From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Christanamied. It's Tuesday, April twenty two, twenty twenty five cardinals from around the world will gather in Rome to elect a new pope after Pope Francis died aged eighty eight. The Vatican announced the Pontiff's passing a day after he appeared at Saint Peter's Basilica on Easter Sunday. Women have abandoned the coalition less than two weeks out from the federal election.
That's according to new data from News poll. It's a sharp decline since the start of the campaign and it could spell trouble for the opposition on polling day. You can read all the latest from the campaign trail right now at the Australian dot com dot au. Moves by Russia in the Pacific have Anthony Albanesi and Peter Dutton
scrambling on defense. In today's episode, our defense expert Ben packham unpicks what Russia's up to in Indonesia and if we should be worried about its surprise appearance in our neck of the woods last week. Halfway through the federal election campaign. Peter Dutton dropped a bombshell, but this.
Is a very troubling development and suggestion that somehow Russia would have some of their assets based in Indonesia, only a short distance from obviously the north of our country.
The opposition leader was referencing an April fourteen report by the Janes Defense Journal that Russia's top brass are keen to build a military base in Indonesia.
It did the Prime Minister know about this before it was publicly announced by the President of Indonesia And what is the government's response to it?
The problem is such a deal was never announced by Indonesia's President Proboo Subianto or anyone else for that matter. Labour's most senior figures, including Prime Minister Anthony Alberesi, Defense Minister Richard Miles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, leapt on the error.
He verbaled the President of Indonesia, this is reckless and it is dangerous, too agro and too reckless.
And at the second Leader's debate on Wednesday night, Dunton admitted he got it wrong. Kind of.
The reference I was making was shouldn't have been to the president. That was in relation to sources from the Proboo government. It was a mistake and I'm happy to a bit. What we got from the Indonesian authorities in the reports was that the sources inside the Proboo government confirmed that was the case.
But this is where things get confusing. The James report did cite Indonesian government sources, but none have confirmed on the record if a request was ever made by Russia to station warplanes on Indonesia's Biak Island. Indonesia's Foreign Ministry spokesman says no one's been given permission to establish a military base, but he didn't mention if any specific requests had been made by Russia. Labour's Employment Minister Murray Watt
was more firm. He told Sky News the Opposition hasn't been briefed because the question was never asked.
They might as well ask for a briefing on the Lockness monster. This is something that doesn't exist that they fabricated. There is no proposal from Russia to have a base anywhere in Indonesia in the way that Peter Dutton and his colleagues have been claiming over the last couple of weeks.
But that's at odds with what some of what's Labour con colleagues have said, which is that the request was made but that Jakarta knocked it back. And so we've kind of come full circle with senior coalition figures demanding greater transparency from the government on Russia's antics in the Pacific. The coalition's Foreign affairs spokesman David Coleman said the inconsistencies
in Labour's statements are proof of briefing is required. On Monday, Russian diplomat Sergey Tolchanov entered the chat, warning that Australia's.
Interests cannot extend to the territory of neighboring sovereign states that pursue active and independent policies.
We've used AI to bring to life parts of a letter written to the Jakarta Post by the Moscow ambassador.
It is clear that the leaders of the two main political parties, replacing each other in power and calling it democracy, are now trying to outdo each other, heating up the situation. They stop at nothing, and the time has come to play the so called Russian card.
And then Prime Minister Anthony Alberanezi dodged questions about the whole debacle dismissing Moscow's presence in the region as propaganda.
There's a lot that still remains unclear over this story, but it's clear that there are quite close ties between Moscow and Jakata, and the Janes Defense publication also suggested that in fact, there's a security threat to Australia from Moscow operating its military aircraft some thirteen hundred kilometers from Darwin.
Ben Packham is the Australian's Foreign affairs and Defense correspondent. I spoke with him on Monday afternoon, when parts of this story were still clear as mud.
Now there's been a lot of back and forth since then about the exact details of what the request was. Was it in fact made, was it granted, Was it a request for a Russian base in India? Was it just a request to transit through Indonesia by Russia. As I said, it is difficult to know exactly what the request was. But the Janes Defense Publication is a very reputable publication and they stand by their report. And that report mentioned documents and it mentioned high level sources in
Indonesia to back its reporting. And the point that the coalition is making about all this is what did Labor know about this request. Have we been blindsided by it? What representations has the Albaneza government made to Indonesia about this? Now? The Labor Party has tried to obfuscate and muddy the waters about this issue because it just does not want to be talking about potential strategic threat on its watch.
