Marles announces decade-long plan for threat that arrived yesterday

SMH · Matthew Knott · Wednesday 15 April 2026

Marles announces decade-long plan for threat that arrived yesterday

Defence Minister Richard Marles will release a 10-year defence spending plan amid warnings Australia is dangerously unprepared for modern warfare threats already at its doorstep.

'The threat is here now' and the response is a ten-year plan. Marles has diagnosed a house fire and ordered new smoke detectors from a catalogue. Every defence white paper since Dibb has said the same thing in increasingly urgent fonts, and every government has responded by commissioning the next one.

Also covered by

The Age