Russell Buzby

On 6 March 2026, the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit discontinued the Major Projects Report with almost no public debate. Eighteen years of annual independent assessment, covering 21 of Defence’s most expensive capability programs and more than $81.5 billion of taxpayer money, ended in a single procedural motion (Cohen, 2026b). The Committee had been the single most important public window into whether Australian defence acquisition actually worked, and the window has now been shut.

Six days earlier, on the other side of the same portfolio, the Defence Delivery Agency was still on track for its 1 July 2026 stand-up. The DDA consolidates Defence’s three main acquisition bodies under a single National Armaments Director (Department of Defence, 2025). It will manage close to $60 billion a year, growing toward $100 billion by the mid-2030s. Minister for Defence Richard Marles has described it as the most significant reform of Australian defence acquisition in fifty years, citing 28 major projects running a combined 97 years late as the problem it is meant to solve.

Both things can be true at once: the acquisition system genuinely needs reform, and the Major Projects Report was imperfect and sometimes plodding in its delivery. But the timing of the two decisions matters because they pull in opposite directions. One concentrates authority while the other reduces the independent scrutiny of how that authority is actually used. Reform on the structural side and retreat on the oversight side do not add up to the same thing as reform overall. What they add up to is reorganisation with a new letterhead.

The Major Projects Report was never primarily a forensic embarrassment mechanism. It functioned more like a structured annual conversation between Defence, the Australian National Audit Office and the Parliament itself, built around a shared data set with agreed definitions of cost and schedule performance. Its value lay less in any single finding than in the discipline it imposed. Defence had to keep a consistent set of numbers on its biggest programs, and the ANAO had to audit them at public hearings in front of the JCPAA. That architecture is why the Report generated the low-level pressure that tends to produce slow, unglamorous improvement.

Cohen (2026b) argues that this accountability model has now been dismantled without a replacement. The Joint Standing Committee on Defence, announced as the new home for defence scrutiny, is expected to sit largely in private. Closed hearings have their place in a classified portfolio, but they cannot substitute for a public-facing audit architecture of the kind the Major Projects Report provided. The whole point of independent scrutiny is that it is visible, because visibility is what signals to the workforce and the taxpaying electorate that someone is watching.

The Defence Delivery Agency is also not Australia’s first attempt to solve acquisition problems with a new box on the org chart. The Defence Materiel Organisation, disbanded in 2015 under the First Principles Review, was the most recent structural answer to the same symptoms. Before the DMO there was the Defence Acquisition Organisation, and before that the Material Branch. The Substack essay Reforming Without Change catalogues seven decades of these cycles and concludes that structural and cultural barriers outweigh organisational fixes (Long, 2026). The DDA is effectively a re-creation of much of what the DMO used to do, now consolidated under a single director with a slightly grander title. That history on its own does not condemn the new agency. It does, however, strongly suggest we should be honest about what the evidence says about structural answers to cultural problems.

The pattern Long describes will be familiar to anyone who has tried to deliver change in a large public agency. Structural reforms are quick to announce and easy to cost, and they look good on ministerial slide decks. Workforce capability and cultural reset, and the slow business of rebuilding project management maturity in the middle of the delivery workforce, are harder to price and harder to sell politically. Reform cycles reach for the structural lever because it is the lever closest to hand, not because the evidence suggests it is the lever that works. Cohen (2026a) makes a closely related point: the DDA’s only real chance of making a difference is if it embeds forward-looking planning and capability forecasting into its core operating model, rather than simply inheriting the processes of its predecessors. His implicit warning is that if the new agency starts life by transferring existing staff and operating assumptions into a new wrapper, it will produce the same outputs it was built to replace.

This is where the timing of the JCPAA decision bites. Concentrating authority is a legitimate response to diffuse accountability. The argument for the DDA is that when responsibility for an acquisition program is split across three groups, nobody owns the outcome, and a single director with a single chain of command is supposed to fix that. The problem is that concentration only improves outcomes when it is paired with credible external scrutiny. Without that counterweight, the apparent clarity of a single chain of command just expands the surface area over which the same cultural problems can play out behind closed doors. Normal public sector design pairs concentration with scrutiny. Remove the scrutiny and the concentration itself becomes the primary risk.

There is a parallel worth naming here. Australia’s recent experience with the Resistance to Interrogation program in the ADF showed what happens when the formal oversight architecture exists on paper but lacks the independence or authority to act. Complaints cycled through review mechanisms for two decades without real consequence, until a front-page investigation and a Commonwealth Ombudsman finding forced the issue into the open. The lesson was never that Defence needed more structures. The lesson was that the structures it already had lacked functional teeth. Acquisition reform risks walking into the same trap from a different direction by building a bigger structure while retiring the one thing that gave the structure a reason to behave.

Over the next twelve to eighteen months, the more telling developments will not be the DDA’s launch events but the second-order decisions that surround it. What the new Joint Standing Committee on Defence chooses to publish matters; so does whether it operates largely in private. A narrowing of the ANAO’s public remit over DDA programs would tell its own story, as would a DDA workforce strategy that hands technical judgement straight back to the same consulting firms the new agency was meant to displace. The forward-looking planning function Cohen (2026a) argues for will either get real resources and real authority, or it will end up as another slide in an induction deck. None of those signals will generate a media cycle, and that is precisely why they are the ones worth tracking.

Defence acquisition is one of the hardest public delivery problems in the country, and it deserves serious reform. Serious reform and serious reorganisation are not the same thing, and the difference between them is almost always visible in what happens to independent scrutiny when the structural change lands. On that score, the last month has moved in the wrong direction. The clearest sign of whether a reform is real is what happens to the people tasked with watching it. On that measure, this one has some ground to make up.

References

Cohen, L. (2026a, March 12). Australia’s new defence acquisition organisation must be forward looking. ASPI Strategist. https://aspistrategist.org.au/australias-new-defence-acquisition-organisation-must-be-forward-looking

Cohen, L. (2026b, March 12). The biggest window into Australian defence acquisition has closed. ASPI Strategist. https://aspistrategist.org.au/the-biggest-window-into-australian-defence-acquisition-has-closed

Department of Defence. (2025, December 1). Defence Delivery Agency announcement. Commonwealth of Australia.

Long, M. (2026, March 13). Reforming without change – Seven decades of Australian defence acquisition reform. Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (Substack). https://mablong.substack.com/p/reforming-without-change-seven-decades

Parliamentary Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit. (2026, March 6). Discontinuation of the Major Projects Report. Parliament of Australia.