The Question of Defence Spending !

 Defence spending is another of those big ticket items that confuse many taxpayers, but doing defence on the cheap would bring disaster to Australia.  Our great land mass would be a tempting target to others in an over populated and hungry world.

Our defence planners contend that we need a fleet of twelve modern attack submarines to guard the sea approaches and they have closed off the nuclear option because of the cost factor and the fact that electric boats are harder to detect because they run silently compared to their nuclear counterparts.

We invited world tenders for the supply of these units and the successful tenderer was France.  The completed shells and engines will be constructed in France and shipped to Australia, where they will be fitted out and armed in South Australia.  This will create the industry skills we need to maintain this arm of our defence force locally without the need to send them overseas for repair.

Initially, the cost of these twelve submarines was estimated at $50 billion Australian dollars.  It has now blown out to $80 billion and it is claimed that the government hid this fact from the public from the start  of the project.  All defence work is constantly affected by technology improvements that make it impossible to estimate the final outcome.

What is important is that this money buys us cutting edge defence equipment.  The lives of the men and women who will deploy it if the country is threatened depend on it and our defence planners are confident that it has the capacity to deter an unfriendly nation from entering our home waters.

We have the good fortune to be free of land borders which are harder to protect.  Our nation is surrounded by sea and that makes defence by both our navy and air force vitally important.  We are not facing any immediate threat, but putting a long term defence in place is reliant on the time factor and years will pass before these submarines are operational.

At the present time, our biggest danger comes from a technician sitting at a keyboard in another country and using his or her skill to hack into our computer network.  The computer has become so integral to our banking, electricity supply and other controls of industry that a sabotage attack is capable of stopping the nation.

It is important that we develop the skills to be able to reply in kind.  A communications war where countries sought to shut down their rivals commerce could be very effective and hard to track the point of entry. The cyber war is predicted to be a weapon of the future, but in reality makes a first strike capacity.

Defence will always be a big ticket item when it comes to keeping the nation safe.  We would do well to remember our vulnerability to a cyber attack and plan accordingly. There is not much point in having the sea approach well guarded if we leave the back door unlocked - and open !