Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Hansard source

Building on our job-creating policies, we're also committed to creating new markets and new opportunities for Australian small businesses. As both the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Defence know, we have a $200 billion investment in Australia's defence capability. This is providing enormous opportunities for small and family businesses. We recently held a defence industries summit in Perth, in Western Australia, where a number of small businesses came along to hear about the opportunities that they are able to get involved in. There are around 3½ thousand SMEs in the Australian defence industry, and they employ around 30,000 hardworking Australians.

What this government is doing, though, to ensure that these businesses have every opportunity to benefit from our investment, is that we're ensuring a level of Australian industry content in all new defence procurements above $4 million.