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

businesses, aged-care facilities, hospitals and government institutions. And it is rising at an exponential rate.

The Australian Signals Directorate is the agency within the Australian Defence Force that is in the front line of keeping our country safe, stopping the banking system from closing down or attacks on our energy network. When the Leader of the Opposition was last in government and was the Deputy Prime Minister to Kevin Rudd—his actual mentor, one that he doesn't ever want to speak of but one whom he admires and contacts for advice regularly—the spending in the ASD then, in 2012-13, was $269 million. I'll tell you what that figure is in 2022-23. It's not $369 million and it's not $769 million. It's $1.66 billion dollars. So at a time when Labor demonstrated their plan for defence was to rip money out of defence and away from the men and women of the ADF, we have put in additional money and we will continue to do so because we have a plan to keep this country safe.

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