Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Deputy Prime Minister. How is the Albanese Labor government ensuring defence spending will be invested in the critical capabilities the ADF needs, and how does this compare to what was inherited?

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

I thank the member for his question and acknowledge his contribution to Australia's national security. During the course of the last 12 months, the Albanese government has been making generational decisions in defence, establishing the pathway by which Australia will acquire a nuclear powered submarine capability and retasking the Australian Defence Force for the first time in 35 years. Underpinning this have been difficult but real funding decisions, which have seen $7.8 billion of spending be reprioritised over the course of the next four years and a growth in the defence budget of 0.2 per cent of GDP above what we inherited from those opposite over the course of the next decade. These decisions have been hard. They have been painful. They have apparently been opposed by those opposite. But the outcome has been that spending is now focused on where Defence needs it the most.

This is a process which is wholly unfamiliar to those opposite. When those opposite were in government and faced with a problem in defence, their solution was to make an announcement without any money behind it—$42 billion of unfunded defence announcements—which put an intense pressure on the Department of Defence, who were effectively asked to engage in planning around eventualities for which there were no dollars.

Over the course of the last two months—with the Defence strategic review and affirmed just two weeks ago at Senate estimates—we've also learned that the former government regarded the defence budget as their piggybank, a piggybank that they were very happy to raid, with the effective outcome of a significant cut in defence spending—cuts that were very deep indeed. In their last five years in government, we saw $20 billion of effective cuts from the defence budget, the bulk of which occurred through a strategic reserve adjustment worth billions of dollars. So on the one hand, they were making announcements without any funding behind them, while on the other, they were ripping tens of billions of dollars out of the defence budget—and none of that adds up.

Thankfully, all of that is in the past. None of this can be undone overnight, but during the course of the last year, we have started to get the defence budget back into order. We have sharpened defence spending. We have reprioritised it so that we will see a much greater quality of outcome in the defence spend, and we will grow the defence budget over the course of the next decade. This is hard, but the moment requires nothing less, because the Albanese government is committed to— (Time expired)