Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, I have often heard you say that Defence is a strategic portfolio and that like any good strategic portfolio it craves certainty and reliability from government. During some of your answers, you mentioned the 2009 white paper. As I understood it, the process was meant to provide that reliability and certainty to the Department of Defence. If I understand the logic of the 2009 white paper, it was founded on a grand bargain between Defence and the department. This was a grand bargain, which had two parties. On the government side, we were going to provide three per cent growth in real terms from 2009, the time of the white paper, to 2017-18. From that point on, 2017-18 to 2030, which was the name of the white paper, it was going to be 2.2 per cent growth in real terms. I think the benevolent government of the day even promised some certainty with respect to indexation of the money it was going to provide Defence. That was what the government promised to do, to deliver that certainty and that reliability.

On the Defence side, they demanded the department search deeply within its organisation and find $20 billion in internal savings. When you put the two elements of that grand bargain together, that was meant to deliver the capability requirements of Delivering Force 2030. Minister, you would know whether the parties met that grand bargain, whether they performed their parts of that grand bargain. I imagine the long-term planning and long-term funding Defence requires to fund some of these capabilities would be very apparent in the incoming government briefs—and your analysis of the budgetary impact of what happened in 2009, and what happened in the intervening period, where I understand Defence was used as something of an ATM and that things were pushed off to the right.

I am interested in your perspective. Did the parties meet their responsibilities under that grand bargain? What is our approach in relation to providing that certainty and reliability that Defence quite rightly demands?

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