6 March 2026 is the day we can say that transparency around Australia’s Department of Defence died, or more accurately, was executed. It’s now sleeping with the fishes, mafioso style.
On a Friday, the traditional day for burying controversial news, parliament’s Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) quietly posted that, ‘the Committee has resolved not to request the Department of Defence and Australian National Audit Office continue to produce the [ANAO’s] Major Projects Report.’
After 18 years of dedicated service to transparency and improved outcomes in the delivery of defence capability, the MPR was gone.
This is the extremely concerning and quite frankly depressing culmination of a long campaign against transparency in defence and national security waged by the Governments of both major parties and the Department of Defence.
What is the report and why does it matter?
The Major Projects Report is an annual publication providing detailed information on the Department of Defence’s roughly 20-25 largest and most complex acquisition program. This information ranges from simple facts, such as when a project was approved, what it was approved to deliver and what it has delivered to date, to assessments of how a project is performing against the ‘iron triangle’ of cost, capability and schedule. In preparing the report, the ANAO had access to Defence’s project management data and published it—data that was not, and will not be, available anywhere else. This included project managers’ risk assessments.
It is an unclassified but invaluable resource used by academics, think tanks, journalists, commentators, industry and indeed officials themselves to understand what was going on in Defence’s major projects.
The approved budget for Defence’s approved capability acquisition programs (that’s the ones that are actually in acquisition and not hypothetical ones off in the future) is $209.6 billion with an estimated expenditure this year alone of $18.4 billion. The MPR doesn’t come close to covering all of them, but the 21 projects it analysed in its most recent report are budgeted at $81.5 billion with an in-year expenditure of $5.3 billion. The others, presumably budgeted at $128.1 billion, received no public scrutiny at all. Now none of the $209.6 billion is subject to any transparent public disclosure.
The parliamentary Committee’s decision is perplexing. Its announcement states that in the 18 years that the MPR had been published ‘the Committee has observed some improvements in Defence accountability and project governance, including risk management, compliance review, budget reporting, records management, lessons, and oversight of projects of concern and projects of interest.’ One might dispute the claim about improvements, but in the Committee’s own view, the MPR was making a difference.
A crime with three culprits
So why end it? The announcement notes that the Committee, ‘has observed a steady reduction in the number of projects that can be reported on publicly through the MPR. As more capability projects become highly classified, the ability of the Parliament and the public to scrutinise major Defence acquisition through a single consolidated report has been progressively constrained.’
As is the case with much discourse around the management of Australia’s Defence Department, the use of impersonal and passive constructions allows the speaker to avoid naming who actually is responsible for making decision or doing things, but the reduction in the number of projects that can be reported on and the increase in the number that are highly classified did not simply happen by itself.
This was a result of actual decisions by people. In this case those people are senior officials in the Department of Defence.
Since 2021-22 the Secretary of Defence has declined to provide information that had previously been released with the justification that ‘some details, both with respect to independent projects and in the aggregate, would or could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth without sanitisation of the data.’ The information that should not be published was determined by the Vice Chief of the Defence Force.
While the acting Secretary casually dismissed these significant lacunae as ‘some details’ in the most recent MPR, they are crucial pieces of project data that relate to 19 of the 21 projects. Perhaps the most important missing information is projects’ final operational capability (FOC) dates because slippage in a project’s currently planned FOC relative to its originally planned FOC is what the Audit Office uses to measure schedule performance. So we no longer have any information on the schedule performance of individual projects or the portfolio as a whole.
Why the publication of information that had routinely been released for years would now damage security was not explained other than the lazy default that the world is now more dangerous. But it’s hard to see why the Peoples Liberation Army would change its plans and intentions towards for Australia based on the knowledge that the schedule for third and final Hunter class frigate entering service had moved from 2036 to 2037.
Surely both the Parliament and the public, i.e., the people who pay for the ADF and whom it exists to defend, have a right to know in these dangerous times whether their $60 billion per year expenditure is actually delivering the necessary capabilities and military power? The JCPAA itself seems to acknowledge this with its reference above to parliamentary and public scrutiny.
Nevertheless, this parliamentary committee has accepted defeat and killed the MPR—and along with it, all the information it contained, information that cannot be found anywhere else. There is now virtually no public information on any of Defence’s capability acquisition projects large or small, other than a single paragraph on each of the largest thirty projects in the annual budget papers. That’s it.
One can assign blame in a number of areas. First is with the mandarins, both uniformed and civilian, whose dedicated, unrelenting efforts to avoid scrutiny, whether it be resisting Freedom of Information requests, or not responding meaningfully to Questions on Notice at Senate Estimates hearings, have now met with ultimate success. More on this later.
Next there is the Committee itself. It’s surrender in this matter confirms one of the greatest weaknesses of our parliamentary form of government—while we may have three branches of government in name, in effect the legislature is controlled by the Executive.
