THE HON ANDREW HASTIE MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR DEFENCE
SHADOW MINISTER FOR DEFENCE INDUSTRY
SHADOW MINISTER FOR DEFENCE PERSONNEL
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR CANNING

SPEECH
ADDRESS TO 2024 AIDN SYMPOSIUM

MONDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2024

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Good morning. It’s good to be back in Canberra.

The world is rapidly changing with the election of Donald Trump.

This has consequences for Australia and for our defence industry.

We can expect more uncertainty in coming months, and we need to be agile and responsive.

I also think that we need a posture of self-examination rather than hyperventilation when we consider the changes occurring in the United States. 

We need to be mature alliance partners—both at the political and industrial level.

And we need to do work to understand the next US administration, the key leaders in it, so we can maximise our opportunities in the Australian national interest. 

To that end, on the flight yesterday, I spent two and half hours listening to an extended interview with Pete Hegseth, President-elect Trump’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Defense.

There was a lot of ground covered, including the subjects of his two books – education and culture within the U.S. military.

He talked about U.S. recruiting shortfalls, slipping training standards and the widespread adoption of woke ideology in the officer class. 

He also talked about the K to 12 education system and his own preference for a classical education for his kids and his strong emphasis on parental sovereignty and choice. 

I think longform podcasts are reshaping how we understand people in public positions.

We get nuance and we get wider context. 
 
We get a sense of their innate complexity, which is part of our shared humanity, too.

So, we’d be foolish to accept the competing media narratives about Hegseth—which break along partisan lines—and do the work ourselves. 

Here are some takeaways that I have for you from listening to him for two and a half hours: 

1. The first is that Pete Hegseth is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Universities. He is highly credentialed as we expect the U.S. governing class to be. The Ivy League system seems the well-worn path.
   But Hegseth considers his military service and his deployments the most formative educational experiences of his life: he talks about the University of Baghdad, Samara and Kabul rather than Princeton or Harvard. It was commanding U.S. troops where he grew as a leader and a person.
   
   I think this is representative of a larger shift in the governing class—accelerated under Trump—where real-world experience at the pointy end of U.S. operations counts for more than degrees at elite institutions.
   
   Think of Mike Waltz as Trump’s National Security Advisor – a Green Beret, a successful Defence business owner himself, time in the U.S. Congress and soon to be at the heart of U.S. foreign and defence policy making.
   
   I think we’ll see a shift from talking points and rhetoric to results-focused policy making. Experience in the real world – outside academia – I think that means more to Donald Trump.
   
   
2. The second point I observed in the podcast is that China is the named threat to the United States and her allies. Hegseth talks explicitly about China’s use of unrestricted warfare and how they are building a military for the specific purpose of defeating the United States.
   
   There were no vague references to upholding the global rules-based order. Hegseth spoke specifically of China, U.S. trade and supply chain dependency on China, and the vulnerability of U.S. aircraft carriers to Chinese hypersonic missiles.
   
   Along with Senator Rubio and Mike Waltz, this is the language of Cold War 2.0. I anticipate serious investment into the U.S. defense-industrial base to recover lost hard power, under President Trump. 
   
   
3. The third point is that Hegseth is going to be focused on cultural, administrative and acquisition issues within the Defense department. Specifically, accelerating the procurement system – he calls it antiquated and slow. He even says that the U.S. is at “the tipping point for total institutional corruption.” My sense is that we can expect a fight within the U.S. military-industrial complex. Disruptors taking on traditional interests and this may have consequences for us – we don’t know yet but we need to be agile and responsive.
   
   
4. Finally, the last point from this podcast is that Hegseth—who supported the invasion of Iraq—calls himself a recovering ‘neocon’. He’s now a deep sceptic of nation-building and foreign wars after time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said that he would not want his children to fight in Ukraine. This accords with Trump’s America First approach to foreign policy. Yet, Hegseth was very focused on China and Taiwan, and so I think we’ll see a prioritisation of strategic competition with China under a Trump Presidency.
   None of this is insurmountable from an Australian perspective.

We need to be agile and adapt as we always do.

The alliance will continue, and I don’t hold any specific fears for AUKUS. 

Back in September, I visited the halls of Congress. I met with some people who will be influential in a Trump Presidency, and I got a sense that people on the Republican side understand the importance of AUKUS to the alliance.

So, I don’t hold any fears for AUKUS.

If the Coalition wins government next year, I’m more than confident that I can strike a solid, fruitful working relationship with Pete Hegseth as Minister for Defence.

We have a fair bit in common—we even share a home city in Nashville, Tennessee, where my wife is from, where her family lives and where have spent quite a few Christmases over the last 15 years.

I’m confident we’ll get on fine and work to secure our mutual interests which is the job, by the way, of anyone serving in the Parliament.

We don’t get to choose who we work with along partisan lines, but we sure as heck better make sure that we are respectful and willing to work with them.

