Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure, Mr Deputy Speaker Murphy, to be addressing the parliament while you are in the chair. I begin my contribution by acknowledging what I am sure is a very genuine motion from the member for Berowra. I understand that he, like all of us in this place, appreciates the enormous contribution these people make through their participation in Defence bands and like organisations. They are invaluable to local communities; there is no doubt about that.

I am a late entrant to this debate because I realised about an hour ago that I might have caused this debate. It was me who, as then Minister for Defence, put in place the Strategic Reform Program and I suspect there may be, as other speakers have indicated, some link between the Strategic Reform Program and the Chief of Army's decision to curtail some of these activities. At the end of the day it is pretty simple: when I became defence minister we began, as we had committed to, the process of developing another Defence white paper. As we all know in this place, we live in an uncertain world in a region which is going through dynamic change, and no-one would contest the fact that, over time, as we continue to grow economically along with our near and not-so-near neighbours we will need to continue to develop Australia's defences in a way which allows us to continue our ability to defend ourselves independently of any other nation state.

Any look at our strategic outlook indicates that, over time, we will need to continue to spend more money on high-end capability, whether it be on air warfare destroyers, fast jets or other capabilities. There is only so much money a country can contribute to defence as a percentage of its GDP and, on average, we are up there with many comparable countries. It became clear to me as defence minister that, given our strategic outlook, we would not be able to find off the budget the sort of money we would need to be investing over the course of the next decade or more, so I came to the conclusion that the only way we could enhance the money coming from the centre of government was to find savings within defence.

I remember vividly suggesting to the Chief of the Defence Force and the secretary of the department at the time that, having had a thorough look at the organisation, we should be able to find $10 billion internally—not $10 billion to give back to the centre but $10 billion to redirect into high-end capability within defence. Some people criticised me for that assessment, but having asked an independent private sector organisation to come in and study defence I was informed: 'You were wrong, Minister. You probably got it wrong when you suggested that $10 billion could be found. We think $20 billion could be found.' That was the recommendation from the independent consultant. So we put in place a strategic reform program not to take money out of defence but to make savings internally so that they could be redirected back into defence. That is what the strategic reform program is all about.

Having done that, we need to rely upon the service chiefs to make the decisions. If they want high-end capability and an efficient defence force they need to make some tough decisions about some of the legacy issues and how they might deal with them. It seems apparent to me—not that I look at these things all that closely these days—that the Chief of Army has decided that there needs to be some rationalisation with respect to Army bands. I think it would be a very dangerous thing for this place, this parliament, this House of Representatives to look to intervene every time a service chief took a decision about how they might rationalise the spending within their own defence organisation.

Again, I accept the genuineness in the approach of the member for Berowra and of those who have supported him, but if we are going to have a strong defence force in the future we must have an ongoing reform program, we must rationalise, we must make savings and we must redirect those savings to the high-end capability in the force we need to protect our nation state. While not questioning anyone's genuineness, I think the parliament should stay out of these decisions. This is a relatively low-level decision for the Chief of Army and we should support him in his decision.

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