Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) | Hansard source

I want to thank the honourable member for Herbert for his question and thank him for consistently backing up the troops in his home town of Townsville. He's a very active participant in the life of the Lavarack Barracks, and I know it's greatly appreciated by not only the troops but their families as well.

As we're seeing in the Ukraine at the moment, with the dreadful circumstances unfolding, there's no certainty in Europe. There's certainly no certainty in the Indo-Pacific as well. This is a very uncertain time in which we live, and from the first day that this government came into office we have rolled out our plan to protect Australians. We've taken decisions to restore funding because when we came into government Labor had reduced spending on defence down to 1.56 per cent of GDP. It was remarkable because it was the lowest level since 1938. And every day since then under this Prime Minister we have rolled out our plan to keep our country safe, and we will do that into the future. We've done it by increasing the number of troops in the Australian Defence Force; we'll increase that to over a hundred thousand. We will increase resources to the Australian Signals Directorate in this budget—

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