Richard Marles’s address to the Shangri-La Dialogue, in which the Australian Defence Minister warned of the threats to vital seabed cables that transmit the digital blood of the global economy, only underlined Labor’s pallid, catch-up mode when it comes to national security.
That it has taken the government four years to come up with a ‘first-ever’ program to develop underwater capabilities under AUKUS’s sagging Pillar II program is further testament to the government’s sluggish approach.
Marles believes the Singapore summit is the most important for an Indo-Pacific Defence Minister to be seen and heard. The conference has, in the past, brought together the major players in the region under the same roof as the Chinese and the United States, although for the last two years, the Chinese have not shown up at the senior level.
Nevertheless, this is the speech that Mr Marles would have been most concerned about to make an impression.
He began by documenting the attacks on seabed cables in the Baltic Sea eighteen months ago.
The seabed attacks actually began in October 2023 and hit key transmission infrastructure, including the Balticconnector pipeline connecting Finland and Estonia, which was detected leaking gas in the Gulf of Finland. The Hong Kong-flagged, Chinese-owned ship Newnew Polar Bear was deemed responsible.
In November 2024, a data cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania was damaged, as well as the only data cable connecting Finland with the European continent. Another Chinese-flagged carrier, Yi Peng 3 was named the culprit.
Then on Christmas Day of that year, a Cook Islands-flagged tanker — part of the shadow fleet — Eagle S struck an interconnector power cable plus four data cables in the Gulf of Finland.
The spate of attacks aimed at disrupting power, internet and energy in the countries most supportive of Ukraine against Russia’s illegal invasion, led to a new NATO operation called Baltic Sentry, which included sending ships and other assets to essentially watch, chase away and, when necessary, board culprit and suspicious ships. This has been effective and largely protected the critical underwater cables.
Yet at the time, the Australian government and Marles specifically showed relatively little interest in what was happening in the Baltic, and what the incidents of cutting seabed cables and getting away with it might mean for our region and for Australians’ economic security.
Marles, for instance, did not release a statement, and a search of his media musings shows his first serious effort to talk about the issue was this weekend, one and a half years later.
He declared that: ‘The seabed is becoming a battlefield. The shadow fleet is becoming a weapon.’
But this scenario has well and truly arrived, and unsurprisingly, the contagion has spread.
‘It is striking that several cables have been severed across the Baltic and the Taiwan Strait since November 2024,’ Marles noted.
Whether the Chinese or Russian-linked ships, often in the shadow fleet of vessels that ferry Russia’s sanctioned oil around the world, were acting deliberately or negligently remains difficult to prove.
But as Marles said: ‘If they were intentional, we are left to wonder: are countries testing our response times, testing our attribution thresholds and testing our political will to respond?’
‘We must reckon with it honestly.’
Well, quite. But an honest reckoning would include a willingness to publicly attribute suspected culprits as the Baltic countries have done, and that would involve naming China, something this government is often allergic to doing in the context of its ‘stabilised’ relationship with China.
Marles could have led by example and followed the advice of his Philippines counterpart Gilberto Teodoro, who encouraged everyone to ‘call a spade a spade’ when it came to China, but he did not. Yet both the Philippines and Japan did call out China’s aggressive behaviour.
It would also require a plan backed by continuous surveillance and assets to enforce any attacks on Australian infrastructure, something the government has not yet set out.
‘In the Indo-Pacific, Taiwan has now reported five separate cases of seabed cable damage in 2025 — compared with three in 2024 and three in 2023. NATO’s Baltic Sentry operation offers a model — not for the Indo-Pacific to mirror, but from which to learn,’ Marles admitted.
‘We have been slow — collectively slow — to recognise them as the strategic targets they have become.’
But the snail’s pace is his fault only. Any sensible actor could look at what the shadow fleet was doing to smaller countries’ vital infrastructure and work out that this was a tactic any rogue actor could use elsewhere. Interestingly, the Defence Minister, who has been in the job for four years, did not explain the cause of this professed slowness.
Marles also launched complaints about the shadow fleet, describing them as ‘vectors for sanctions evasion’, for the transport of energy that sustains Russia’s war in Europe.
It’s a great line. But here too, the Australian government has not acted as swiftly or as honestly as it could.
The government still has not closed the sanctions loophole allowing Russian crude refined in third countries to be imported into Australia.
While the government has given $1.7 billion in aid to Ukraine, Australia’s failure to close the loophole has delivered Vladimir Putin’s war economy an estimated $2.45 billion between 2022 and November 2025, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
So what is the government waiting for?
On AUKUS too, the program to build new capabilities beyond the submarines has moved at the speed of a slug.
‘We are announcing today the first signature project under Pillar II, which will see all three countries invest in the development of cutting-edge payloads and enabling systems for Uncrewed Undersea Vehicles is a momentous occasion in what is the AUKUS journey,’ Marles declared alongside his AUKUS counterparts John Healey of the UK and Pete Hegseth of the US in Singapore.
L-R: US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles and UK Defence Secretary John Healey.
AUKUS was announced in September 2021. Labor inherited the program when it was first elected in May 2022. It has taken them four years to come with a ‘first-ever’ plan to build some undersea capabilities under the Pillar II plank of the program.
‘For too long with AUKUS, we talked too much and delivered too little,’ Healey observed.
This is an utter failure and Labor’s to bear alone.
Marles is almost a lone security hawk in the Labor government. But despite being a political ally and personal friend of the Prime Minister, it is Anthony Albanese’s disinterest in security that more often than not prevails when it comes to meaningful policy outcomes.
This has been the case when it comes to defence spending. The government was able to swerve an attack from US President Donald Trump about its relatively poor spending as a percentage of GDP compared to Nato allies, who have been forced into pledging 3.5 per cent spending by 2035.
Labor fudged the figures and told the US that if Australia added in military pensions and the like like NATO countries do, it would bring Australia’s spending closer to 2.8 per cent.
Under Labor this would rise to 3 per cent by 2033.
As I have previously pointed out, this means that if Australia is now measuring itself against Nato standards, it would have to increase spending by 0.5 per cent in two years to meet the 2035 target.
That would constitute more than double the planned increases it has budgeted between now and the next seven years.
That prospect is as likely as Albanese keeping his election promise not to touch negative gearing or capital gains tax.
‘States that do not invest in credible defence capability will be more exposed to coercion and face greater constraints on their sovereignty,’ Marles warned in Singapore.
Perhaps he needs to have the conversation a little louder at home first.
This piece was first published by The Nightly
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