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

I rise to note the Public Accounts and Audit Joint Committee report, 489th reportDefence major projects. Firstly, I note that this is not my first speech. With inflation at record levels and a cost-of-living crisis hitting everyday Australians and when this government is telling workers to wait for a living wage, why can we always find money to increase spending on weapons and war? The major projects report is an annual review of the Department of Defence's equipment acquisitions. We need to see more transparency and more accountability regarding the extraordinary amount of our public wealth that is spent on the military. Defence acquisition expenditure is ramping up. In 2021-22 there was in fact a $2.1 billion increase in acquisition spending on the previous year, and the government have committed yet a further increase next year as they pledge to spend more than two per cent on Australia's GDP on defence. Indeed, during the election campaign, the only difference between the Labor Party and the coalition on defence was who was going to promise to outspend the other.

We are now being told to prepare for an austerity budget and to brace for cuts that will hurt everyday Australians. But has the defence establishment been warned to brace for a budget cut? Well, no; quite the opposite. But what do they do with the money that we give them? This report and the report that follows make quite disturbing reading. As at 30 June last year, the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group, or CASG, within Defence was managing 161 government approved major acquisition projects and 13, what they describe as, minor projects, with a collective cost of $121. 6 billion—well a collective cost as at the time that report was written, because we know it's blown out since.

When you look at Defence's capacity to deliver that, it makes sad, sad reading. The 2019-20 MPR foreshadows delays across all projects of some 507 months. That is a collective delay of 42 years. In the latest MPR, the forecast is still a staggering 405 months or a collective delay of some 34 years. That's the value for money we're getting from the defence establishment. And the cost, once approved, is blowing out to an extraordinary degree. When we look at the 2019-20 report referenced in this Public Accounts and Audit committee report we can see that the cost blowout of just the acquisitions program, just the acquisitions of Defence and just the cost blowout, was $24.2 billion. That's just how much it was above budget. That's enough to fully fund our education system and to cancel about a third of HECS debt, and that's just the cost blowout. In the most recent report the cost blowout is sitting at $18.3 billion, or a 31 per cent variance on the budget, nearly a third more than what they initially said, and if you go back year on year there's not a single year where the variance wasn't multiple billions of dollars above the initial estimate. Yet we keep going to Defence, the same broken institution when it comes to this budgeting, and asking them how much money they need. They keep giving us a figure and every single time it's wrong, every single time it's lowballed and we're caught in the middle of these major acquisition projects paying billions and billions more than what the Defence establishment initially said—every single time.

Surely at some point we will learn. Surely at some point we will apply genuine rigour to this extraordinary expenditure of our public wealth on weapons and war. In fact there's a lot more to see here, but the truth is the Labor and the Liberal parties don't want us to see it. Why can we always find the money to increase spending on weapons and wars that kill children, destroy countries and destroy communities? Well, the answer is simple: it's that both major parties have agreed to do this and to deliver the report and not even debate it, not even question a $20 billion blowout from Defence, not even raise a ripple in this chamber. But for this contribution it would've gone through in silence. Well, it's time that ended. It's time we applied a blowtorch to this extraordinary agree of expenditure of our public wealth on weapons and war. It's time we did more than just comfortably agree to give the military whatever they want, and the Greens are up to that job.