Address to 2025 Indo Pacific Conference breakfast

So welcome everyone today to the Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition 2025 and the accompanying Royal Australian Navy's Sea Power conference. 

And quite literally, Indo Pac 2025 is bigger and better than it has ever been. 

On the Navy side of the house, last count, there are 58 countries that are represented here with 35 chiefs of Navy, and I know that Admiral Hammond has literally been salivating about the prospect of the Sea Power conference this year, to have so many chiefs of Navy congregated in one spot is a kind of version of Navy Disneyland. 

And quite literally, Sydney during Indo Pac for a Chief of Navy is the happiest place on earth. 

So I really do hope that all of you enjoy that side of the next three days. 

And on the industry side, there are 900 exhibitors here again, the biggest trade exposition for Indo Pac in its history. 

And I really want to acknowledge Vice Admiral Retired Tim Barrett, the Chair of AMDA, and Justin Giddings, the CEO of AMDA, and really thank them for the incredible work that they have done in putting together the industry side of Indo Pac and indeed Mark and all of his staff for putting together the Sea Power conference, it is going to be a fantastic three days. 

The gathering and the interest of everyone here over the next three days does reflect a more serious and more troubling assessment of the world. 

Today, be it in Eastern Europe and the Middle East or in the Indo Pacific, the global rules based order is under increasing pressure. 

And the rules of the road which are under pressure, in so many ways are actually the rules of the sea.

For a country like Australia, with a growing proportion of our national income being derived from trade and the physical manifestation of that being our sea lines of communication, having open sea lines, having freedom of navigation, having an adherence to the rules of the sea, is very much at the core of our national interest. 

And in our contemporary world, literally, the daily work of the Royal Australian Navy is to assert the rules based order where our trade routes go in places like the South China Sea and East China Sea. 

And that work is challenging, and in truth, it's becoming increasingly risky. 

The biggest military build-up in the world today is China, and that it is happening without strategic reassurance, means that for Australia and for so many countries, a response is demanded. 

And we need to be thinking about the kinds of capabilities that we have and we need to be thinking about it increasingly. 

Next year, we will release the National Defence Strategy 2026 in the lead up to the federal budget in May of next year. 

And NDS 26 with the accompanying Integrated Investment Plan, which is our ten year procurement schedule, will, I am sure, just as NDS 24 did, just as the Defence Strategic Review did, speak to the need for the Australian Defence Force to be able to engage in impactful projection. 

To have a more amphibious army, to have longer range missiles, to have a more capable set of northern bases which enable our Air Force to project further, but chief among those capabilities is having a long range, highly capable Navy, both in terms of our service fleet and our submarines. 

And it's no coincidence that when you look at our most recent announcements, the decision to pursue the Mogami Class vessel from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as our new general purpose frigate. 

The decision to invest $1.7 billion in Ghost Shark, a long range underwater autonomous capability being produced by Anduril Australia. 

The decision to invest $12.5 billion in the Henderson Defence Precinct in Perth, which will be the home of continuous naval ship building in Western Australia, but also the home of the maintenance of our future submarines. 

All of those investments, literally in the last few months, are about building a much more capable, lethal, long range Navy. 

But all of those investments also speak to the fact that we are increasing across the board, our Defence expenditure. 

Relative to what we inherited when we came into office, in the last three and a half years, we have increased our Defence spending by more than $70 billion over the decade, but that's also investment in the here and now. 

In each of the last two financial years, Defence has spent more on procurement than it ever has, a record has been established in each of those two years, and so that spending is happening right now. 

And what that means is that over the course of the next three days, this is an invaluable and incredibly worthwhile opportunity, because it is a moment where we can compare notes with our fellow Navies around the world around shared challenges, but it's also a moment when we can speak to industry about the kind of capabilities that we will need to see. 

And here on the Expo side of it, we will be seeing an incredible display of what our industry can produce; awesome power, ingenious autonomous systems and craft of all shapes and sizes which spread, which span the breadth of the beautiful, the menacing and the extremely cool. 

And all of it is on display the very best of human ingenuity. 

So we really are looking forward to these next three days. 

I hope that you do as well. 

And please get the most that you can out of Indo Pac 25, I know that we will. 

And with those words, it is my enormous honour to declare Indo Pac 25 open. 

Thank you.