Last month, I was alarmed by the Rudd Government’s expressed intentions to arm us to the teeth at great expense in response to some supposed ‘China threat’. I wrote a stream of alarmed posts. Not only didn’t the Government’s position make much sense in strategic terms, but I just couldn’t see how we could afford the tens of billions required to fund this silliness. Thankfully, Ross Gittins has been able to reassure us all today, based on thin tank analysis, that the whole thing was a spinmeister’s three-card trick:
Ten days before the budget, Rudd stood in front of a frigate (where else?) to release the defence white paper, which he claimed was “the most comprehensive of the modern era”.
He had a much bigger and grander vision for defence than his predecessors, which he backed up by promising to spend a lot more money: a more generous indexation arrangement, plus extension of the commitment to real annual growth of 3 per cent out to 2017-18, then 2.2 per cent real until 2030. The cost would be covered by $20 billion in internal savings.
Just 10 days later, Wayne Swan stood up in Parliament (why not in front of a bank or the Mint – have his spin doctors no imagination?) to deliver the budget and promptly reneged on the deal.
Phew, had me there for awhile.
The gap between Rudd’s bellicose announcement and Swan’s budgetary reality is too short to allow an interpretation that the Government changed it’s mind. Still, I am relieved that it was all a bit of spin to disguise the fact that the defence budget has been effectively cut, again according to think tank analysis quoted by Gittins:
“As best we can estimate (the budget papers do not disclose the total size or timing of the deferrals), around $8.8 billion of funding has been taken from the first six years of the defence budget. Of this amount, some money is returned in the last three years of the forthcoming decade and some is deferred into the next decade. We cannot say how much falls into each category.”
As spin goes, it’s breathtaking stuff. But, it’s better than the madness of contributing to an arms race.
