Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Canning said they had too many ministers in defence. If we're looking for factors contributing to mismanagement, look at the coalition mismanagement of defence. The coalition government had six ministers for defence in nine years. They had four ministers for defence industry over four years. And once again, who was central to all this—the leadership changes, the inertia and the mismanagement? It was the opposition leader.

That brings me to my next psychological malady: deflection. The opposition leader is not only a master projector in that sense, projecting onto others, but also a compulsive deflector. The mismanagement goes beyond the coalition's record in defence. We saw yesterday the Richardson report handed down, after a review of allegations of systemic misuse of taxpayer money. Guess who oversaw this? The opposition leader. We know that. The opposition leader has a compulsive need to deflect from his abject failures as both the Minister for Defence and the Minister for Home Affairs in the previous coalition government. He likes to posture, he likes to deflect and he likes to project. Unfortunately, the rest of the team over there on the opposite side are following in those footsteps by bringing this MPI forward.

In contrast, this government has taken responsibility for cleaning up the mess and mismanagement of nine long years under the coalition, and our focus has been solely on keeping Australians safe. Our first action as a government was to commission the Defence Strategic Review and set an ambitious agenda for Australia's defence that moves our country forward and ensures the safety of all Australians. And we've made substantive reforms—they say that we haven't—in relation to early warning criteria on projects of concern, in raising attention on emerging problems and encouraging early response, and in making sure that we're getting the defence budget back on track. We've added $30.5 billion to defence funding across the decade. Those opposite can project and deflect all they like, but it will never change the reality that their mismanagement of defence for nine years will always and forever be in the history books as a blight on their record.

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