"long‑term stewardship of the sovereign defence industrial base," the reform plan states, identifying stewardship as a "key function" of the new agency and a specific responsibility of its chief, the national armaments director.
The Defence Delivery Agency (DDA): design and mandate
The government’s reform plan Rebuilding Defence Capability, released quietly while the 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy (DIDS) was launched, sets out a new, quasi-independent Defence Delivery Agency (DDA). The plan describes the DDA as having more formal independence than past arrangements and control over its own budget. Its role goes beyond delivering individual projects: the DDA is charged explicitly with "long‑term stewardship of the sovereign defence industrial base," a duty the strategy identifies as a core function of the agency and a named responsibility of the national armaments director.
How the DDA differs from the earlier Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO)
Both the DDA and the DMO were conceived to improve capability delivery by separating acquisition from Defence proper, but the similarities largely end there. The DMO, which operated from 2005 to 2015, was built around a purchaser‑provider model intended to impose commercial discipline. The DDA, by contrast, is grounded in a newer administrative philosophy associated with New Public Governance: partnership, networks and stewardship rather than transactional market mechanisms. Ministers have been at pains to say "it won’t be DMO 2.0," and the strategy documents make no reference to the need for a business‑style purchaser‑provider relationship between Defence and the DDA.
Ideological shift and what it means for governance
The reform marks a deliberate move away from the market‑oriented, contract‑centric reforms of the Howard era toward a post‑neoliberal model that privileges trust and collaboration. Defence emphasised these themes at its annual Defence and Industry Conference on 1 July. Where the DMO model leaned on commercial performance metrics and auditability, the DDA’s stewardship mandate asks officials to shape and protect an Australian industrial ecosystem—engaging earlier with industry, understanding capacity, and, where necessary, intervening to preserve capability that market forces might erode.
Risks embedded in stewardship: accountability, measurement, and capture
Stewardship reshapes risk. The reform plan acknowledges problems—poor through‑life costing and "incomplete implementation of clear, senior accountability for capability outcomes"—that earlier reviews (Kinnaird, 2003; Mortimer, 2008) flagged and that the DMO sought to address. But stewardship is "big, vague and extraordinarily hard‑to‑measure," the reform analysis warns, and decisions about how particular actions advance long‑term industrial outcomes will be complex and difficult for outsiders to scrutinise. The piece urges Parliament and the public must be assured that the risk of stewardship sliding into regulatory capture is being managed. It contrasts the neoliberal fixation on contract performance—which "had a natural affinity for public scrutiny and audit"—with the post‑neoliberal ecosystem approach, which the author says "doesn’t."
What this means for Defence, the national armaments director, and industry
- Defence: The department will cede operational control over some acquisition delivery to a more independent agency while relying on the DDA to protect long‑term industrial capacity—requiring new oversight approaches to ensure accountability for capability outcomes.
- The national armaments director (the DDA chief): Tasked with stewardship, this official will be responsible for judgements about which firms and capacities to nurture or protect—decisions the source says will be "highly involved and difficult to scrutinise from outside the building."
- Industry: The DDA’s promise to "know industry better" and "engage earlier" signals closer partnerships and possible protections for domestic suppliers; at the same time, closer relations increase the need for probity controls to prevent undue influence or preferential treatment.
The reforms are presented as an evolution rather than a replay. As Mark Thomson wrote for ASPI in 2015, defence reform "owes as much to trial and error as it does to intelligent design …. It’s one more opportunity to discard failed ideas and try some new ones." The DDA is designed to learn from past experience—yet the source cautions that shifting from a contract‑centric model to stewardship substitutes a new set of hard choices for the old ones. The central question left on the table is procedural as much as strategic: how will Parliament and the public be given the tools to judge whether stewardship is protecting sovereign capability, or simply inscribing industry preferences into long‑term policy?
