Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. Australia faces capability gaps in our defence because of the complete incompetence of the former coalition government, and it was all based on the way in which they govern themselves. They had six—almost seven—defence ministers in the course of nine years. It started with David Johnston who had served just over a year when, as the champion of Australian defence industry, he announced to the world that he wouldn't trust the defence industry of our country to build a canoe. Then we had Kevin Andrews who went off and pursued a submarine deal with Japan which, in turn, became a subject of the 'empty chair' challenge on Tony Abbott. Kevin Andrews lost his job as defence minister when Tony Abbott lost his job as the Prime Minister. And then we had Senator Payne, and everything stopped. Literally, nothing happened. After the 2016 election, Christopher Pyne was brought in to be the human defibrillator machine to shock coalition defence policy back into life. But then we had two defence ministers at the same time, and no-one had any idea who was responsible for what. That was never going to last, so Christopher took over the entire show until he got sick of it in 2019. Then we had Senator Payne. Then we had the current leader of the opposition.

Over the course of nine years, there were 24 different ministers across the breadth of the Defence portfolio. Is it any wonder that the result of that was absolute chaos? There were 28 different projects running a combined total of 97 years over time. The only things that moved in the last decade were defence ministers, because everything else came to a grinding halt. But you don't need to take my word for it, because last week we had an outbreak of honesty from the shadow minister, the member for Canning, when he said:

… we also squandered a lot of opportunity through the leadership changes. It created ministerial churn—

that's one description of it—

which led to inertia …

Well, he got that right, because that inertia described the single worst national security government in our country's history.

Now, over the last few months the Albanese Labor government has established the Defence Strategic Review—

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