and people who've served our country, including former defence bureaucrats, because they've been critical of the government's national security and defence policy. I think that was beneath the Deputy Prime Minister at the National Press Club.
CHRIS KENNY: What about this issue of the rules-based international order and the US alliance? You know, these are testing times, and Donald Trump is a testing president for all of his allies. He's done so much without consulting his allies and then asked why they're not on board. But it is an important point, isn't it, that we need to stick with the alliance. Is it much bigger than one president or one set of difficult circumstances?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: The world has changed since the 1990s, Chris, and we should be sober and honest about that with the Australian people. That was a unipolar moment with one dominant global power in the United States, and we're now in either a bipolar moment with China or a multipolar moment if you want to count other powers as well. And we also have, as you say, a US administration that's behaving unconventionally. I don't personally think that means that everything about the international rules-based order is dead or should be abandoned, but we shouldn't pretend that we're in this 1990s Nirvana moment either. Very clearly, it has changed, and it demands something different of us, which is a much greater investment in our own defence and national security and real investment, not just moving money around and pretending that we're spending more.
CHRIS KENNY: Yeah, well, this is the point about the rules-based international order. If it's not imposed by the Western Alliance nations, then it doesn't exist. It's not imposed by the United Nations, the EU, or any of the communist nations. And this point about us needing to be more self-reliant is something that our major ally wants anyway. If there's been a theme of Donald Trump's two periods as president, it's been that allies need to carry their share of the burden. So it deepens the alliance as well as deepens and strengthens our own self-reliance if we spend more and do it more efficiently ourselves.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I agree with you Chris, we will both be a more self-reliant country that's better able to secure our interests in a dangerous world and a better ally to the United States and others if we spend more on defence. And our own best informed experts, people like Sir Angus Houston and Professor Peter Dean, who completed the defence strategic review for the Albanese government, have said that in order to do that, we need to be spending about 3% of GDP on defence capability. Now the Albanese government is trying to fudge that by saying well we're almost sort of kind of spending 3% of GDP if you count military pensions and other things, but counting military pensions as part of the defence budget doesn't deliver one new ship, one new plane, one new missile, one drone, it's just accounting trickery and our men and women in uniform deserve better than that.
CHRIS KENNY: When you talk about the long-term outliers in defence, you have to look at AUKUS and the nuclear submarines many, many decades away. To what extent are you concerned that this could be a redundant technology by the time we get there? There have been so many advances in the use of drones, of course. We're going to be seeing, and are starting to see, autonomous vehicles, underwater vehicles and the like. Could large manned submarines be a thing of the past when it comes to. The strategic assets that this country needs in the future.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I don't share the concern that some analysts have expressed about this, and let's be clear, the US Virginia-class submarine is a generation ahead of its next closest rival under the water and it particularly has a significant edge over submarines operated by the People's Liberation Army Navy. But you don't have to take my word for it, the Chinese Navy is investing very heavily in next-generation nuclear-powered submarines, so they obviously don't think it's a redundant feature, and nor do I. And the truth is that a lot of these uncrewed platforms, the underwater ones and the air ones, are deployed in conjunction with crewed platforms. And it would be a Virginia-class submarine that would help deploy a platform like that to the relevant strategic area of concern. And so I think we need both, and I think that we need to spend more so we can get both.
CHRIS KENNY: And finally, talk to us about defence personnel, both attracting and retaining the key personnel that all of our defence forces need. It's an ongoing problem, isn't it, and how can we or this government or the next government adequately address that?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: It certainly is. We are below the authorised strength of the ADF, and the Albanese Government reduced the target for the number of personnel in the ADF to try to make it easier for them to hit the targets. But we're not going to be able to man all the platforms that we need, including submarines, frigates and other exciting new technology we're acquiring, unless we've got the people to do it. The good news is there is a lot of young people who are patriotic, who are inspired by service, and I understand particularly want to serve on nuclear submarines. It's one of the most popular areas that young people who are signing up to the ADF say they want to be part of. So that's exciting, but we need to reward them, we need back them, we need inspire them, and frankly, I think we could do a lot more to do that.
CHRIS KENNY: Thanks for joining us, Senator. I appreciate it.
ENDS