IN BRIEF
- The defence minister will lay out priority areas for the Australian Defence Force in a speech on Thursday.
- Australia's defence spending as a proportion of GDP will reach about 3 per cent by 2033.
Australia is set to spend the most amount on defence outside of wartime as the military's strategy for coming years is released.
Defence Minister Richard Marles will hand down the 2026 national defence strategy on Thursday, which will lay out the path forward for Australia's armed forces and projects it will pursue over the next two years.
Marles will reveal in a speech at the National Press Club an extra $14 billion will be spent on defence in the next four years, compared with estimates laid out in the previous strategy from 2024.
An additional $53 billion will be set aside for defence over the next decade.
The figures mean Australia's total defence spending will rise to three per cent of GDP by 2033.
The federal government previously announced it would aim to reach 2.3 per cent by the 2033 deadline.
Australia has been facing calls by the US to lift its defence spend to 3.5 per cent as the Trump administration pushes allied countries to do more with their military.
Marles will say an increase in money allocated for the military was necessary given the shift in the global environment.
"Australia faces its most complex and threatening strategic circumstances since the end of World War II. International norms that once constrained the use of force and military coercion continue to erode," he will say.
"In the face of this, the Albanese government is pursuing every avenue of increasing defence capability quickly, mostly through bigger defence appropriations but also through accessing private capital.
"The result is that we are now seeing the biggest peacetime increase in defence spending in our nation’s history."
The defence minister will also lay out priority areas for the Australian Defence Force in the speech.
Already, billions of extra dollars have been earmarked for drones, given their successful use in Ukraine and the Middle East.
"Delivering this strategy is not only about investing more — it is about spending better," Marles will say.
"It puts Australia on a path to strengthen our defence self-reliance. It reinforces the industrial and national foundations of defence, and it situates Australia firmly within a network of trusted regional and global partnerships."
Opposition defence spokesperson James Paterson said the opposition would "carefully review" the national defence strategy when it was released.
"But one thing is already clear, accounting tricks don’t make Australians safer," he said.
"Counting money we’ve always spent on things like military pensions as defence spending is a desperate attempt by the Albanese government to pretend they are finally taking our strategic circumstances seriously when they are not.
"Australia needs real increases in actual defence spending today to put tangible capability into the hands of war fighters to protect our country. Anything less is an insult to our men and women in uniform and fails to heed the lessons of Ukraine and Iran."
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