Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

I won't speak long, but I do rise to speak in support of the Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence) Bill 2025. As many other speakers have iterated earlier today, the defence and national security challenges our nation faces today have been unprecedented in at least eight decades. As we scale up the capability and the readiness of our Defence Force, it is critical that there is greater oversight of our spending of money to fund new capability and the timelines that are necessary to acquire that capability.

One of the greatest challenges facing our Defence Force—there are several, one is the amount of money available to it—is capability acquisition. The truth is, Australia has a very poor record when it comes to the acquisition of new capability. We have had far too many Defence projects—this is not a partisan point; this is an institutional point—that have run significantly overbudget and overtime. Too often, in our acquisitions, we have allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good, endlessly 'bespoking' and customising platforms rather than acquiring them off the shelf and endlessly seeking to tailor and tinker with proven and trusted capabilities to meet quite peculiar national circumstances. That has led to, over many years and across many governments, Defence projects which have rivalled Snowy 2.0 in terms of their cost overrun and their failure to deliver on time. That's simply a luxury that we can no longer afford in Australia.

If everyone accepts the rhetoric that we face difficult and uncertain strategic times—and I certainly do—then we need to fix this. I do believe that proper scrutiny and accountability to the parliament, which allows for the furnishing of classified information and the proper protection and handling of classified information, will add an important discipline, oversight and accountability mechanism to the billions of dollars of public money that we will be pumping into Defence over the next decade or two.

I don't share the concerns of some of my crossbench colleagues that such a committee, if composed entirely of parties of the government and opposition, will not be able to do a good job. In fact, I think it's quite important that membership of this committee, either by convention or by the bill that's before us, be limited to members of political parties who form the government or opposition, just as we do with the PJCIS, because of the sensitivity of the information that's being handled because of what is a bipartisan basis, in many respects, to the strategic challenges that we face—a viewpoint shared by the government and the opposition—and because I don't think we can risk having political games being played or classified information being misused by people in this parliament who are entitled to have a legitimately different point of view but who do not, basically, share the strategic assessment that underpins the scale-up in the defence forces.

I want to acknowledge and pay credit to some former senators here, most notably the late senator Jim Molan and Senators Linda Reynolds and David Fawcett who have, over many years, advocated for a greater role of parliamentary oversight and scrutiny of the Defence Force and have shared the frustrations of many that one of the biggest items in our federal budget is not subject to the same scrutiny, discipline and accountability as other items of public spending. There are good reasons for that, but I believe this committee will help address and overcome those. For those reasons, I support this bill, and I do not support the amendments.