Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of answers. What a pleasure it has been to listen to the diatribe of the last five minutes from the shadow Defence minister—the captain of designing policy on the backs of slips of paper—Senator Conroy. When we look at the previous government and their capacity for decision making in this particular policy space, it is a blank piece of paper. Instead of providing Defence with the capacity to purchase and procure, they rip $16 billion out of the budget—that makes it a little difficult to get on with the job of purchasing.

When it comes to submarines, we are determined to take action on this particular issue—to get the best value for money and capacity for our Defence forces. Having participated in a procurement inquiry last year, I find that the ALP is quite strong on the rhetoric but quite weak on the action. We had very strong advocacy from the CFMEU around paper procurement. For six years, if the Labor Party was actually interested in ensuring the jobs of workers, particularly in regional areas—and I think about the Maryvale pulp mill in my home state of Victoria—then they would have done something. Instead they sat on their hands, as with this particular example, and now they are braying from the sidelines like the donkeys that they are, complaining rather than using the time they were in government to show leadership and make decisions.

When this issue needed to be dealt with in a timely manner, more than two years ago, where was the Labor Party? You were MIA—missing in action—on productive decision making in Defence for the entire time you were in government. In September 2013 the Australian people did vote for strong, united leadership and that is what they got after six years of debacle from the previous government—