Minister Richard Marles’ defence spend boasting is off target and sinks the truth about Australia’s shortfall

Richard Marles flew to London to meet his fifth UK Defence Secretary in as many years, armed with a new excuse for why he is not raising defence spending.

“We now have defence spending at 2.8 per cent of GDP by the NATO measure puts us ahead of most NATO countries, with the exception of the Nordics, the Baltics, Poland,” he said as he departed Washington DC, for the trip across the Atlantic.

At the Pentagon, the US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “emphasised the need for capable allies to contribute to the collective defence and invest in their own sovereign security”.

This is a retreat from an increasingly discredited Secretary and dysfunctional Trump Administration, which used to explicitly demand that Australia raise its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP.

And Labor is gloating. Mr Marles boasted that Australia’s spending was so good that it was: “On this day, in respect of defence, ahead of Germany, ahead of Britain, ahead of France, ahead of Spain, ahead of Italy.”

Even if this statement told the whole truth, it is hardly desirable that Australia’s benchmark for national security and resilience is, well, we’re not as bad as Europe.

Is that really the standard Labor wants to set for the nation given the Government itself says the country faces “the most challenging strategic circumstances since World War Two.”

But even here, there is important context that upsets the minister’s brag.

Firstly, a reminder. Mr Marles has not raised defence spending in any meaningful way; all he did at the last budget was cook the books.

He did this by adding in things like military pensions that Australia did not previously consider constituted defence spending and objectively do not contribute to any new capabilities for the army, navy or air force.

But if he was going to do a transatlantic comparison, he obviously missed the fact that he was flying into a raging political debate in the UK over exactly this point — does Labor take the threat it faces seriously and will it fund defence accordingly?

The very justification for his lightning trip to London was to meet his newest British counterpart Wes Streeting. The two rehashed the usual lines about Australia and the UK working through AUKUS to uphold the rules-based order and supporting Ukraine.

There was no new development from their meeting, and Mr Marles and Mr Streeting did not even allow journalists into their posing-opportunity for the television cameras.

If they had, they would likely both have faced pertinent questions about their commitment to backing those words with actual funding to buy equipment and boost the size of the military.

This is because Mr Streeting quit the Cabinet when Keir Starmer was the Prime Minister and was looking at a tilt at the top job himself.

He did not succeed. It took the resignation of John Healey as defence secretary to force Sir Keir out the door.

Mr Healey quit on the day the last time Mr Marles was in the UK, leaving him a jilted bride at HMS Portsmouth, the British naval base where they were due to rendezvous for the cameras.

Why? Because Mr Healey said Russia could attack the UK as soon as 2030, and Sir Keir was refusing to raise defence spending to 3 per cent by then, to meet the heightened security threat.

Mr Healey is now Chancellor of the Exchequer and dismayed many with his refusal in recent weeks to commit to spending the funds he is now in charge of, to the level he said was required when he was in the job just a few months ago.

Mr Healey suggested that the Starmer government was only going to raise defence spending to 2.68 per cent by 2030, a paltry increase of 0.08 per cent.

He is promising to set out a clear path for military funds when he hands down his first budget next month. What he chooses could define his legacy and the rest of the Burnham government’s credibility. He could quickly morph from being viewed as the Cabinet’s most honourable and capable figure to Judas.

This is why Tan Dhesi, a Labour MP and Chair of the Parliament’s Defence Committee, used Mr Burnham’s first Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons this week to warn the new leader that “vibes alone” would not protect the country.

“Defence is definitely one area where vibes alone just isn’t going to be enough. Will the Prime Minister urgently commit to charting a pathway to reach 3 per cent of GDP spent on defence by 2030, which, as his Chancellor rightly noted, is critical to keeping our country safe?” Mr Dhesi said.

Imagine for a moment if a Labor MP in the caucus had the guts to use their Question Time opportunity to challenge Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on behalf of the nation in the same way.

But even in the UK, where a sizeable number of Labour MPs do take national security seriously and believe it needs to be funded, they struggle to make their colleagues understand the urgency of the task.

Labour MP Diane Abbott, who had been suspended for anti-Semitism under Sir Keir, but welcomed back into the party under Mr Burnham, said that a imminent Russian threat to the UK was a “NATO fiction”.

The UK’s opposition leader Kemi Badenoch has seized the initiative, announcing as Mr Marles touched down on UK soil that if the Conservatives were returned to power, she would cut ballooning welfare payments to pay for defence to meet a 3 per cent commitment in four years.

“Our enemies are not going to sit around until Labour find the money to fight them. Russia will attack a country it thinks is weak,” she said.

“National security is not just about tanks, boots on the ground and planes in the air. It is about our cyber defences; it is about our energy security; it is about our country’s resilience.

“National security does not just happen we also have to pay for it, and that means spending more money on defence.”

Ms Badenoch rightly pointed to the attempted Russian drone attack on the German Leipzig Airport last month, where drones loaded with explosives were found near planes, including a Ukrainian jet carrying weapons.

She noted that Britain had been subjected to Russia’s systematic attacks on infrastructure as well.

What Mr Marles’ humblebrag also failed to note, was that Europe is taking defence extremely seriously and those who aren’t, like the Spanish socialist President Pedro Sanchez, and to a degree, the UK Labour government, are losing credibility amongst NATO allies. NATO’s big spenders like Poland, have called on the UK to step up.

So Labor relishing in winning a battle of pygmies is surely a pyrrhic victory.

But in singling out Germany, Mr Marles overlooked an inconvenient truth. Germany is staging one of Europe’s greatest turnarounds on defence spending.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz last year did something very un-German. He successfully changed the constitution to release the country’s brake on debt so the country could raise funds to pay for the defences it needs.

As a result, Germany is rapidly re-arming. Chancellor Merz is doubling his country’s defence budget in four years from 1.43 per cent of GDP in 2021 to 2.69 per cent this year.

By 2029, the defence budget will be worth €162 billion, above 3 per cent of GDP and well on track to meet 3.5 per cent of GDP in 2035.

Australia, by comparison, would reach a NATO target of 3 per cent in 2033 and 2034. So while Mr Marles is correct to say that right now, Australia’s fudged figures put it slightly in front of Germany, what he is not telling the Australian public is that Germany is on a clear trajectory to overtake Australia and very soon.

Mr Marles and Mr Streeting joked that they would “get to work” when they met at Horseguards. Both their time would be well spent convincing their prime ministers that defence cannot continue to be an optional priority.