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

Sorry, Mr Speaker. The seat names spoiled my alliteration! I will continue. It's little wonder that what resulted from all of this was complete chaos. It is hard to think of how the coalition could have treated defence with more contempt. They regarded ministerial jobs in the defence portfolio as like a ride at the show; literally everybody got a go! But the chaos affected real people.

Yesterday, one member of the not-so-exclusive Liberal-former-defence-ministers club, Senator Reynolds, started talking about valleys of death. To be clear: those opposite are experts in valleys of death after program after program ground to a halt. We saw the Hunter class frigates run four years over time; the offshore patrol vessels run a year over time; and the Cape class vessels run another year over time.

The Albanese Labor government is absolutely committed to managing defence procurement properly. We get that defence projects are large and complex, and that sometimes not everything goes right, which is why we're going to have objective criteria—

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