Vince Connelly (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence. Will the minister inform the House how the Morrison's government's investment in defence capability will provide the Australian Defence Force with the capability edge that it needs to protect Australians in a changing geostrategic environment, and is the minister aware of any alternative policy approaches?

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. I thank him for his service to our country as a member of the Australian Defence Force and for his enduring interest in making sure that our country, our government, does everything we can to help Defence Force personnel. I enjoyed a phone hook-up with him only last week and clearly he still has that passion for members of the Australian Defence Force, and I hope he still has the passion for this parliament for many years to come.

The Indo-Pacific, as we know, continues to become more and more complex and less stable every day. We know that the world is changing and that we cannot take our position in the Indo-Pacific for granted. We need to make sure that we have a significant investment into the security of our country and that we provide support to our neighbours—incredibly important. That is why the security partnership of AUKUS was struck, because we want to make sure that we can invest, that we can work even more closely, with our allies in the US, the United Kingdom and with our Five Eyes partners, including Canada and New Zealand.

The government have put our money where our mouths are because we have increased our committed spending into the Defence portfolio now to two per cent of GDP and will go further. We are investing $65 billion over the course of the next decade into next-generation air capability, including through acquiring long-range antiship missiles. Our naval shipbuilding plan, including the construction of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines, represents the largest regeneration of the Navy since the Second World War.

If you can trust that track record to the Labor Party, when the Labor Party was in government—get this—they cut spending to the lowest level since 1938, to 1.5 per cent of GDP and they still, to this very day, stand condemned for doing that because, when Labor were last in government, they jacked up taxes on every Australia. At the last election, they promised to increase taxes for superannuants, for low-income earners, for middle-income owners, for householders, for homeowners, for the those looking to go into retirement and, at the same time, they cut investment in defence. It was a terrible period in our country's history. Don't forget it was at a time when they lost control of our borders. Why would they cut spending in defence? Because they needed to plug the holes and gaps in the blowout in spending elsewhere. Labor is known for two things—higher taxes and cutting funding for— (Time expired)