A profile of Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Defence, and Geelong’s enduring gift to Australian satirists

Meet Richard Donald Marles. Deputy Prime Minister. Minister for Defence. Member for Corangamite. Product of the Victorian Labor Right, that curious faction where union roots somehow sprout hawkish foreign policy, big-ticket defence contracts, and a preselection culture that makes branch stacking look like a minor administrative irregularity.

He is, in the most precise political sense available, a Liberal in drag. Same tough talk on alliances and deterrence. Same fondness for American hardware and AUKUS largesse. Same instinct to defer to Washington on questions that might benefit from an independent Australian view. Wrapped, however, in just enough factional red to keep the true believers satisfied. All suit, no spark, and a remarkable talent for making national security sound like a mildly confusing numbers meeting that ran somewhat overtime.

Richard Marles is Geelong’s enduring gift to Australian satirists. The question is whether Geelong intended it as a gift or an apology.

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The Walking Capability Gap

There is a phrase in defence circles for the gap between what a military is supposed to have and what it actually has. They call it a capability gap. Richard Marles is, in his own person, a walking capability gap: the announced function and the delivered result separated by a distance that no procurement budget has yet been able to close.

The man who fronts up as the steady hand on the tiller is the same man under whose watch the Navy wonders where the hulls went, the budget bleeds billions into procurement black holes, and the ANAO produces findings of ethical and competence failures with the regularity of a quarterly report. He is the stumblebum with the plum in his mouth, projecting authority while the institution he manages projects something considerably more ambiguous.

He inherited the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal and turned it into a rolling saga of delays, cost reassessments, and nervous hand-wringing that would be impressive in its consistency if consistency were the quality being tested. Critics, including people in uniform, people in the audit office, and old Labor warhorses who remember when the party had a clearer relationship with its own principles, point to the endless reviews, the production bottlenecks, and the twenty-year capability hole while Australia waits for American goodwill and Virginia class boats that may or may not materialise on schedule.

Marles’s signature response to any question about whether the Americans will actually deliver is that periodic reviews are “perfectly natural.” Plan B questions he dodges with the practised ease of a man who has decided that the question itself is the problem. Billions committed. Timelines slipping. The public left staring at a price tag somewhere between two hundred billion and three hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars, depending on which estimate one consults and on which day one consults it, for submarines that remain considerably more promise than propeller.

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The Procurement Masterclass

Procurement under Marles has been a sustained masterclass in what might charitably be called bureaucratic swamp-dwelling.

The armoured vehicle deals have produced headlines about billions wasted. The ANAO has produced findings of ethical and competence failures with sufficient regularity that they no longer surprise anyone, which is itself a finding worth examining. The response to each procurement disaster has been a reorganisation, and the response to each reorganisation’s failure has been another reorganisation. The most recent iteration produced something called a Defence Delivery Agency, created to fix the procurement problems generated by the previous structural reform, which had been created to fix the problems generated by the one before that.

Wars do not wait for the next reorganisation. Marles’s briefings, apparently, do.

He has poured extra billions into the portfolio. The department continues to be slammed for shortfalls and blowouts. These two facts coexist without apparent embarrassment on anyone’s part, which is perhaps the most remarkable procurement achievement of the period.

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The Washington Incident

Then there is the diplomacy, or the performance of it.

Mr Marles flew to Washington at a moment when AUKUS was genuinely uncertain and American goodwill genuinely required active cultivation. The visit produced a clarification from the Pentagon that the encounter with the US Defence Secretary was, in the Pentagon’s own careful formulation, a “happenstance encounter” rather than a formal meeting.

Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence had flown to Washington and bumped into his counterpart in a corridor. This is the diplomatic equivalent of running into your bank manager at the supermarket and counting it as a financial planning session. The image that lodged in the public mind was of Australia’s most senior defence official as the uninvited guest at the cool table, the one who shows up at the party and discovers from the expressions of the other guests that the invitation was more theoretical than practical.

Mr Marles said it went very well.