It’s awkward for parliamentary committees with Government majorities such as the JCPAA to highlight the underperformance of the Government.
The person who stands to be most embarrassed by the analysis in the Major Projects Report highlighting the underwhelming performance of the Department of Defence is the Minister for Defence, currently Richard Marles. Marles is the capo of the Victorian faction of the Labor party and is well known as the ‘factional assassin’ who ended the careers of two serving ministers in order to make space in the ministry for members of his faction. One wonders if it is only a coincidence that the Chair of the JCPAA is Josh Burns, also a member of Labor’s Victorian right faction, but Burns no doubt knows who he has to keep on side if he has any aspirations for career advancement. That creates what from the outside looks like an unhealthy dynamic I’m sure both individuals would deny, which will be reassuring.
And that gets us to the third site of blame, the Government. If the Australian Government truly wanted transparency and accountability it could simply direct Defence and other agencies such as the ANAO to provide it. By its own inaction it’s clear it doesn’t want transparency and accountability.
Hiding poor performance on critical national issues is bad for 27 million Australians
And here we get into ‘when people do stupid things that hurt themselves’ territory. We like to think that only dumb people do this, like MAGA supporters, who vote for a president who strips away their health cover, food stamps, education funding, and environmental protection and imposes cost of living increases on them through import tariffs and wars. But smart people like government ministers can live in this territory too.
Remember it was only a little over three months ago that the Albanese government breathlessly announced ‘the biggest reform to the Defence organisation in 50 years.’ The need for this reform was Defence’s poor performance in delivering capability projects. For example, Pat Conroy, the Minister for Defence Industry, stated that when the Albanese government came to power 28 major projects were running 97 years late (one wonders whether this statistic was taken from the now defunct MPR…).
The solution to this state of affairs was to move Defence’s acquisition arm outside of the Department into a separate agency. Again, one can be sceptical about the unique bigliness of this reform or its prospects for success—after all, it has been tried in various forms before and declared a failed experiment each time.
But one of the Government’s justifications for undertaking this reform is the need to demonstrate ‘better bang for buck for taxpayers’. How the Government thinks taxpayers will be persuaded that they are getting value when the only means they have to judge this for themselves (rather than through the usual assertions of ‘trust us, we’re the government/mandarins’) has now been quietly abolished is not clear.
The bigger problem – a closed circle of advisers, advice & options
We see here in this sorry episode one of the defining features of our current national security community and discourse.
In 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Here we seem to be succumbing to the dangers of a military-advisory complex. That is, in Australia, small numbers of senior policy makers insist on complete control over information and the right to determine the shape of public debate in the defence and security sphere. Perhaps it could better be termed the Mandarin Advisory Complex, with the mandarins comprising current senior bureaucrats and military officers along with a burgeoning class of their retired colleagues and a very liberal sprinkling of former ministers. Either way, it’s the ‘MAC’.
One relatively recent example of the MAC in action was the Varghese review of the national security community in which a former senior mandarin—commissioned by a current senior mandarin at the request of the prime minister—argued that the purpose of the broader national security community outside of the public service was essentially to act as a research service addressing topics set by current mandarins in return for small amounts of money doled out by those mandarins. Think tanks and academics offering opinions outside of that narrow task was inappropriate editorialising.
The National Treasure option: former mandarins marking their own homework
We consistently see the MAC in action when governments ostensibly show their openness to hearing alternative viewpoints to those offered by the current mandarins by paying the previous incumbents of those mandarins’ positions $5,500 per day to review the current situation. Inevitably the former mandarins deliver something that says the current mandarins have basically got it right (by definition they must have because they’ve taken up the reins left by the previous mandarins conducting the review—see how this circular process works?). Of course, to justify the $5,500 per day the former mandarins will need to make some recommendations that tweak the current arrangements, perhaps a bit of a restructure (moving the acquisition arm of a department outside the department again, maybe…). And there will of course be a ministerial foreword emphasising how this process contributes to transparency and accountability and thanking the former mandarin as a national treasure for giving their time to this matter.
The mandarins have a track record of failure on Australia’s big issues and challenges
Unfortunately, the mandarins have an appalling record on policy advice on the big questions.
Space doesn’t allow us to list all of the Australian Government’s policy failures, but many of them are based on the mandarins’ consistent advice that we can rely on the economic hand of market forces, on just in time international logistics, and on economic concepts such as competitive advantage. To do otherwise and intervene in markets would be rank populism.
This has of course delivered us our current gas disaster where international corporations pay very little for our gas and none is reserved for eastern Australian consumers, driving Australian manufacturers out of business. It’s also led to our current liquid fuel plight, starkly exposed by Iran’s entirely predictable response to US and Israeli bombing, in which we have very little refining capability and minimal liquid fuel reserves—this despite years of loud warnings from people such as John Blackburn.
