Whether it was a cynical and disrespectful political ploy or just a happy accident, the launch of the government’s new Defence Strategic Review (DSR) on the eve of Anzac Day was rather appropriate. The event was, like Anzac Day, a familiar ritual centred on the recitation of well-worn phrases whose real meanings have faded with time and repetition.

This particular ritual is staged on a roughly triennial cycle. Monday’s event was the fifth occasion since 2009 that an Australian government has solemnly announced that it has fundamentally overhauled Australia’s defence policy to face the challenges posed by the rise of China. There was Kevin Rudd’s Defence White Paper in 2009, Julia Gillard’s in 2013, Malcolm Turnbull’s in 2016 and Scott Morrison’s Defence Strategic Update in 2020. Each time, they warned of bigger strategic risks, proclaimed new strategic concepts, promised radically enhanced military capabilities, pledged root-and-branch reform of Defence’s dysfunctional bureaucracy and vowed to spend whatever it takes to keep Australia secure.

And each time, nothing material changed. Australia’s defence effort continued on its wasteful and directionless way, becoming more divorced from the realities and less equal to the demands of a strategic environment that is becoming as dangerous as they say.

This week’s DSR conforms precisely to this pattern. Its authors boldly state that it is not “just another Defence review”, but that is exactly what it is. And we can confidently predict that about three years from now there will be another one just like it, making all the same promises and delivering the same negligible results. The fundamental reason for these serial failures in policymaking is that our governments decide our strategic objectives – that is, what we want our armed forces to be able to do. It should be self-evident that this is the essential first step to determining what kinds of forces we need, and the more demanding our strategic circumstances become the more clearly we must do this. We cannot “focus” our force on its key tasks – as the DSR says we must – until we know what those tasks are.

But this is hard, because the choices we face today are big and very scary. The alternatives are clear enough, and quite familiar because they are essentially the ones we have confronted throughout our history: either we support our ally or defend ourselves. But we face this choice today in new and unprecedented circumstances, because China’s rise – and India’s and Indonesia’s – means that the balance of wealth and power is shifting against the United States, and against us. That means our ally’s ability to defend us in the decades ahead will shrink, and at the same time the demands of defending ourselves are growing.

The choice we face today is whether to build armed forces designed to help the US defend its strategic position in Asia against China’s challenge and preserve the old US-led order, or build forces that can keep us secure as American power in Asia fades and a new order dominated by China and India takes its place. That requires the capability to defend ourselves independently from the forces that a major Asian power could deploy against us. We cannot do both, because they pull our force priorities in very different directions. Supporting the US in Asia means focusing on forces to project power against China. Defending ourselves means focusing on forces to prevent China – or others – projecting power against us.

It is clear from the DRS that the Albanese government has no clear idea which path to choose. On one hand, the AUKUS nuclear submarine plan is all about supporting the US in a war with China, and the DSR says the alliance “is becoming even more important to Australia”. But elsewhere in the DSR the impression that arises most clearly from its muddled prose is one that points in the opposite direction, to a focus on the defence of the continent and its direct approaches.

It says that Australia “needs to develop the capability to unilaterally deter any state from offensive military action against Australian forces or territory”. But despite that word “unilaterally”, it also says – in the same paragraph – that we cannot do this independently: “This can only be achieved by Australia working with the United States …”

In fact – as the DSR makes embarrassingly clear – the Albanese government, like its predecessors, has no intention of building forces that can achieve either of these objectives. For all the bold talk, the review makes no serious, concrete proposals for substantial enhancements to Australian Defence Force capabilities for either role, and makes no commitments to the sustained increases in defence spending that would be needed to fund them. That means there are no plans to materially enhance Australia’s ability to help America deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, or to defend ourselves. Australia’s nonchalance about this is typified by the reckless gamble of entrusting our future submarine capability to the impossibly protracted, complex and risky AUKUS nuclear program, when much faster and more cost-effective conventional options are available.

What this tells us is that the government does not really believe Australia has a serious role to play either in preserving the US-led regional order or in guarding our own security. Nor does it really believe its own rhetoric about us facing, in Albanese’s words, “the most challenging strategic circumstances since the Second World War”, because it still takes US power and resolve for granted, and cannot bring itself to see that America might not always be there for us.

That was made startlingly clear in the most revealing moment of Monday’s DSR launch, when Albanese was asked a well-phrased question about America’s reliability as an ally and the consequent need for Australian self-reliance. Albanese simply refused to engage with the question, and was perhaps incapable of doing so. Instead he intoned some boilerplate talking points, affirming his conviction that nothing has really changed: “The US remains an important ally. It’s a relationship between nations, it’s a relationship between peoples and it’s based upon our common values.”

That was it. Well-worn phrases whose real meanings have faded with time and repetition, just like those used on Anzac Day. And that is why our defence policy is going nowhere.

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