Military cuts not on US talks agenda: Australia
12 Nov 2012 7:24 AM IST
Australia on Sunday sought to play down comments by a senior US official who said Washington planned to raise concerns about Canberra's falling military spending at talks this week between the allies.
Australia slashed Aus 5.5 billion (USD 5.7 billion) from its defence budget in May in a bid to return the economy to surplus, despite a beefed-up US alliance that has seen hundreds of Marines deployed to northern Australia. The expansion in ties, announced by US President Barack Obama on a visit to Australia 12 months ago, is part of Washington's pivot to Asia to counter China's growing military might. Australia is a long-standing US ally. Defence Minister Stephen Smith is due to meet US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Perth this week for annual security talks, and one of Clinton's top advisors in the region, Kurt Campbell, earlier said the ‘important’ spending issue would be raised. But Smith said on Sunday that the defence cuts were not on the agenda of the AUSMIN summit and it was ‘frankly a nonsense’ to suggest that US officials were coming to Australia ‘to talk about our defence cuts’.
‘We're going to deal with the suite of strategic issues that are of importance to us,’ he told ABC Television.
Smith said Panetta had both publicly and privately described Australia's contribution to global security as ‘first-class’. The remarks were backed by the US ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich, who said the two nations trusted one another and Washington was not concerned by the spending cuts.
Australia slashed Aus 5.5 billion (USD 5.7 billion) from its defence budget in May in a bid to return the economy to surplus, despite a beefed-up US alliance that has seen hundreds of Marines deployed to northern Australia. The expansion in ties, announced by US President Barack Obama on a visit to Australia 12 months ago, is part of Washington's pivot to Asia to counter China's growing military might. Australia is a long-standing US ally. Defence Minister Stephen Smith is due to meet US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Perth this week for annual security talks, and one of Clinton's top advisors in the region, Kurt Campbell, earlier said the ‘important’ spending issue would be raised. But Smith said on Sunday that the defence cuts were not on the agenda of the AUSMIN summit and it was ‘frankly a nonsense’ to suggest that US officials were coming to Australia ‘to talk about our defence cuts’.
‘We're going to deal with the suite of strategic issues that are of importance to us,’ he told ABC Television.
Smith said Panetta had both publicly and privately described Australia's contribution to global security as ‘first-class’. The remarks were backed by the US ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich, who said the two nations trusted one another and Washington was not concerned by the spending cuts.
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