In short:
Australian industry would receive $4 billion to manufacture drones and missiles under a new Greens party policy.
Funding for the “self-defence” weapons would come from scrapping billions of dollars in American contracts, including M1A2 tanks, Black Hawks and AUKUS submarines.
What’s next?
Greens Senator David Shoebridge says his party’s policy is only a “beginning”, acknowledging more would need to be done to protect the continent.
Poignant how the election results of a foreign ally can have so much influence on domestic defense policy (or maybe more accurately the politics surrounding that policy). I don’t personally know much about domestic defense manufacturing other than whenever someone asks us for something (Canada and JORN, Ukraine and Bushmasters) - a quick glance suggests we’re already moving in the direction of domestic missile manufacturing, but I don’t know how far along we are there (and thus the relative practicality of saying “let’s make more missiles than the current plan”). Makes it hard for a layperson to understand if, in isolation, it’s a sensible policy or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s also really interestingly politically for the Greens to be advocating for lethal weapons manufacturing. Their site only (currently - I assume they’ll update it later) has a very hand-wavy general defense “policy” on it, and without having checked I imagine they’ll have had a history of advocating against specific defense policies (like AUKUS), but “Greens advocate for increase to domestic lethal weapons manufacturing” was closer to a Chaser headline than an ABC headline in my mind.
The benefits the greens get from advocating for this is more local manufacturing jobs, more upskilling of our own people rather then buying it from America.
Not to mention if the US decides were to be state 53 or whatever it would be better for us to be self reliant rather then on their whim of if we’ve been a good little country to trump this week
Absolutely. And, while I don’t think the situation is likely/imminent, if hypothetically Australia becomes a proxy war theatre like Ukraine is, we saw just how easily the US abandoned Ukraine and negotiated terms with the Russian Federation. Now, that generally happens with proxy wars, but we’re seeing in plain sight and open cruelty what usually happens diplomatically behind closed doors. If the smaller power can’t defend itself, its ‘ally’ will happily negotiate terms with the enemy over their head once they feel the war is no longer a good investment.