But President Trump is transactional.

There’s no secret about that.

There will be no free lunch under a Trump Presidency.

And we will have to demonstrate our value as alliance partners, which we can surely do given our strong record since the Second World War.

So, rather than hyperventilating about the Trump Presidency, we should do some self-examination. 

Here are three things I think we should consider: 

1. We’ve got to reform and grow our own defence-industrial base. People here in this room are critical to that effort. In a more competitive and dangerous world, we need to lift our game.
   
   Labor, under Prime Minister Albanese, has made life more difficult for our small and medium enterprises in the defence industrial space.
   
   Energy costs have gone up.
   
   Labour costs have gone up.
   
   The cost of capital has gone up.
   
   Our productivity is down as a country and we are less competitive as a nation.
   
   There aren’t enough defence job orders from this government.
   
   Ever since the decline and death of the car industry in Australia—the workers, the skills, the factories, the supply chains—we’ve had a crisis of confidence about our ability to make complex things as a nation.
   
   We must regain this lost confidence and capacity—at speed and at scale.
   
   We’ve also missed a great opportunity to assist the Ukrainians more directly and build our industrial base in the process.
   
   It’s the right thing to do, but the theatre of war in Ukraine is also a battle lab where we can test, adapt and sharpen our emerging sovereign capabilities.
   
   It’s been a missed opportunity—for Ukraine and for our sovereign defence industrial base.
   
   If we don’t reindustrialise and grow our sovereign capacity to make arms and munitions, the United States will have serious questions of us as an ally. 
2. We must be able to survive a surprise first strike by an adversary.
   
   We must not forget the surprise attack on Darwin on 19 February, 1942.
   
   It happened a long time ago, and it was great to see the Japanese Defence Minister and the U.S. Secretary of Defense up in Darwin on the weekend. History moves quickly.
   
   But it should inspire our strategic imagination to consider what a modern-day surprise first strike might look like, and what damage Australia might be expected to sustain.
   
   The reach of missiles, drones, submarines, and cyber capabilities means we can’t limit our imagination to our northern approaches – we can’t be a slave to history.
   
   As Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan: until they get punched in the face”.
   
   I don’t know if you watched the fight on the weekend – Mike took a lot of punches to the face, but I’m not sure he had a plan.
   
   Australia needs to be able to survive a first punch, maybe even two—in whatever form they take.
   
   The United States needs us to survive a few punches given the deepening integration of our alliance at the operational level with AUKUS and MERF-D.
   
   This brings me to my final point.
   
   
3. We know how to provide strategic depth to our partners.
   
   We do provide strategic depth already to the United States.
   
   And we must be able to forcefully demonstrate that—either militarily or industrially or politically through our advocacy in Washington D.C. especially under a transactional Trump Presidency – we’ve got a strong record here.
   
   The U.S. Navy operated massive submarine bases out of Perth and Albany during the Second World War.
   
   The U.S. had the largest Asiatic submarine base in the Second World War based out of Fremantle.
   
   We conducted battle damage repairs on HMS Illustrious—a Royal Navy aircraft carrier—out of the Captain Cook graving dock in Sydney during 1945.
   
   We also hosted up to a million U.S. military personnel, including General Douglas MacArthur, as they staged for victory in the Pacific.
   
   We have an abundance of land and natural supplies. Our comparative advantage has always been in the provision of strategic depth.
   
   Our great distance gives allied bases here a degree of safety and warning: Pine Gap, the U.S. Marine Corps presence in Darwin, and the Perth AUKUS base demonstrates this.
   
   To tie back to what Pete Hegseth mentioned: US aircraft carriers being targeted by Chinese hypersonic missiles. The question we should be asking is: when a carrier goes down, or maybe two, and they get a bunch of fighters off the flight deck in time, where are they going to land?
   
   What can we provide in a scenario like that?
   
   The point is that real estate and geography remain fundamental.
   
   We need to emphasise our contribution, and deliver on our commitments.
   
   That means the pace of AUKUS must accelerate.
   
   The U.S. is upping the delivery cadence of their submarines from 1.3 to 2.5 per year and that’s with the assistance of up to $4 billion of Australian money.
   
   The clock is ticking for them. It’s ticking for us. And we mustn’t fall behind.
   
   There are serious questions around the leadership of the Albanese Government in this regard, and the Cook Government in WA as well who have a very important role in getting the infrastructure and the housing, and all the supporting supply chains, ready in place for 2027 when Submarine Rotational Force–West is established.

But to this audience, I want to say this: our small and medium defence industry sector is key to our national survival and our alliances—it’s time for change, and its time to get moving. 

I know you’ve had a tough couple of years. Some haven’t even survived, some are on their knees, but we want to change that.

The Coalition backs you. We want to win government – that’s our focus from here until May.

And so I say in closing, bring on the election because there is a lot of work to be done.

Thank you.

[ENDS]