Name: Hon. Richard Marles MP - Press Conference
Uploaded: 2026-08-18T03:05:00+00:00
Duration: 2880 s

22:26 - 25:28

Speaker 1

Okay, well welcome everyone here today and can I particularly welcome my counterpart, my good friend, the Japanese Minister for Defence, Shin Koisumi. Today we have had our fourth meeting under the framework for strategic defence coordination, a mechanism that we established in Tokyo last December. And at a time in the world where our strategic landscape is challenging and volatile, we deeply appreciate the relationship that we have with Japan. We have never been more strategically aligned. There is no country with whom we have greater strategic alignment than Japan, and our engagement together is underpinned by complete trust.

And that has very much been a feature of the conversation that we have had today. Today we have agreed to continue to advance the information sharing that we are undertaking between our two defence forces. We've also agreed to the very fast tempo and deep tempo of defence exercises between our two countries.

And to that end, over the last couple of months, Darwin has hosted F-35s from the Japanese Air Force that have participated in two exercises: Exercise Southern Cross, which was a trilateral exercise between our two countries and the United States, and then of course Exercise Pitch Black, which is our major air exercise involving Australia and 20 other countries. But across those two, it meant that there were Japanese F-35s in Darwin for the better part of two months. I had the pleasure of being able to meet the crew of the F-35s and I think a couple of the Japanese E-3s. I sent Shin a photo of that meeting and they did a fantastic job in participating in that exercise. Today we've also talked about the progress of the Mogami-class vessel and the partnership that we have with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

We remain on course to see the first of those vessels in service in the Royal Australian Navy this decade, making it one of the fastest acquisitions of a surface combatant into the Royal Australian Navy in our history. And we could not be happier with the level of cooperation that we are having with the Japanese government in respect of that, but also the level of cooperation that we are having with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. We had previously spoken about seeking to increase the level of engagement between our defense science and innovation sectors. Today we can announce that through that collaboration, we are progressing a project which is called Boobook. Boobook is an Australian owl that can see very well in the dark, that's why we've called it that.

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