Yet have we gone far enough? Although Defence 2000 went some way to respond to the major changes of the 1990s, and focused significantly on tasks for the ADF beyond the defence of the continent, it has been criticised for being still too narrowly concerned with the defence of the continent. There is some basis for that charge, at least as far as declaratory policy is concerned. Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force said that the defence of Australia remained ‘the primary priority for the ADF’, which ‘provides a clear basis for our defence planning’.^[63] At several places one can find an uneasy tension between the significant innovations in approach and outlook described in the last section, and affirmations that the defence of the continent remained the core of Australian strategic policy. How do these divergent policy ideas fit together? Does it really make sense, for example, to say that our policy gives overriding priority to the defence of Australia, and then say that the key role of the Army is to support stability in our immediate neighbourhood? Or to state that a key factor shaping our air-combat and strike forces is the need to contribute to coalition operations in the wider region against major powers like China? On the critical question of the balance of priorities between continental defence and the defence of wider interests, Defence 2000 does seem inconsistent.

As we have seen, Australian Defence and the 1987 Defence of Australia argued that the capabilities developed for the defence of Australia would provide government with an adequate range of options for other contingencies. But Australia’s Strategic Planning in the 1990s and Australia’s Strategic Policy both questioned this approach. They said that the adequacy of our ‘defence of Australia’ defence force to meet wider needs should be carefully tested as the demands of offshore contingencies grew with changing strategic circumstances. Defence 2000’s approach therefore marked a reversion to the earlier doctrine. It claimed, in similar terms to the 1987 Defence of Australia, that ‘forces built primarily to defend Australia will be able to undertake a range of operations to promote our wider strategic interests’,^[64] even though it specifically proposed that forces should be developed for strategic tasks beyond the defence of Australia. This tension is not resolved. While setting out the elements of a new, more expansive strategic posture for Australia based on the defence of a set of broad interests, Defence 2000 still held on to the ideas which had formed the foundation of defence policy for the preceding 25 years, without explaining how the old and the new fit together. The result was a measure of policy ‘dissonance’ (to use Michael Evans’ term).^[65]

Such instinctive conservatism is perhaps not all that surprising. This document was after all a product of the Howard Government. Policy centred on the defence of our own territory had worked well for many years, attracting widespread public support and bipartisan political consensus in Australia. It was readily accepted by Australia’s neighbours, and offered a clear basis for setting capability priorities. While the strong urge to cling to it is hardly surprising, it is no longer tenable. The key strategic trends of the past 15 years have significantly increased the weight that Australian defence policy needs to give to our wider strategic interests. It is artificial to claim, as Defence 2000 did, that we still develop forces primarily for the defence of the continent. This artificiality prevents us addressing squarely the real and complex problems of policy that our new strategic circumstances present. To build a credible, effective and sustainable defence policy for the coming decades, we need to rethink the place of ‘defence of Australia’, and bring Australia’s wider strategic interests out from under its shadow. So moving beyond ‘defence of Australia’ is not just a matter of more credible public presentation. It is important to getting the content of our policy right. Unfortunately the atmosphere of the five years since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 has been unconducive, indeed counterproductive, to this effort. The preoccupation with the ‘war on terror’, and especially the political imperative to frame defence policy in terms which supported the decision to join the United States in invading Iraq, made it difficult to take a balanced, long-term view of the nature of Australia’s wider strategic interests, and of the kinds of forces that could most cost-effectively protect them. This is the task upon which Australian defence policy, and scholars who study that policy, must now focus. It is rather different from, but in a way analogous to, the one Tom Millar posed back in 1965, and to which the SDSC has made such a major contribution. I hope the SDSC can contribute as much to this new task.