Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, he has ruled against the point of order. I will now go on with the debate. I will make it quite clear, as a debating point, that I am happy for Senator George Campbell to get up and debate this. I invite the Labor Party, rather than raising this at 9 o’clock on a Tuesday night, to have a real debate about the defence of Australia and multibillion dollar defence projects. Why not have a real debate about defence? We will debate them anywhere, anytime. We know that Labor’s record on defence is appalling. It is a disgrace. We remember the Collins class submarine project. Whenever you think about the Labor Party and defence procurement in Australia, you think about the Collins class submarine project. It has taken a decade to clean up the mess made by gurus like Senator Robert Ray and the other former defence ministers, which created a disaster for Australia’s defence procurement.

Senator Faulkner and the Labor Party cannot have it both ways. They cannot say that the defence minister and the Prime Minister are responsible for some failures in defence procurement but that DMO personnel are responsible for all the improvements. That is the point I am making. You cannot say the minister is responsible for all the failures but the public servants are responsible for the improvements. When you attack defence procurement you attack the people responsible for it, and you cannot get away from that. Senator Faulkner is attacking the defence procurement of the Australian government, and that is the responsibility of hundreds of very decent Australians who work their guts out to ensure Australia is well defended. They are the ones Senator Faulkner is attacking, whether he likes it or not and whether his comrade Senator George Campbell wants to accept it or not. That is the reality of what Senator Faulkner does.

The reality of our projects is that there are no cost blowouts. Senator Faulkner has the audacity to come into this place and say that we are stealing from the future of Australia’s defence capability, when this government has been increasing defence spending year after year and when defence spending under Labor went down and down. The Labor Party talks about stealing from future generations. What happened when we came to power in 1996 and found Defence in a hopeless state—morale down and defence spending slashed year after year? We realised Australia had to rebuild its defences and we looked in the Treasury coffers. How do you rebuild the defence of Australia when you have inherited a Treasury which has been robbed to the tune of $96 billion and when the interest on the debt that the Labor Party ran up is in excess of billions of dollars a year? What did we do? We said that defence is important. We started ramping up defence spending. We had to cut expenditure across every single department of government because of the profligacy of Labor when they were running the Treasury. There was $96 billion of debt. So we started cutting expenditure in every single portfolio. Every single cut was opposed by the Labor Party, but we saved one department. Which one was that? It was Defence. We knew that the most crucial responsibility of the Australian government was to defend Australia. We quarantined Defence, and of course since then we have rebuilt defence expenditure. These people opposite talk about robbing future generations. They ran up debt to $96 billion.

Since July 2003 there has been just a three per cent increase in the real cost of major capital equipment projects. This compares very favourably with our defence counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom. Let us get some facts for a change—we heard all the rhetoric from Senator Faulkner. Of 93 projects completed since July 2003, 10 required a budget increase and 51 of them achieved budget decreases—10 cost overruns, 51 below budget. Overall, the net variation in cost was just $36 million. Senator Faulkner would have you believe it was $10 billion—and this is from the people who borrowed $96 billion and put it on the bankcard. He talks about $10 billion, but the reality is that the net variation is just $36 million from a total of $5.5 billion.

Let us get this in context: a multibillion dollar increase in Australia’s defence procurement to give us the most historic increase in defence preparedness in Australia’s history. Senator Faulkner will not debate this during the day. He waits until 9 o’clock at night. What is the real increase? It is 0.65 per cent. Senator Faulkner should be ashamed of himself. His audacity knows no bounds. For the Labor Party to raise defence procurement, when they ran this country into debt and ran our defence down, is a joke. (Time expired)