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The Verbal Vapourware Special

In television studios, Mr Marles has developed a signature style that deserves its own name. Call it the Verbal Vapourware Special.

Classic footage shows him in conversation with Karl Stefanovic on the Today Show, a programme not renowned for its forensic rigour, in which Marles produces word salads of sufficient density that Stefanovic, a man not given to extended silences, fills them by playing Trump clips over the minister’s ongoing remarks. The furrowed brow arrives first. Then the careful pause before the answer that does not quite materialise. Then the vague platitude delivered with the gravity of a man who believes that gravity is itself the substance of the answer.

One moment he is warning of the most complex strategic circumstances since World War Two. The next he is “very close, but we’re not saying how close” on flare incidents, or deflecting capability questions with the expression of a man encountering the question for the first time despite having been Defence Minister for three years.

This is not statesmanlike gravitas. This is the performance of a factional numbers man who is considerably more comfortable in a preselection meeting than a television studio, and who has not, in eleven years of public life, fully resolved the tension between those two environments.

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The Liberal in Labor Clothing

Here is the thing about Richard Marles that his factional allies would prefer not to discuss in public. On the questions that actually matter in defence policy, he is more hawkish than many in the Coalition. Pro-American to a degree that occasionally makes Liberal defence spokespeople look like peaceniks by comparison. An enthusiast for American hardware whose enthusiasm is not noticeably tempered by the evidence that the hardware in question is, in the case of the F-35, “predominantly unusable” in the year we are being asked to buy more of it.

He waves the progressive flag with the conviction of a man who remembers 1995 very fondly and has not updated the gesture since. The union pedigree produced a defence hawk. The Labor branding covers a set of instincts that would be entirely at home in the moderate wing of the Liberal Party, which is perhaps why the moderate wing of the Liberal Party has largely ceased to exist. Marles ate its lunch.

Consider what this means for Australian defence policy. The minister responsible for the nation’s strategic posture is, on alliance management, hardware procurement, and the fundamental question of Australian strategic autonomy, considerably to the right of the position the Labor Party took to every election between 1972 and 2001. He is more committed to the American alliance than the Americans are currently committed to him, as the happenstance encounter in Washington demonstrated. He is ordering more F-35s in the year the Iran war revealed their limitations, because the procurement cycle does not wait for strategic reality to update it. He is the defence hawk that the Labor Right produces when it decides that appearing tough matters more than thinking clearly. The consequence is a defence policy that satisfies the Americans just enough to avoid a diplomatic incident and satisfies the electorate just enough to avoid a political one, while satisfying neither the strategic logic of Australia’s actual position nor the budget discipline that fifty-three billion dollars over a decade might reasonably demand.

He has, to his genuine credit, stripped medals from Afghanistan-era officers pursuant to the Brereton Report, which required political courage of a kind not always visible in his portfolio management. He has criticised Chinese live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea, correctly. He has appointed Lieutenant General Susan Coyle as the first female chief of army, which is a genuinely historic moment. These are real achievements. They coexist, in the same ministerial career, with the AUKUS cost blowouts, the armoured vehicle disasters, the happenstance Washington encounter, and the word salads on morning television. A man capable of these decisions is also responsible for those failures. That coexistence is a more interesting and more damning claim than simple incompetence.

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The Satirist’s Accounting

In a dangerous neighbourhood, with real capability needs and a fuel crisis that has exposed the fragility of everything the defence budget is supposed to protect, Richard Marles is what happens when you take a moderately ambitious right-leaning machine politician, hand him Defence for factional balance, and hope that nobody notices the spark shortage before the next election.

The procurement disasters generate the reorganisations that generate the next procurement disasters. The submarines remain in the future. The F-35 software remains predominantly unusable. The Geelong refinery burned on Wednesday night while the minister responsible for the nation’s strategic circumstances was preparing his remarks for the National Press Club.

Mr Marles said it was not only about investing more. It was about spending better.

Richard Donald Marles, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, remains magnificently, unmistakably, and at considerable public expense, wooden.

All faction, no fire.

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