David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

Twenty-nine billion dollars—it's a lot of money. It could put dental into Medicare, you could build tens of thousands of new public homes, or it would go a long way to wiping all student debt. It would fund our foreign aid program for the next five years. Instead, Labor and the Liberal Party, with their friends in One Nation, have spent $29 billion on cost blowouts in just a handful of big-ticket projects in defence. This isn't just scandalous; it's criminal. Public wealth that could have been spent on improving our lives has instead been handed over, mostly to US arms corporations, on contracts that have increased, on average, by 38 per cent since the signed agreed price.

We've seen the government blame this on red tape today. Well, where was the oversight when the same department sank $45 billion into the Hunter frigates project without any value-for-money assessment? We've seen the government blame this on long meetings. Well, tell me: where was the long meeting on AUKUS? Was it the two-hour no-docs briefing that now prime minister Albanese got from Morrison before agreeing to AUKUS?

It's all just spin and deceit while our public wealth is burnt at the altar of Trump and the US. One Nation and Labor want to make Australia an interoperable cog in the US military, which is the most expensive military in human history. Cost blowouts are embedded in that project, and Defence leadership know they'll never be held to account. Over the last decade, Defence spent $150 billion on acquisition, so that means the cost blowout from just this handful of projects was 20 per cent of that budget, wasted. The government plans to spend over $425 billion on new capabilities in the next decade. That will see $100 billion wasted on cost blowouts. This is daylight robbery of the public, with the burglars getting promotions and the crime bosses getting a ministerial suite and a Comcar.