Australia’s Prime Minister, Defence Minister and Chief of Defence Force have addressed a major security summit in Singapore, giving their perspective on the security challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region and the wider global defence and security environment.
They were speaking at the annual Shangri La Dialogue, which is organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies – Asia (IISS-Asia) and brings together defence ministers from across the Indo-Pacific and the world to discuss and enhance security in the region.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered the opening keynote at the event, where he threw his support behind the Biden Administration’s efforts to pursue continued dialogue with China’s leaders.
He cautioned in his speech that events spiralling out of control in the region because both sides were not speaking to each other, whether over events in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere, would be disastrous for the world.
“If you don’t have the pressure valve of dialogue, if you don’t have the capacity at the decision-making level to pick up the phone to seek some clarity or provide some context, then there is always the greater risk of assumptions spilling over into irretrievable action and reaction,” he said.
Albanese was speaking on the evening of 2 June, the same day ADF chief General Angus Campbell addressed a special session of the summit ahead of its official opening.
The session was on the challenges of Asia-Pacific military capability development, where he noted that as “an island nation bound by three oceans and one that largely depends on a range of just-in-time imports, Australia is extremely sensitive to changes in international supply chains.”
This impacts the defence sphere as “sophisticated military technologies are often constructed with unique and complex components (and) most countries, including Australia, do not possess many of these components in large quantities, nor do we currently possess the industrial capacity to manufacture them,” GEN Campbell said.
“The consequence is that this creates significant dependencies – dependencies that must be reliable when the defensive sovereignty and national interest is at stake.”
Defence Minister Richard Marles addressed the summit in a plenary session on Sunday where he touched on the recent Defence Strategic Review (DSR), telling the audience that it recognises that Australia “must be able to contribute with our partners to the collective security of the Indo-Pacific and the maintenance of the global and regional rules-based order”.
“Indeed, these are now articulated tasks of Australia’s Defence Force. Our government views Australia playing its part in maintaining and building regional peace as being at the heart of why we have a defence force,” he said.
Consulting and reassuring Australia’s regional neighbours was also a key theme of the Australian remarks at the dialogue, with Marles reiterating that prior to announcing the AUKUS nuclear-powered-submarine deal, Australia’s government made more than 60 calls to regional and other world leaders.
This process was repeated “in the days leading up to and following the Defence Strategic Review… while our diplomatic network was active in briefing counterparts across the globe.”
He added that while "it is for individual countries to judge how successful that effort was, what must be completely clear to all is that the intent on our part is to be as transparent as possible about what we are doing, the way we are doing it and why, because a secure region requires balance, and balance requires transparency."
ADM will bring you a detailed report of CDF General Campbell’s address in our ADM Premium newsletter this week.