Page 1005 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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There are many other examples. Senator Hanson-Young said that the Morrison government had locked in more than $270 billion. She is upping the $200 billion to $270 billion that she wants to cut from new defence spending, despite the global pandemic and the crisis. What would you rather spend this money on? It is unclear exactly. There are a range of other statements and motions. Indeed, there is a motion from Senator Ludlam calling on $730 million to be taken out of defence and spent on other things.
But there is a consequence to this that defence members and veterans understand. And history is littered with cases of militaries that were not prepared for conflict and went unprepared and, as a consequence, the people who suffered were soldiers, sailors and aviators; and they died as a consequence. Australia is not immune to this. We have been unprepared on occasions for conflicts; and our soldiers, sailors and airmen have died in conflicts as a consequence.
I would like to bring an example to this place of my own military service, where the money that we have spent on defence has saved lives. I will give you the example of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Bushmaster vehicle. The Bushmaster vehicle is a protected mobility vehicle. You may have seen one. There is one parked outside the War Memorial if you want to go and have a look. It is a protective vehicle. So it is designed to be able to move people around a battlefield and, if they get hit by IEDs or other weapon systems, those inside can survive.
I used to go along a road that had an IED threat on it. For whatever reason, at that stage the unit that I was in was in up-armoured Land Cruisers, which I was not particularly happy about. We then were protected by the battalion’s Bushmasters. And I am very glad that we were. I put a lot of effort into making sure that the unit which replaced mine on rotation had its own Bushmasters, and they got them.
Despite all the times that Bushmasters were hit in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the number of soldiers who died in a Bushmaster is zero. There are many cases on it and there is a book that has been written about Bushmasters and the effect that they have. One of the examples it talks about was in 2008. A Bushmaster in Afghanistan struck an improvised explosive device, throwing a solider seven metres into the air, only to hit the bonnet on the way down and summersault onto the ground. That was just one story. That man was Corporal Mark Donaldson who then went on to win a Victoria Cross, saving a local Afghan’s life. You would no doubt be aware of that story. But many, many of those vehicles hit IEDs and the people in them went on to survive.
I raised the Bushmaster example because that was not the case with the British Army. The British Army had not invested, had not spent the money. Maybe they had listened to the Greens, because they sent their troops to war in Land Rovers, what you call Snatch Land Rovers. In total, 37 service personnel, at the time of this article written in 2017, had died in what became known as mobile coffins. In a written apology from the Defence Secretary, in a letter to the mother of one soldier, Sir Michael Fallon apologised for failures that could have saved lives. He wrote:
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