Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Whish-Wilson for the question. I think that if one casts an eye across the white paper itself—particularly in relation to the strategic outlook, Australia security environment and the issues that that canvasses in the white paper, Australia's defence strategy, the future Australian Defence Force and a number of other aspects of it, including the chapter called 'positioning Defence for tomorrow's challenges'—what the reader and those interested would see is that we have very carefully and very methodically assessed the circumstances in which we find ourselves now in the early years of the 21st century but also most importantly across the decade hence and the one beyond that.

We recognise that the security environment is, to say the very least, dynamic. It is changing all the time. There is the threats of non-state actors, with which we have men and women of the ADF dealing with every single day in Iraq and Syria—