July 11, 2023
Germany has signed a $1bn deal with Australia to buy 100 armed carriers in a move Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says will boost Australia’s sovereignty.
Mr Albanese, who arrived in Berlin on Monday, said the deal to supply the Queensland-made Boxer heavy weapon carriers would become “one of our largest ever exports”, would guarantee jobs, and boost the economy.
The deal could in time come to be worth up to $6.5bn.
“This will boost our sovereignty. This will increase our defence capability and boost our economy. This is a great outcome,” Mr Albanese said.
“And it’s the first outcome of quite a few that we have ready to announce (on Monday) with our friends here in Germany. I thank Chancellor Scholz for the very kind invitation to come here to commemorate these agreements that we will enter into tomorrow.”
The Boxer heavy weapon carrier vehicles are produced by Germany company Rheinmetall at its Military Vehicle Centre of Excellence in Brisbane.
Mr Albanese witnessed the signing on Monday afternoon.
The Opposition have welcomed the deal, with home affairs spokesperson James Paterson saying it was in line with what the previous government had envisaged.
“We hoped that establishing that presence here in Australia would lead to exports and the fact that it has borne fruit under this government is a very welcome thing,” he told ABC Radio.
Mr Albanese is in Germany on Monday ahead of the NATO meeting in Lithuania, in what it set to be a divided alliance after French President Emmanuel Macron dug in on his opposition to the bid to open a liaison office in Tokyo.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg had planned to officially set up a Japanese outpost during the two-day summit, as a move to counter the rising threat of China.
Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea will all be at the NATO summit, despite not being NATO members, because Mr Stoltenberg says Europe’s security is “not regional, it is global”.
In a sensational spray, former Labor prime minister Paul Keating backed Mr Macron, saying NATO’s focus of the Asia-Pacific region would be a case of “Asia welcoming the plague upon itself”.
Mr Keating lashed Mr Stoltenberg as a “supreme fool” who “by instinct and by policy is simply an accident on its way to happen”.
“NATO’s continued existence after and at the end of the Cold War has already denied peaceful unity to the broader Europe, the promise of which the end of the Cold War held open,” Mr Keating said.
“And besides, the Europeans have been fighting each other for the better part of 300 years, including giving the rest of us two world wars in the last hundred.
“Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States.”
Mr Albanese dodged addressing the Keating tirade when he was asked directly whether it would make his meeting with Mr Stoltenberg at NATO awkward.
The Prime Minister noted he had met Mr Stoltnber on a number of occasions and was pleased to be addressing NATO.
“Jens Stoltenberg is a friend of Australia. I’ve met him on a number of occasions and we need to remember the role that NATO is playing,” he told reporters in Berlin.
“We support the extraordinary efforts that NATO is showing (in Ukraine) because this is a struggle that is has implications for the whole world.
“I’m interested in looking forward, my constructive engagement with NATO.
Senator Paterson sought to hose down Mr Keating, saying it was “really welcome” that NATO was showing an increased level of interest in the Indo-Pacific.
“If we want stability in the Indo-Pacific, if we want to prevent what is happening in Ukraine from happening in our region, then the interest of other powers in the world is very welcome,” he said.
