House of Representatives 26 August 2025
Speaker:
I give the call to the Member for Fisher.
Andrew Wallace MP:
Thanks, Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise in support of this motion because AUKUS is one of the most important military defence arrangements our country has ever entered into.
Pillar One delivers $368 billion worth of nuclear-propelled submarines. I sit here and listen daily to those opposite. I heard the Member for Wills, the Assistant Defence Minister, talking about the importance of AUKUS and the strategic dangers we now face. Everybody seems to acknowledge that we are in the most geostrategically challenging times since 1945.
But this Government continues to let AUKUS slide. When AUKUS was first announced in September 2021 by the Coalition Government, it was groundbreaking. AUKUS provides Australia with a technology that very few countries have, with the exception of the United States and the United Kingdom. This technology represents the crown jewels of defence capability.
Yet this Government still has defence spending at just over 2% of GDP. What they have done is pool funding from the Army and Air Force into the submarine program. It is right to fund submarines, but not at the expense of Army and Air Force.
The United States has recently said it wants its allies to shoulder more of the burden of Western defence. NATO countries are no longer investing just 2% of their GDPs. They are now investing 3.5% on defence expenditure and another 1.5% on defence infrastructure, 5% in total. Yet our Prime Minister says, “We’ll decide how much money we spend on defence.”
At the last election the Coalition committed to lifting defence spending to a minimum of 3%. This Government must increase GDP expenditure on defence. These are not business-as-usual times. You cannot say we live in the most geostrategically challenging times since 1945 and still spend only 2% of GDP on defence. That is not rocket science, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Every NATO country, with the exception of one, has agreed to lift their expenditure to 5%. Yet here we are at just over 2%. The Prime Minister says, “We’ll decide.” But look at who is saying otherwise: Angus Houston, former CDF, the author of the Defence Strategic Review, Greg Sheridan, Peter Jennings. Every defence expert is saying we must increase defence expenditure. And yet this Government, led by your Prime Minister, insists otherwise.
It is an absolute debacle. Get real.
END
Media Contact: Brendan West – 0402 556 646 – Brendan.west@aph.gov.au
