Over the past two decades, Defence has staggered from one budget crisis to the next, trying to afford the unaffordable. Of the five White Papers issued between 1976 and 2009 for which ex post fact …
Tag Archive for: "defence spending"
The government looks set to spend somewhere between $8 and $10 billion on F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which would then constitute the bulk of the RAAF’s air-combat capability for decades to come. The aircraft has …
China has once again raised its defence spending by a double digit percentage. There’s nothing new about that; the average rate of growth since 2002 has been 14.6% according to official figures. Usually, the annual …
In late February, I attended the Ditchley Park conference on power rivalries in Asia. A sub-theme of the conference was to explore whether the region was being drawn into an arms race. Like all good …
Yesterday I appeared in front of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Public Accounts and Audit. It’s not my usual haunt, but they were holding a public hearing into the Australian National Audit Office’s Audit Report …