Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Conroy, you guys should get a room. I will tell you what the Greens are committed to doing. We are committed to asking the hard questions. We are committed to asking the hard questions that we know a lot of Australians want answered. With this white paper we have a totally unexpected significant boost to defence funding—two per cent of GDP is being quarantined; there is a $30 billion increase in defence expenditure with no overall increase in the threat assessment as outlined in the white paper document itself. As a country we have made a stark choice here—we have decided to spend taxpayer dollars on weapons companies, on arms manufacturers and on military hardware when we could have spent that money on other things in this country that we desperately need. It is a fundamental principle that every single dollar we spend on defence is a dollar we will not have to spend elsewhere. There is an opportunity cost that comes with the expenditure of each and every dollar. Our job as parliamentarians, and as politicians, is to question this expenditure and make sure it is being spent the right way, it is being spent on the right things, and that it is providing the best, pardon my pun, bang for our buck.

I do not see the Labor Party asking these hard questions. I do not see them doing the job of being the opposition on the biggest ramp-up of military expenditure this country has seen in decades. That is the role of an opposition—to ask the hard questions, especially on something as fundamental as spending money on defence. We have seen tensions in the South China Sea, there is no doubt about that, but ever since I can remember we have seen tensions there—especially around the Spratly Islands. There have been a lot of reports on this lately, and I understand that Mr Kevin Andrews, the previous defence minister, even suggested in a media interview last week that we should send some of our naval vessels within 12 nautical miles of those disputed islands—presumably to see what happens.