Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Defence Capability Assurance and Oversight Bill 2023 is everything I came to this place for. So often we see government and bureaucracy having their own way and making very little impact on effectiveness. Senator Shoebridge, who stood up and spoke before me, made so many comments I'd like to associate myself with. He said that he would prefer to see less money spent on defence but that they can support the bill because it is right, because it puts the right procedures in place for procurement and because it's better for Australia. We talk about bureaucracies, and there is a very big bureaucracy in the Australian Defence Force, and for years and years their procurement has had difficulties—some abject failures and some successes. When we look at the three standards of cost, timeliness and effectiveness, very few of their major projects have come out with all three and succeeded.

Senator Fawcett had a look around the world and worked out the way to make this better, the way to make it more effective and the way to protect Australian taxpayers' dollars and protect our war fighters by giving them the things they need, giving them equipment they can use and giving them a way forward to do this better. We went through the four areas this touches on: independence, competence, transparency and accountability. Why would we not want that? The question isn't, 'Why would we support this bill?' It's, 'Why would we not?' I can't see a single reason that we wouldn't want to make something better.

To the government's point that it'll cost money—no, it won't. It will save money. Senator Fawcett, I think, and Senator Brown spoke about the OneSKY project. It was deemed that it didn't need to go through testing and evaluation because it was 90 per cent off-the-shelf technology.