Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Makin spoke about South Australian members and so forth. Well, defence affects all members of this parliament. Defence affects all Australians. He wants to give us advice on defence acquisitions. Well, on this side of the House we take advice from the minister; and also from the assistant minister, the member for Fadden, who had a distinguished career in the Defence Force; and also from the member for Bass, who spoke on this MPI today, who was a distinguished brigadier in the Defence Force and sits on our defence backbench committee. I am quite happy to take recommendations from those members on our side of the parliament.

Opposition members interjecting—

The Labor Party are negative. I am quite happy to talk about the Minister for Defence. I judge people by what I see when I meet them. I have spoken to the Minister for Defence on several occasions and I believe he is passionate about the ADF and believes Australia needs to have a strong Defence Force. Let's look at what the minister said today in the Senate. He said: 'The frustrations of successive governments with the performance of both the Collins class sustainment and the AWD program are well documented. I am committed to leading the effort to fix our problems. I did express my frustrations in the past performance of ASC—

Opposition members interjecting—

Listen up, 'shadow minister'. He said: 'In these comments I never intended to cause offence and regret that offence may have been taken.' But that is not good enough for the opposition because they are Mr and Mrs Negativity. What is Labor's record on defence? We have heard it from other members, and I will not go into it all again, but we know that they launched a defence white paper and then cut $16 billion out of defence. Many new members are sitting around me here. We made the decision to run for our seats in parliament because of your past performance, because of the cuts that you made to defence and the many, many things that you did—and you have the gall to come in here and raise this in an MPI debate. Under Labor, defence spending dropped to 1.56 per cent, the lowest since 1938. We have made a commitment to invest in defence. We will continue to do so and ensure taxpayers' money is spent well. (Time expired)

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