Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The 2012-13 federal budget announced reduced defence funding as a share of gross domestic product, reducing it to its lowest level in Australia in 74 years. Defence funding had not been lower than 1.6 per cent of GDP since—wait for it—the year 1938. We all know what happened in 1939. And with our service men and women still fighting the good fight in Afghanistan and maintaining other important peacekeeping missions elsewhere, now is not the time for the Australian government to be taking the axe to defence spending.

I present this speech on the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade's review of the Defence annual report 2010-11 as the member from a triservice city. Wagga Wagga is the home of the soldier: the Australian Army Recruit Training Centre puts the polish on all recruits, and Forest Hill on the eastern outskirts of the city has important strategic bases for the Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Australian Navy.

The coalition has always and will continue to support in a bipartisan way our operations in the field. Our support is a given, and that is the way it should be. But the impulsive and superficially expedient nature of Labor's enormous cuts in defence has left this nation without a credible strategic plan or defence administration. The opposition cannot be party to such poor policy.

With the release of the 2009 defence white paper titled Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific century: force 2030, Labor pledged to modernise and reform our defence forces. A funding commitment of three per cent real growth, sustaining defence funding at close to 1.8 per cent GDP, was given. It also outlined a strategic reform program delivering $20 billion over 10 years, with those savings being returned, as they ought to be, to defence for funding acquisitions. Despite being afforded virtually no detail as to funding—nothing unusual there; that is the Labor way—the opposition gave the plan bipartisan support. Since then, the reality of a totally disingenuous government has kicked in. Labor has taken the portfolio in precisely the opposite direction. A total of $17 billion worth of defence funding has either been cut, indefinitely deferred, cancelled or delayed. Then, four days out from the 8 May 2012 federal budget, Labor announced $5.5 billion in cuts to the Defence portfolio, with no strategic or defence policy justification, in what was clearly about the last-minute politics of a wafer-thin surplus we all now know was never going to and will not materialise. The only glib reference to defence in the Treasurer's budget was this:

Of $33.6 billion of savings, about half are reductions in spending … deferring some defence expenditure while prioritising support for current overseas operations …

It is nothing to do with defence reform or national security.

If Labor had not been so wasteful and so reckless with the public purse, cuts in the order of what defence and so many front-line services are now being forced to endure would not be being made. Labor is guilty of unacceptable public maladministration. Australia has not been in this position—

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