Against a backdrop of overt Chinese military aggression toward Australia and its neighbours and autocratic regimes banding together, defence analysts have long-warned the public is not fully aware of how dire the global security landscape is.
Mr Marles said on Thursday that while the average Australian might not be “across all the kind of changes that we’re seeing in terms of warfare that’s playing out in the Middle East and Ukraine”, the was “a fundamental sense of unease out there about the state of the world”.
Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles says the ‘public mood is about where it should be’ on Australia’s security threats. Picture: NewsWire Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
“Do I think that gives a licence to increase defence spending? I do, and as a government we have,” he told an Australian Strategic Policy Institute conference, adding that “the public mood is about where it should be”.
“I do sit here feeling we are in a deteriorating strategic environment – I think … a very complex one, and I think there are many aspects of that which are quite threatening.
“That does not mean that I sit here thinking that conflict is an inevitability.
“I don’t feel that at all. I think we need to be in a state of preparation, but I am very hopeful that, managed correctly and managed with the right preparation, we can have deterrence in place which maintains peace and stability.”
He added that he did not think “the public mood imagines that we are on the eve of war”.
Taking questions from the floor, Mr Marles was by a self-identified Philippines academic why the Albanese government spoke more openly about conflicts further afield rather than “grey zone operations being conducted against my country, against Japan, and also against Taiwan”.
“And even in respect of how we would conceive of what’s going on in Ukraine is about the way in which it might feed into the Indo-Pacific.
“We see Ukraine as relevant because the moment China and Russia signed a no‑limits agreement on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became a moment that what happened in Ukraine would see lessons learned that would be applied in the Indo-Pacific.”
Russia has increasingly relied on North Korean troops for its war in Ukraine – a point Kyiv regularly makes when stressing the need for Australia’s support.
