Defence Minister, Senator Lynda Reyolds delivered a speech yesterday in Western Australia. The hard-hitting parts of the speech, and the source document can be found below:
"Australia’s strategic environment – across all of our three oceans - is complex, is increasingly contested and is changing rapidly. It has changed more rapidly than anticipated in the 2016 Defence White Paper. Let me be quite blunt. The world we all grew up in is no more. Major power competition, militarisation, disruptive technological change and new threats - are all making our region less safe. Some countries are modernising their militaries and increasing their preparedness for conflict. Some nations are increasingly employing coercive tactics that fall below the threshold of armed conflict. Cyber-attacks, foreign interference and economic pressure seek to exploit the grey area between peace and war. In the grey zone, when the screws are tightened: influence becomes interference, economic co operation becomes coercion, and investment becomes entrapment.
Transnational threats also remain. Terrorism, violent extremism, organised crime and people smuggling. And the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much an active and unpredictable threat. One that is dramatically altering the global economic and strategic landscape. As the Prime Minister observed in his speech last Wednesday, he said this; “…we need to prepare for a post-COVID world that is poorer, that is more dangerous, and that is more disorderly.” All of these pressures are contributing to rising uncertainty and tension. The prospect of high intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific, while still unlikely, is less remote than in the past. We must adapt to these new challenges.
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