Concerns over Australia's defence buildup

Updated May 4, 2009 20:01:20

The The Australian government has announced an overhaul of its defense strategy which many are seeing as being aimed at China. In it's white paper released over the weekend, the government said that the United States remains crucial to its defense strategy but other major powers such as China and India are emerging. There's be to a boost to spending over the next twenty years, with significant new investment in naval and air capability, including 12 new submarines. The new defence policy paper has sparked debate about whether the country is doing enough to ensure capacity for operations like Solomon Islands, East Timor and even Afghanistan.

Presenter: Linda Mottram
Speakers: Australia's defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon; Professor Alan Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

MOTTRAM: The long-awaited white paper has a strategic rationale that's all about China's rise and its influence on power relativities in the Asia Pacific region.

Australia's defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

FITZGIBBON: While its true, and we make the assessment in the white paper that the U.S. will remain dominant over the next 20 year period, its also true that there will be a number of other superpowers floating around. The emergence of China and India for example, the re-emergence of Russia means that in the future there won't be just one superpower, there'll be a number of substantial powers. And its natural that that sort of change can lead and probably will lead to strategic competition and maybe strategic tension which in turn can turn into miscalculation.

MOTTRAM: The paper restates Australia's strong links to the South Pacific and East Timor by shared geography and history. For both humanitarian and strategic reasons, it says, Australia has an enduring interest in helping build stability and prosperity in the region. It foresees though continuing weakness .. economic and political .. and significant need for Australian assistance, including through defence deployments.

But it takes a swipe at China's role in the Pacific, as Beijing pumps money into Pacific states and is perceived as buying influence in competition to the West. The paper says:

WHITE PAPER QUOTE: Australian interests are inevitably engaged if countries in the region become vulnerable to the adverse influence of strategic competition.

MOTTRAM: In the broad, the paper says conventional war-fighting is the primary role for the Australia Defence Forces, first and foremost in defence of the Australian continent with a heavy focus on the Asia Pacific region as Australia's sphere of interest.

It foresees a continuing role in stabilisation, humanitarian and peace-keeping operations, such as those in East Timor and Solomon Islands.

The rationale has given rise to a promise of Australia's biggest defence acquisition program since World War Two .. multi-billions of dollars worth of submarines, ships, fighter jets and land-attack cruise missiles with a range up to 2,400 kilometres.

Some analysts say the plan isn't balanced, that most of the equipment, if it can even be afforded in the first place, will never be used, particularly given the more usual recent use of Australian forces in humanitarian, peace-keeping and stabilisation roles.

Professor Alan Dupont is director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

DUPONT: If you look at the conflicts Australia has been traditionally involved in, they are pretty heavily weighted towards boots on the ground, humanitarian intervention, peace keeping, peace enforcement, Afghanistans and Iraqs of this world. You need to have a lot of ground forces and supporting architecture for that. So a lot of the equipment we've got I don't think we're going to use. And we're putting a lot of money into those particular buckets.