Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question and thank him for his service to our country in uniform and for being a great champion for Tasmania. Obviously in the post-COVID world we see a situation where our country will face more and more complex strategic challenges, and Australia needs to make sure we can harness our future opportunities. Importantly, we also need to mitigate the risks and to deter potential future threats. The federal government has been able to put significant investment into our Defence Force, not only to provide support to our men and women who wear the uniform but, importantly, to make sure they receive the right kit and that we make the right investment into a number of assets that will provide support to our defence personnel.

The 2020 Defence Strategic Update and the 2020 Force Structure Plan are key parts of the government's national security agenda, and we are backing our armed forces by investing $270 billion into defence capability over the next decade and restoring defence funding to over two per cent of GDP. So this not only provides a future of certainty for our country where we can provide assurances to Australians about making them as safe as possible but it also puts a significant amount of money into local businesses right across the country. So, when people look forward over the next 12 months, over the next 12 years, they know that if they're working in a small manufacturing business in an outer metropolitan area somewhere they can be provided with the assurances they need to make the extra employment arrangements that they might need to fulfil their arrangements in their contract with Defence. We're also building our naval vessels—70 vessels being built here in Australia.

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