Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Defence Legislation (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2008. In doing so, I recognise the members of the defence establishment who are here today, including Michael Simon, who have come to witness the debate. I wish to speak on the duplicity of the government in schedule 2 of the bill, although it would be remiss of me not to remind the member for Port Adelaide that in 1993 I was at the Nurrungar protests as a young lieutenant with the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment. The Prime Minister at the time, Prime Minister Keating, sent in a company group plus 170 troops to guard the Nurrungar facility against 4,000 demonstrators, including union members. As a union member, member for Port Adelaide, you should be very thankful the unions did not get past the police barricade and come in contact with the members of the 3rd Battalion, because we would have been less than merciful.

It is also interesting that you complain about the coalition under Howard not introducing the measures in schedule 2 with respect to providing medical treatment to defence members. Need I remind you that we had to pay off $96 billion of Labor debt, including $30-plus billion of interest payments from 1996 through to the early 2000s? We put aside $65 billion in the Future Fund to take care of public service liabilities that you neglected. Furthermore, we set aside $20 billion in funds for future infrastructure expenditure and left $18 billion in the 2007-08 budget surplus. We left you $240 billion, a quarter of a trillion dollars, so do not come in here and lecture about what the coalition may or may not have done in various areas of the economy. If we did not have to spend that quarter of a trillion dollars on the liabilities you left behind, I daresay there would be a range of things we could have done.

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