Phillip Thompson (Herbert, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence. Will the minister update the House on how the Morrison government's plan for a stronger future is ensuring Australians are kept safe and secure? And is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

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

I want to thank the honourable member for Herbert for his question and thank him for consistently backing up the troops in his home town of Townsville. He's a very active participant in the life of the Lavarack Barracks, and I know it's greatly appreciated by not only the troops but their families as well.

As we're seeing in the Ukraine at the moment, with the dreadful circumstances unfolding, there's no certainty in Europe. There's certainly no certainty in the Indo-Pacific as well. This is a very uncertain time in which we live, and from the first day that this government came into office we have rolled out our plan to protect Australians. We've taken decisions to restore funding because when we came into government Labor had reduced spending on defence down to 1.56 per cent of GDP. It was remarkable because it was the lowest level since 1938. And every day since then under this Prime Minister we have rolled out our plan to keep our country safe, and we will do that into the future. We've done it by increasing the number of troops in the Australian Defence Force; we'll increase that to over a hundred thousand. We will increase resources to the Australian Signals Directorate in this budget—

Andrew Wallace (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Lyons is warned.

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

to $10 billion over the next decade. The reason that that is important is that we know that at the moment our soldiers are on the front line in the cyberwar with state actors and organised criminal figures seeking to attack the Australian public—

Andrew Wallace (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Wills is warned.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) | Link to this | 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.