David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today’s taking note of answers again establishes the great fact that is emanating from across the chamber, and that is that there is no-one in the federal opposition who has any real understanding of defence, and they have even less understanding of capability acquisition. Senator Bishop underlines that. He talks about AWACS. The AWACS is a light, command and control, carrier launched aircraft used by the US Navy. The project that he is referring to, which he wants to say is so important, is called AEW&C—airborne early warning and control. The project name is Air 5077. It has a value of $3.7 billion. I would have thought that a person coming in here to talk about projects would understand or have some vague knowledge of the correct identification of projects. There is nobody in the opposition, sadly, that has any real knowledge of defence or capability acquisition. Indeed, I think it was on Tuesday night that Senator Faulkner said in this place:

The government may say that the DMO annual report 2005-2006 identifies some project performance improvements. I acknowledge and believe that these can be attributed to better management inside the DMO and reflect well on the work being done by the DMO management team.

The question must be asked: better than what? Who could fail to remember the litany of cutbacks and slashings—15,000 defence personnel just taken off the books—by the Labor Party when they were last in power?

Let us just go through the good work that the minister and the Howard government have been doing in defence. We came to power and made a commitment to increase defence funding by an average of three per cent per annum over a decade, and we have done that. We gave a long-term funding commitment to a defence capability plan to give industry the certainty it needs. We did that. We established the Defence Materiel Organisation to provide a single point of accountability for defence acquisitions. May I pause to say that it is working magnificently, with almost $60 billion worth of projects on the go. We established the Kinnaird review into defence procurement.

We developed an acquisition reform plan to further improve the way government buys new defence equipment and capability, including changes to DMO to improve financial transparency and accountability. We did that. The Defence white paper Defence 2000: our future Defence Force, established a benchmark for the ongoing future development of the Australian Defence Force. Around 100 major projects worth some $17 billion have been approved from the white paper recommendations. We established the Defence Industry Advisory Council. They are things that the opposition know nothing about and never talk about because they are not interested in the subject. We carried out the Defence Reform Program, which identified savings in excess of $900 million a year to be redirected to combat capabilities such as additional Army personnel, modifications to amphibious ships and combat equipment, and ammunition.

We developed a strategic defence industry policy identifying six key strategies to shape Defence’s future relationship with industry. We established the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, ASPI, which gives the opposition every opportunity to hone their skills to try and understand something of defence, but, sadly, the messages are not getting through. And since taking office we have fixed Labor’s blunders. Who could forget them? They were fantastic. There were the minehunters—an absolute shocker—$138 million worth of vessels that never even went into the water. We lost the intellectual property with the Collins class submarine—the welding was wrong—because the Labor minister at the time failed to administer the contract properly. Kockums never properly transferred the intellectual property—a classic ministerial mistake that the previous Minister for Defence, Minister Hill, fixed and repaired. These are just the tip of a very black iceberg. If Labor were ever to come to power, the defence of Australia would be in jeopardy. (Time expired)