The mandarins, both civilian and military, have also given us disastrous outcomes in defence capability. We all have our list of favourite defence acquisition disasters but at the top of the list is of course future frigate program in which $30 billion for nine ships has become $27 billion for three. Overall, the naval shipbuilding program has been a trainwreck, with over $10 billion spent to date and two patrol vessels delivered with no real purpose or warfighting capability and any real warships still years and tens of billions of dollars away.
Aside from individual project disasters, the overall force structure planning has been an illustration of unbelievable MAC incompetence resulting in a lack of missile defence in age of missiles, a lack of drones and counter drone capabilities in age of drones, and a lack of maritime mine clearance despite our dependence on sealines of communication.
MAC turkeys coming home to roost, with disastrous consequences
The MAC has meant we are all now experiencing in brutal form FAFO (F*** Around and Find Out, as first applied by the US President to Venezuela). We are ‘finding out’ in liquid fuel security, and our lack of military options means we are finding out in defence capability. The mandarins, however, who did the original effing around go on to further MAC opportunities in consultancies, company boards and diplomatic positions.
With the MAC’s killing of the MPR, we will continue to experience FAFO in defence capability, except it’s the Mandarin Advisory Class who FA-ed and it’s the broader Australian people who will have the unpleasant bit that is Finding Out when we don’t have the right capability when we need it.
So what happens now the MPR is dead? The JCPAA committee’s announcement claims that scrutiny of the mammoth defence acquisition program will continue through two means. Again, we have grounds for deep scepticism. The first means for renewed scrutiny will apparently be the new Joint Standing Committee on Defence established by a deal between the major parties. It will meet behind closed doors and have no requirement to publish its findings.
Moreover, it has no members outside of the self-declared ‘parties of government’, that is, those parties whose bad policy decisions and poor management of Defence have resulted in the consistently poor outcomes the Albanese Government apparently laments and claims to want to avoid in future.
And since parliamentarians have often drawn their capability-related questions to Defence officials from the MPR, the report that is now deceased, it’s not clear what they will base their future enquires on.
In short, people who have minimal interest in exposing their own parties’ poor records on running Defence and have little access to useful information will meet Defence officials behind close doors and that will somehow result in both better capability outcomes and a public convinced they are getting bang for the buck.
And being critical or even doubtful will reduce any politician’s prospects of joining in a post-politics advisory or consultancy career in the MAC that relies on the goodwill of incumbent mandarins and ministers.
The second means by which robust scrutiny will supposedly occur is that the JCPAA will ‘transition to a process where it examines in greater detail the Auditor-General’s reports in the Defence portfolio.’ Considering that on average the ANAO produces only one performance audit on a major Defence project per year it is completely implausible that ‘greater scrutiny’ of a single report (that may represent less than one percent of Defence’s acquisition portfolio) will provide any meaningful insight into how the portfolio as whole is being delivered.
This whole affair can only be described as a pre-emptive mass ‘Dunning-Kruger’ phenomenon in which people seek to deny themselves information in order to make themselves more informed and better able to execute their responsibilities.
The reality is that not only does this this assault on transparency deny the Australian public the ability to have any confidence that the military capabilities they are paying for and on which their security depends are being delivered, but it doesn’t help the Government either.
Confident governments welcome external ideas. Anxious governments strangle them
In 2001, in response to the quality of advice it had received in the lead up to the Timor crisis, the Howard government sought to overcome its over-reliance on the mandarins by establishing the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Its first responsibility was ‘to provide alternative sources of input to Government decision-making processes on major strategic and defence policy issues. The Government believes that contestability of advice is an important contributor to good public policy, and is concerned that in the strategic and defence policy arena the range of alternative views on which the government can draw is not well developed.’
Its second was ‘to help nourish public debate and understanding. The Government believes that improved public understanding of strategic and defence issues is an important long-term investment in Australia’s security. Good policy must be informed by a well-informed public debate, and be supported by a sophisticated public understanding of the choices that need to be made.’
Of course, we can debate how well ASPI has met its charter over the past 25 years, but the basic point is that there have been Australian governments who have sought alternative viewpoints outside the closed circle of the Canberran mandarins on defence and security and who have endeavoured to support informed public debate.
That goal is a very good one, indeed it is a vital one in a functioning democracy. But as the ASPI charter notes, that debate must be well-informed—and that requires information and data. However, the death of the MPR confirms once again that ministers and mandarins are choking off information. Let us repeat, there is now virtually no reliable, detailed public information on the delivery of Defence $200+billion capability program.
This will allow the Government and the Mandarin Advisory Complex in circular fashion to dismiss others’ views because they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about since they don’t have access to basic information.
It’s a lamentable state of affairs and one that not only does not serve the public, but will inevitably come back to haunt this and future governments. It’s hiding its F***ing Around now, but one day, we will all Find Out at the worst possible time. In that moment, those usually noisy former mandarins and ministers will be hard to find.