Last week Frank O'Shea pointed out that part of the reason that the $50 billion submarine deal passes underneath our intellectual sonar without being challenged is the brain-boggling amount of money which it represents.
For me, as an international lawyer, another klaxon which it sets off is the fact that defence spending goes relatively unchallenged despite the fact that it says much about a country's diplomatic priorities.
As the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz put it in Vom Kriege (On War) 'war is merely the continuation of policy by other means'.
In this age of the terror of terrorism, however, we have unfortunately reached the position where, like a stage hypnotist, all a government (any government) needs to do is to say 'national security' and our collective eyes glaze over and our brain switches off.
The new budget has allocated $32.3 billion to defence to pay for everything from submarines to maritime patrol aircraft, air tankers and training aircraft, and promised to grow the whole defence budget to 2 per cent of GDP (from its present 1.92 per cent) by 2020. Some of these increases may be vital and it is impractical for an average citizen to do a line by line check of the accounts.
However, while we may not be able to challenge the books in detail, we should be asking basic questions like: who are we defending against, how will our big ticket spending items advance this and will they work?
Only then can we sensibly ask whether the money could be better spent elsewhere — especially at a time when the Abbott-Turnbull government has been preaching austerity and a reduction, or at best flat-lining, of government spending in most non-military areas.
Let us take the sub spend, for example. We are told by the Navy in its 2005 book, The Navy Contribution to Australian Maritime Operations, that the roles of the submarine fleet include: intelligence collection and surveillance; maritime strike and interdiction; barrier operations; advanced force operations; layered defence; interdiction of shipping; containment by distraction; and support to operations on land.
"If Australia is buying such offensive weapons, against whom does it anticipate using them?"
It will immediately be seen that these categories are not only very broad but (with the exception of layered defence) generally offensive in nature. Subs are not much use in policing or peace-keeping roles either. The Navy's book observes laconically that '[t]he modern submarine generally has limited utility in