Now this was helped by Peter Dutton actually because this has assisted Labor to bat away subsequent lines of questioning on this. But there's a lot of deeper questions here. There's a few unknowns there. And Indonesia further says that other nations military aircraft and vessels are free to undertake peaceful missions from its territory. It seems that if Russia wanted to do what it did in twenty seventeen and conduct surveillance missions from Biak Island, that it could do that.
Let's assume for a minute Russia did propose establishing a military base in Indonesia. Would that be so wild? Since last year, the two nations have been collaborating on a commercial satellite launch facility on Biak Island, which is in Indonesia's easternmost Papua Province, and following his inauguration in October, Indonesian President Proboo Subianto signed onto the Bricks Developing Nations Group.
It's an intergovernmental organization comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Within two weeks of that agreement being signed, by lateral naval exercises were underway in Indonesian waters.
We're all very used to China being spoken of as a strategic threat for Australia in the region, but for many people the emergence of Russia in this context has been quite a surprise and of great interest. Now it would obviously be quite bad in a strategic sense for Australia to have Russia being free to operate its military aircraft to our north. There has been quite a close relationship between Russia and Indonesia over the years, dating back
to the Cold War and even earlier. Indonesia is a big buyer of Russian military equipment and weapons, and we also know that in twenty seventeen Russia used Biack Island to stage reconnaissance miss using some of its long range bombers just eight years ago, so there's precedent for this, and there's a whole lot of advantages of equatorial launch locations for satellites. You get a benefit from the Earth's rotational forces near the equator, so it is quite a
good location for a satellite launch facility. So really, if all goes to plans, as far as Indonesia's concerned, this island is going to be a hive of Russian activity, and Russia, concerningly, will have more leverage, even more leverage over Jakarta. Underneath it all, it does seem that you know that there is something to see here, that it's quite serious, and that not only do we have to worry about China's engagement and intentions in the region, but we also have to worry about Russia's.
Would the White House have clocked that any of this is going on? Do you think? And how would it react.
Donald Trump his views on Russia appear to be much more favorable than those of his predecessors. That's one thing. Also, the US has a lot on its plate at the moment. Donald Trump's moving incredibly fast on a whole range of foreign policy and economic issues. I doubt that there'd be a great deal of concern in Washington about this specific issue.
I think they would be well aware of Russia's activities and efforts to gain more of a strategic foothold in the Pacific, But I think it probably doesn't reach the threshold of something that's going to hit the President's desk right at the moment.
Coming up. How do you solve a problem like defense spending? Ben Labor has signaled it won't boost defense spending to the three percent of GDP guided by the United States if it's re elected on May three, and the coalition's defense policy will only be unveiled in the next couple of days. Does this confusion around Russia's moves in the Indo Pacific change the calculus for either party? Do you think.
This sort of draws attention in a broad sense to the strategic challenges that both parties freely admit that Australia faces. But while Labor has talked up those strategic challenges, we saw in the recent federal budget that it is sticking to its defense funding trajectory, so that has defense spending at roughly two point oh four percent of GDP in the coming financial year, rising to something like two point three three percent of GDP in the early twenty thirties.
The Coalition is going to promise to spend more than that. They're talking about a target of two point five percent in the medium term. That'll be in the early twenty thirties, we believe, but you know that ramp up the trajectory to get there in the shorter term as well. There's quite a bit to do. And while Labor says that it's putting record money into defense and so forth, the truth is that every year is a record year for
defense spending, because that's the nature of these things. So I think this whole debate over Russia and also China is going to feed into the coalition's election campaign. Whether or not that will change any or many votes, that remains to be seen. But I think we will see the Coalition trying to walk the talk in terms of matching the funding envelope to the sort of warnings of what we face, the strategic circumstances that we face.
Do you think Peter Dutton's job in communicating that defense policy is made harder by the fact that he appears to have misunderstood a fairly crucial point about one of Australia's closest neighbors.
I think by the time that defense policy is unveiled in the next couple of days, that sort of proboogaff will be behind him. It's just made it harder for him to capitalize on the Russia issue in the meantime.
Ben Packham is The Australian's Foreign affairs and Defense correspondent. This story is developing quickly. You can read the latest right now at the Australian dot com dot au