Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As some may know, I have a great deal of personal experience of the incompetence of the previous government on security issues, but the extent of their mismanagement and incompetence has only been fully revealed to us since the last election. I have to advise the House this evening on one aspect of that mismanagement, which was the defence capital works program. We call it the Major Capital Facilities program or MCF. This program covers capital and reinvestment in the defence estate and the provision of new facilities to meet new capability requirements. Funding for capital reinvestment in the defence estate has fallen from the $600 million that the Labor government maintained over the period from 1985 through to its defeat at the election in 1996. That was $600 million, I reiterate, that was invested in the defence estate to maintain it in the condition required to keep our ADF operating to its capacity. From 1998 onwards, however, that amount was reduced to $400 million and it has been maintained at that level ever since. That effectively results in the guts being ripped out of the defence estate over a period of 10 years.

This has led to a serious problem for us. Before the election we committed to maintaining our defence spending at the level of $22 billion, with a three per cent real increase annually, but that was intended of course to maintain the capabilities and acquire the new capabilities necessary for the security of this country. We are now under extreme pressure because of this lack of investment and reinvestment in the defence estate. Effectively, over these past 10 years all we have been able to do is to keep the fire extinguishers and sprinklers going while the buildings deteriorated. This is a particularly grievous problem because we are in a period now where we are intending to generate the Enhanced Land Force and the Hardened and Networked Army as well as to accommodate new capabilities for the defence of this country and the contribution to international security. This is going to mean that we will have to be really digging a lot deeper than we originally intended to try and maintain our commitment to those capabilities. At the same time this has an impact on the recruitment and retention issue. Our personnel are demoralised when they see the deterioration in the defence estate that the previous government was responsible for.

When we add to that the record of the previous government in relation to the management of operations, we have a horror story that stretches for 11½ years, starting with what occurred in Timor Leste in 1999, when the government failed to heed intelligence warnings about what was going to take place post ballot and then afterwards had the hide to say that they were not receiving that information, which was completely misinforming the Australian public. Then we had the spectacle of the defence minister at the time referring to ‘hot pursuit into Indonesian territory’, which was a gross inaccuracy, incorrect in law and irresponsible and led to the deterioration in our relationship with Indonesia. That saga of mismanagement continued all the way through to 2006 in Timor, where the previous government failed to take advantage of the availability of the new Peacebuilding Commission to work on the issues of East Timor and also, over that period of time, neglected the issues of security sector reform and supporting good governance. We have since then had the children overboard saga, the failure to identify governance problems in the Solomons and then of course the saga in Iraq, with the weapons of mass destruction issue, the Australian Wheat Board crisis and the Abu Ghraib story as well. I should remind members of the fact that the previous government funded Saddam Hussein to the tune of $300 million while our soldiers were preparing to go into battle with his troops.

Their record on security matters is sorry. They are probably the worst government in relation to security matters that this country has ever seen. They are impostors on security as they are on so much else. They have proven to be strategically inept and morally and intellectually bankrupt.