Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

The idea that the failure of transparency in the former Liberal government was solely confined to the member for Cook would be completely wrong because it was an abiding culture of all of them. It belonged to every one of them, and it most certainly applied in defence.

Today we learned, through the ANAO's report on Defence's administration of the Integrated Investment Program under the former coalition government, that when those opposite were advised that the Attack class submarine program would cost $78 billion, the number they provided to the public was $50 billion. The ANAO report makes it clear that, when those opposite were advised that the Hunter class frigate program would cost $36 billion, the number they provided to the public was $30 billion.

To be clear, that is not a failure of transparency. That is straight-out misinformation on a grand scale. That is the equivalent of trying to hide the entire state budget of Western Australia. The reason they did this is that those opposite were unable to deal with the hard questions about those costs, because to do so would have been to actually engage in defence policy, and those opposite are never interested in doing that. They're just completely obsessed with the politics of defence. It's this behaviour which has left our government inheriting 28 different programs, running a combined 97 years over time. In our history, there has never been an administration as with the former Liberal government which has treated Australia's defence with such contempt.

The Albanese government is different. We are introducing an independent program office. When programs go wrong, we are going to have objective criteria by which they are put on the 'projects of interest/projects of concern' list, and then there will be monthly reports to ministers so we can get those back on track. But all of that pales into insignificance—

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