One part of my talk at the Australian Defence Magazine’s annual defence industry conference that didn’t make it into my previous post was a digression about the recently released defence export strategy. Rob Bourke’s recent post picked up on a few of the points I covered, so I’ll confine myself to a critique of the government’s stated aim of making Australia a ‘top ten’ supplier of armaments.
As Rob already pointed out, establishing a baseline of the current level of defence exports isn’t as easy as you might hope. There’s no single unambiguous source of data, and the $1.5–2 billion figure in the strategy isn’t obviously relatable to specific products. Defence used to issue an annual report on Australian arms exports, but that stopped after 2003–04. More recently the Defence Export Controls office has put out a statistical report of export permit applications and their outcomes. That data is incomplete and potentially misleading for two reasons. First, not every approved application results in exports to the full value of the approval. Second, it’s not mandatory for exporters to provide the department with the value of the goods or services in question—some do and some don’t.
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