Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

To start off, I would like to give a shout-out to my local veterans, particularly our veterans at the St Marys Vietnam Veterans Outpost. The extraordinary work that you do in our community to ensure that we remember the sacrifices that are being made is something that really touches me, my family and our whole committee. Thank you very much.

There has never been more of a wake-up call on sovereign capability than COVID, which meant securing our supply chains and protecting our country, and today, post-COVID, we are experiencing some of the most uncertain times globally. What should we have in a time like this, which is so uncertain and so unstable? We should have urgency. Do you know what urgency is, Madam Deputy Speaker? It is the importance of swift action, imperativeness, haste. There is no definition of urgency that says, 'We should have another review, another meeting and go slow.' That is what this government is doing.

As my friend the honourable member for Canning said, there is nothing more pressing for an Australian government than the defence of the nation, and I would particularly like to give a shout-out to those who work so hard at Defence Establishment Orchard Hills, in my electorate of Lindsay, to ensure our weapons are kept safe. They are maintaining such extraordinary work in the most uncertain times. Unfortunately, we have the Labor Party at the helm when we are in the midst of the most challenging geostrategic moment in our lives, with China consistently knocking on the doors of our Indo-Pacific neighbours with promises of infrastructure and security in exchange for not recognising Taiwan and cutting strong and, previously, enduring relationships with Australia. China is building its defence capability at a rapid speed and this is troubling for what could occur should tensions rise for us and the Indo-Pacific community yet, again—go slow, no urgency—this Albanese Labor government is stalling on strategic defence decisions and is just not up to the job of defending our country. Not only is China causing disturbance but we have conflict waging in Ukraine against the Russian invasion, yet we have the Albanese Labor government continuing to use this conflict as a cover for inflation and price rises at the bowser despite committing to savings when he was in opposition while the situation overseas was advancing.

The ongoing crisis occurring in the Middle East, with Hamas still refusing to release hostages to Israel, is a disgrace. As part of this, militants in the region have started to attack ships. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to assist in the Red Sea? There were revelations out of estimates yesterday that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had no involvement in whether we would send a warship to assist in efforts and operations in the Red Sea. Why was the United States' request not important enough for the Minister for Defence and our nation's Deputy Prime Minister to not take the matter to the Prime Minister for discussion by the National Security Committee? This is extraordinary. There has been question after question not answered—failure after failure after failure, no urgency, just go slow.

The Prime Minister and the defence minister were ministers in the previous Labor government when defence spending was slashed to levels below that of 1938. I wonder if the Prime Minister had anything to say in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years when China's defence spending and capability grew extraordinarily despite the government he was a senior member of not commissioning a single vessel in the Australian shipyard, not a single one.

The world is watching us, our AUKUS partners are watching us but, even more importantly, our enemies are watching us, and what are we doing? The global strategic environment is increasingly facing harder headwinds. If we had a government that was focused on key priorities like boosting defence capability, boosting recruitment, looking after our Defence Force—not putting them down—and boosting investment at a local level in defence and domestic manufacturing, we would have a safer nation.

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