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

I thank the member for his question and acknowledge the incredible and proud way that he represents the beautiful suburbs of Tangney in this parliament. I got a bit of a taste of that last week when I went with the honourable member to visit a company in his electorate—Australian Safety Engineers, in Canning Vale. ASE make breathing apparatus and air compressors they supply to our special forces. They built an incredible unit which was used at the docking of HMS Anson, the UK Astute class submarine, which visited HMAS Stirling in February and March this year for its successful maintenance period. ASE mainly supplies to the Defence Force. It's not a large company; it has about 30 employees, but in the field in which it operates it is absolutely world class.

We are building very large industrial sites, like the Osborne Naval Shipyard and Henderson, where thousands of people are employed. But so much of Australia's defence industry now is small and medium businesses which have incredible capability that are supporting our Defence Force. They are benefiting from the fact that, in the last two financial years, we have had the two biggest spends on record in defence procurement, and in the financial year that we are in right now, which will finish next week, that spend will be even bigger again. Since coming to office, we've seen employment in defence manufacturing increase by 11 per cent, and that's because we now have a clear strategic direction. We are building a defence force in accordance with that and we're putting real dollars behind that bill.

That could not be more different from the way in which the Liberals ran Defence during their wasteful decade. They presided over $42 billion of unfunded Defence commitments, and that meant that, for a full quarter of what Defence was expected to procure, they had no money for them—an absolute disgrace. The Liberals were really big on Defence press releases, but they went completely missing when it came to following that through with action. As it turns out, press releases don't employ people, defence industry does.

Australia's defence industry well knows that, under this Prime Minister, they have a government which is backing them in supporting the Australian Defence Force in keeping Australians safe.

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