Labor’s best policy might be admitting Red Sea defence gap

In his speech to the Lowy Institute on Tuesday night, Mr Albanese invoked former prime minister John Curtin’s recalling of Australian troops from the Middle East to fight the battle of Australia in the Pacific during World War II as the start of the Labor defence and foreign policy tradition of anchoring Australia’s strategic policy in Asia.

Mr Albanese also rightly said that “what Australia says and does on the world stage matters to our security” and that foreign policy shouldn’t be “just a catalogue of things that happen to us”.

The strategic reality – opposed to the partisan myopic mythology – is that Australia has global defence and foreign policy interests that are protected through its network of international friendships and partnerships within the overarching security guarantee provided by Australia’s most important 72-year ANZUS alliance with America.

Despite his origins in Labor’s “Midnight Oil” wing, Mr Albanese’s strong backing of the AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement has shown that he is no “anti-US forces” zealot.

But nevertheless, the explanation for not dispatching a ship to the Red Sea, proffered by Mr Albanese, of making support for America in Asia the priority, still risks being politicised by the Coalition into some failed loyalty test of Labor’s commitment to the US alliance.

This would not represent a major military commitment, just pulling our weight in a routine international policing task.

It might therefore be in the government’s interests to admit, despite how scandalous this is, that this high-income middle power with an annual defence budget topping $52 billion does not have even one ship to send to help calm the waters and keep trade flowing freely through the Red Sea.

It would be an embarrassing admission that advertises Australia’s defence weakness – something which may now be obvious to friend and foe alike anyway.

The blame, with some justification, could be shifted onto the previous nine years of Coalition rule before Labor came to power in 2022.

Yet this would also put pressure on Labor’s ambitious defence strategic review, its supposed blueprint for Australia’s defence planning and resourcing in coming decades.

Australia’s Department of Defence has a long history of botching troubled defence projects featuring glacial decision-making, cost blowouts, poor implementation and bureaucratic incompetence.

In a more geopolitically dangerous world, Australia needs to spend more on defence to boost the capabilities of its military forces, starting with the $368 billion investment in the AUKUS deterrence.

But taxpayers need to be confident of getting value for money from the top brass and boffins in charge of major defence projects.

That it appears Australia may not to have a ship to spare to help round up a few modern-day pirates hardly augurs well for future efforts to close Australia’s seemingly gaping defence capabilities gap.