David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

But they're now given the green light to literally double the Navy fleet: a hugely expensive—almost never to be launched, if you take into account the timetables—fleet.

But perhaps most shockingly, the Albanese government decided to keep the Hunter frigates program. They cut the number from nine to six but kept the budget at $45 billion—almost $7 billion a boat! Each boat could build 325 primary schools. Each boat would effectively see millions of Australians get access to dental care. Seven billion dollars per boat—that's the same amount that it cost the US to launch a nuclear submarine, and we get a frigate for it! You couldn't make this stuff up!

But next time you can't drop your kids off to school, or you're talking to their teacher about the huge class size, or the classroom's not air-conditioned, think about the fact that this money that the Albanese government is spending on six frigates is enough to fix all of that and more. It's enough to fix pretty much any problem that you can fix with money. And so, next time Labor cry poor, as they do, on how they 'haven't got the money' for public housing, they can't raise JobSeeker and they can't improve Medicare—but they can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear submarines and tens of billions of dollars on frigates, and not even put any of them in the water?—ask your Labor MP why that's the case.

Finally, in this last week, we've seen Julian Assange trying to get his freedom—trying to get his government, and the UK government, and the US government, to finally see that he's a political prisoner and should be released. As Duncan Campbell wrote in the Guardian:

Which is the more serious criminal activity: extrajudicial killings, routine torture of prisoners and illegal renditions carried out by a state, or exposing those actions by publishing—

allegedly—

illegally leaked details of how, where, when and by whom they were committed?

Which is the bigger crime?