Australia’s defense chief acknowledged missing a warning about a live firing exercise involving a Chinese warship. This contradicted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s timeline of when the information was known. Admiral David Johnston shared with a Senate estimates committee that a warning coming from a New Zealand warship, which Australia was depending on to track three Chinese warships off the east coast, reached Canberra around 11 am last Friday. At this point, the firing had been ongoing for 90 minutes and had already been reported by a pilot from Virgin Australia, just 50 minutes before. Admiral Johnston explained that the short-range radio signal used by Chinese warships to communicate the warning couldn’t be detected, despite the Australian Defense Force monitoring the vessels for several days beforehand. Later that Wednesday, Mr. Albanese mentioned that the New Zealand alert came ‘at around the same time’ as the pilot’s report to Airservices Australia, which had been relayed to Defense 50 minutes earlier. These statements, coupled with his assertion the previous week that China had informed about the exercise ‘in line with the usual process,’ has sparked accusations from the Opposition that the Prime Minister misled the public. Admiral Johnston also revealed at the Senate estimates that a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine may have been involved in the training exercise. ‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘Task groups occasionally do deploy with submarines, but not always. I can’t be definitive on whether that’s the case.’ He said China had given ‘inadequate notification’ of the ‘clearly disruptive’ live weapons drill, which caused 49 aircraft diversions. James Paterson, the Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, said the delayed notice meant there was no advance warning of the exercise in international waters. ‘It’s not really notification of an upcoming exercise if we only find out about it after it has commenced, is it,’ he told Senate estimates. Senator Patterson told The Australian: ‘The Prime Minister’s attempt to mislead the public by suggesting there was notice given by the People’s Liberation Army – Navy (PLA-N) and it was reported through military channels in a timely way is yet more evidence of his weak leadership. ‘He should be honest, admit we were never notified, and call out this malign behaviour instead of making excuses for the PLA-N.’ Defence Minister Richard Marles told Melbourne radio that China had not yet given a ‘satisfactory answer’ for the lack of notice for the drill, which was repeated on Saturday. ‘The moment that this (Chinese) task group came near Australia, I authorised an unprecedented level of surveillance. We’ve been doing that in combination with our ally, in respect of New Zealand,’ he said. ‘It was the New Zealand frigate that was doing the shadowing work at that time. So we both heard from New Zealand and from the commercial airlines around this.’ Opposition leader Peter Dutton said Mr Albanese must explain why the government took so long to find out about the exercise. ‘If there was an incursion across into our waters and Defence didn’t know about it, or the Defence Minister didn’t know about it, we need to ask those questions and they should be answered,’ he said. ‘The Prime Minister should stand up and explain what is a very significant event, but at the moment, obviously the Prime Minister hasn’t done that, and his story seems to be at odds with the version given by the Chief of the Defence Force in estimates. ‘These are very serious questions that the Prime Minister needs to answer.’ Greens senator David Shoebridge slammed the Government on the issue, saying he was ‘trying to work out how it is with a $55.7billion budget, we find out from a Virgin pilot and a delayed notification from New Zealand’. The revelations come as Foreign Minister Penny Wong prepares to address the nation on Thursday about the ‘unprecedented’ global challenges about Australia is facing. ‘Bullies are threatening to use nuclear weapons, authoritarianism is spreading … institutions we built are being eroded, and rules we wrote are being challenged,’ she will say. Want more stories like this from the Daily Mail? Visit our profile page and hit the follow button above for more of the news you need.