George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

But we will not go there. Three defence ministers in six years. The first of them, Mr Joel Fitzgibbon, was required to resign under circumstances which reflected very poorly upon his personal character. They reflected very poorly upon him, and he was required to resign. The second defence minister they had was Senator John Faulkner, who has marketed himself for many years as a great scholar of strategic matters. Senator John Faulkner lasted in the portfolio until just before the 2010 election, and then he basically gave up. It was all too hard for him; so, having been in the portfolio for less than 18 months, this very senior member of the Labor cabinet said, 'I'm sorry, I am not going to continue on the front bench; I am going to resign.' Then, for the second term of the Labor government—that unlamented, unhappy government—we had in the defence portfolio a minister, Mr Stephen Smith, who did not even want to be there. He wanted to be a foreign minister, but he was forced into a portfolio in which he had no interest and for which he had no evidence aptitude in order to create a political fix to look after Mr Kevin Rudd so that Mr Rudd could take his former portfolio. And he did not make the distance either, because on 27 June last year Mr Stephen Smith said: 'I'm not continuing. It's all too hard for me too. I'm not contesting the 2013 election.' And the last 2½ months of the Labor government, as it limped to its sorry end, we had a lame duck defence minister.

That is the quality of the people that the Labor Party put into the defence portfolio, and now we have this buffoon, this clown, Senator Stephen Conroy, as the shadow defence minister whose only contribution to Australian public life thus far has been as communications minister presiding over the greatest destruction of public wealth in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia—that is, the NBN.

Of course, when you have indifferent ministers, disengaged ministers, incompetent ministers in a portfolio, that has a cost, and the cost it had was to Australia's defence policy. As I said at the start of my remarks, if you want to know what the Labor Party did for the next-generation submarine program, the program described as so critical by the shadow defence minister, for six years they did nothing. Not a word. Not a word, not a decision, not an appropriation, not an action, nothing for six years; and, as a result, when the Abbott government was elected and Senator David Johnston was given one of the toughest jobs in the government—to clean up this aspect of the Labor Party's mess—he found a blank sheet of paper and a capability gap.

Senator Edwards interjecting—

There it is, Senator Sean Edwards.