Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was quite excited when I saw this motion on the Notice Paper, talking about naval shipbuilding and the member for Makin moving it. I thought: 'This is great. We're going to see some well earned praise for the coalition government and what it has done for naval shipbuilding, what it has done for defence investment and what it has done for the fine state of South Australia.' But all we get is carping and whining and whingeing—typical negativity. I like the member for Makin. He's a great fellow, but that five minutes that he just delivered is five minutes of my life I'm not going to get back. I'm annoyed about that because I thought he was going to talk up our sovereign capability. I thought he was going to talk up the fact that we are investing record amounts. I thought he might even have been just a tad honest about the fact that, during the Gillard and Rudd years, defence spending dropped—and the defence minister talked about this in question time today—to 1.56 per cent of gross domestic product. That was the lowest level since 1938, and the member for Makin knows, as we all do, what happened in 1939.

We are putting in place investment of $90 billion in new naval ships and submarines. The member for Makin should be talking that up, because South Australia is going to play a key role in that shipbuilding. There's more than $1 billion in modern shipyard infrastructure—

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