Page 1202 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 4 May 2022
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I rise today to speak on the motion, which tenuously links the horrors of the war currently underway in the Ukraine with the question of how we pay our dignified respects to the dead and turns it into a political strawman that the Greens’ bogeyman is coming after your defence industry jobs. Mr Hanson does so in a way that plumbs new depths, demonstrates a lack of understanding of how national security works and is actually quite gross. I feel the need to wash myself afterwards.
Firstly, to be clear, the Greens condemn Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, as we condemn all war. We affirm the right of the people of Ukraine to sovereignty and territorial integrity. We support the democratically elected government of the Ukraine.
Mr Hanson’s motion makes mention of the economic activity of defence spending in the ACT and the region. Certainly, government expenditure supports jobs and promotes economic activity. It is a very simple law of economics. With the sheer quantity of funds that the federal government is injecting into military hardware, of course there will be subsequent jobs.
Defence spending sits at two per cent of GDP, over nine times the budget allocated to aid and diplomacy. As Melissa Tyler, a researcher at the University of Melbourne has written, if the 2022 federal budget was $100, we would be spending $6 on defence, 72 cents on development and one cent on diplomacy. This means that we are currently spending eight times more on defence than on peaceful means to create a better world and better relationships with our neighbours and countries across the globe.
It would be a mistake to directly conflate the investment of taxpayers’ dollars in the defence industry with increased military capability or increased Australian security or even increased jobs available for Canberrans. That is a very long bow, but it is one that this motion is trying to draw today.
Billions of dollars are being thrown at weapons manufacturers with very little scrutiny. Many of the government’s costly acquisitions will be obsolete by the time they are deployed. Some will not be delivered at all. We dropped $5.5 billion on submarines before the government decided to welsh on the deal with the French. We dropped $1.3 billion on reaper drones before we decided that that money pit could not be filled. So the question is: has that increased spending on weapons manufacturing and the associated industry actually made us more secure?
On the contrary, I want to give a concrete example of the real and tangible impacts of diplomacy: the coordinated global response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supposedly the target of Mr Hanson’s concern. How were those sanctions implemented? Concerned nations communicated with each other and came to an agreement. These nations then convinced others to come on board. Diplomats persuaded the governments of the United Kingdom and Italy, among others, that they could live without Russian oligarchs. This diplomatic process even persuaded Switzerland to break its centuries-old neutral stance and join the move to sanction Russia.
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