Australia must be strong in region: Rudd

Australia's defence focus on the Asia-Pacific region is a reflection of the
significant military and naval build-up in the area, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says.
A 140-page white paper - Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030
- launched by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Sydney on Saturday names China as an
emerging dominant force in the region.
It says China will be Asia's strongest military power "by a considerable margin" and
warns the pace and scope of its growth has the potential to give its neighbours
cause for concern if not properly explained.
Asked if Australians have reason to fear China, Mr Rudd said only that the nation
must be prepared for "a range of contingencies".
"It's as plain as day that there is a significant military and naval build-up across
the Asia-Pacific region, that's a reality, it's a truth, it's there," Mr Rudd said
on board HMAS Stuart.
"Either you can simply choose to ignore that fact, or to incorporate that into a
realistic component of Australia's strategic assumptions about what this region will
look like over the next two decades."
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull criticised the paper for being too focused on a
major conflict with China.
"Something most people would regard as being very unlikely and not realistic in the
context of Australia's future relations and future strategy in the Asia Pacific," he
said.
Mr Turnbull also criticised the government for providing "back of the envelope"
calculations on how the increase in expenditure would be paid.
He said out of a 140-page document, just one-and-a-third pages were devoted to how
defence funding would increase in real terms by three per cent from its current
$22.7 billion annual funding until 2017-18, and then by 2.2 per cent until 2030.
"Nobody reading this white paper could have any confidence that the government has
the capacity, the commitment, or even knows how it is going to pay for this dramatic
expansion in our military hardware," Mr Turnbull said.
The commitment to increase defence funding requires a $20 billion saving within the
forces to be reinvested into capability, a move Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon
says is possible after "a number of inefficiencies" were identified.
However, not providing an estimate of how much each item listed in the paper would
cost "is not a proper defence plan", opposition defence spokesman David Johnston
said.
The coalition is concerned the white paper is merely a "wish list" against a likely
$50 billion deficit in the upcoming budget, Senator Johnston said.
"We have no capacity to come up with the sort of money the 12 submarines, the eight
new frigates, the 20 offshore patrol vessels and the Joint Strike Fighter project
will require," he told AAP.
"You can't have a defence plan that doesn't have a plan to pay for it."
Criticism of the defence white paper also came from the Australian Defence
Association's Neil James, who said the document's "political tone" made it seem that
this government was responsible for making many of the decisions that "were the
genesis back in the Keating and Howard governments".
"They've been a bit too defensive about previous Labor decisions and a bit too
critical about previous Liberal ones, when in effect, any apolitical look at
Australia's defence acknowledges that governments of both political persuasions have
made mistakes in the past," Mr James told AAP.
He also indicated that some aspects of the paper, including focusing on "cyber
warfare" and a greater emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region, would have occurred
anyway, regardless of which government was in power.
Professor Hugh White, of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian
National University (ANU), says $310 billion over two decades is a huge impost on
government coffers and questions whether it can be fully funded as the government
says.
"The document appears to put a very heavy emphasis on very large savings, savings
within the defence organisation, in order to fund these capabilities," he told ABC
Radio.
"I'm sure the government's committed to making defence more efficient and reaping
those savings, but there are very big question marks over whether those savings can
be achieved."
ANU expert Paul Dibb, who prepared a 1987 defence white paper, told AAP it was a
very ambitious but prudent document.
"The fore-structure that's proposed is one of the most ambitious Australia has ever
seen, doubling the size of the submarine force, acquiring fifth generation joint
strike fighters with a more capable army."
But it was "always a matter of money", he said in relation to the future funding
growth of defence.