Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an opportunity to really bell the cat on the lies that have been peddled in relation to defence expenditure. All sound commentators and fact checkers have pointed out that the percentage of GDP figure fluctuates dramatically through the course of an economy because of the fluctuation in the GDP statistics. It's really ironic that the coalition like to cite the 1938 figure. It was a coalition government at that time leading Australia down a blind alley in preparation for World War II. It was the Curtin government that took spending from that historic low to a near 30 per cent of GDP figure that put this country on track to actually fight off an existential threat. Of course, after that, it was under Labor governments in the seventies—during the Whitlam government and, of course, particularly during the Hawke-Keating years—when spending as a percentage of GDP never fell below two per cent. For five years, it was at 2.6 per cent—a figure that the Howard government never matched in its time and, in fact, was closest to those GDP figures of the 1930s. In fact, it was the Gillard-Rudd government that came the closest to that two per cent figure through those last six years by reaching 1.96 per cent, which this government has not yet reached. We had a promise from them of hitting two per cent and, this year, hitting 1.9 per cent, but that's not as high as the highest figure that Labor achieved.

Labor, in fact, took defence spending to a record level of $114 billion in our final budget, and, over the defence guidance period, we were going to be spending $333 billion. More importantly, as my colleague the shadow defence minister pointed out, we were going to bridge the valley of death on the back of, of course, Labor creating our naval shipbuilding industry by building the last two Adelaide class frigates, the Anzac frigates and the Collins submarines, which the Howard government then completely wasted. We had to spend a billion dollars rebuilding Australia's capacity in the workforce and industry to get that shipbuilding program rolling again. I had Defence advice, as the Minister for Defence Materiel, in relation to those supply vessels that said that not only could they be built here but they should be. That advice to me said that a full in-country build for SEA 1654—the supply vessels—could provide critical workflow to Australia's naval shipbuilding sector across all three shipyards, avoiding the costly decline of specialist skills between completion of the LHD and AWD projects and the start of Future Submarines. They said that optimisation—that is, local build—could overcome the imminent impact of the valley of death on sustainability of the national shipbuilding industry and retention of critical skills. There were no known reasons why either design they were contemplating could not be built entirely in Australia. That was our commitment prior to the 2013 election. This government sent those vessels to Spain, for Spanish jobs. They should've been built here and there would have been no valley of death.

The Minister for Defence Industry likes to claim that we didn't commission a single vessel. That was because no planning had been done during the Howard government for the replacement of the submarines, for the supply vessels, for the offshore patrol vessels or for the patrol boats. We had to pick the ball up from ground zero. To give an idea of what is entailed in that, the replacement process for the Oberon class submarines began in 1978, and the first of those vessels didn't start hitting the water till the late nineties. The last boat hit the water in 2003. That demonstrates how long the planning process takes in commissioning vessels. How many locally built vessels, major fleet units, has this government commissioned in its four years? Zero. Let's get the facts right, let's get the record straight. Another member referred to the Land 400 project, which this government has also made a mess of, along with its record prior to us coming into government in 2007. We had to place 21 projects of concern into a special process, and there was the $1.4 billion lost entirely through its catastrophic Seasprite program, which we had to remediate by creating the Seahawk program. There was the landing craft that it spent $40 million on that didn't fit any vessel we then owned or were building—a completely wasted sum of money.

This government needs to focus on letting Austal and ASC be in the process for the bidding of the frigates. A complete lie is being told about Australian industry commitment to our projects. This government needs to get serious on that. We're very happy to work with it on ensuring that our industry is fully factored into the defence processes; let's actually put some substance on that instead of the constant politicisation we see from the Minister for Defence Industry.

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