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

I thank the member for her question and thank you, Mr Speaker. Let me explain. This afternoon, the government will be receiving the Defence Strategic Review from Sir Angus Houston and Professor Stephen Smith. It is the single most important re-evaluation of Australia's strategic posture in the last 35 years, against a backdrop of the most complex strategic landscape that we have faced since the end of the Second World War. The review has met with 150 different experts from across academia, think tanks, the defence industry and the Defence Force itself. It has received more than 360 submissions from the general public. I have no doubt that the report the Prime Minister and I are about to receive will be one of the most important works in Australia's defence history. The government will take some weeks to consider the review before we announce an unclassified version of it along with our response to it.

But none of this happens in a vacuum, because the decisions this government now has to make come on the back of a lost decade from the former coalition government, the worst government for national security in our country's history. Time and again we watched those opposite make decisions based on politics rather than on policy, decisions such as their decision to down-select the Attack class submarine program to one tenderer before they even competed the design, just so they could do a single press conference in the lead up to the 2016 election. That decision alone cost the Australian taxpayers billions of dollars. It was an epic failure from a government which, when it left office, had 28 different defence programs running a combined 97 years over time.

The decisions of those opposite aren't really a surprise, because they never took defence seriously. They had six—really, seven—different defence ministers in the course of nine years, underpinned by another 18 defence ministers over the same period of time. It was for them a revolving door. They could not have treated defence with more contempt, because, for those opposite, becoming a defence minister was simply receiving a trophy. Well, let me say this: the Defence Strategic Review ushers in a new era of defence policy in this country, one where our decisions are rooted in proper judgements, judgements which are based on the national interest, a national interest which has at its heart keeping Australians safe.

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