Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for North Sydney for his question. I believe today might be his 50th birthday, so congratulations to the member for North Sydney.

It is critically important that we fund the government's build-up of our military capability in full and into the future. Several years ago we made the decision that we would fund a build-up of our military capability, the largest in our peacetime history, costing, from this year, $200 billion over the next 10 years and taking the spending on defence to two per cent of gross domestic product by 2020, a year earlier than we had initially promised. That's why we put in place the structure to give people certainty, whether they be foreign governments, state and territory governments, the defence industry, or the Australian government through the ADF and the Department of Defence.

We set in place the structure through a white paper, through the integrated investment plan, through the Naval Shipbuilding Plan, through the Defence Export Strategy and through the Defence Industrial Capability Plan so that everyone knows how we are building up our military by $200 billion over the next 10 years. It gives us the security we need to be a good ally to the United States, to have the capability to influence our region and to be the regional security power in terms of, for example, submarines—to have regionally superior submarines. We decided to use it as well to drive high-technology jobs, manufacturing jobs, throughout our economy. It is working. It is working very well. But we can only do it because we have budgetary management under control—

Dr Mike Kelly interjecting—

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