Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has offered the government Coalition support for budget cuts to fund the purchase of submarines.Credit:Natalie Boog
The Greens also vowed to obstruct the government’s submarine deal on Tuesday,warning the $368 billion price tag would force the government to make cuts to spending on health,education,housing and Indigenous Australians.
“Unlike the Coalition,the Greens will not be co-operating with the government to force budget savings on critical public services to pay for these submarines,” Greens senator David Shoebridge said.
“[Tuesday’s] announcement will force Labor to deliver austerity budgets to funnel billions of dollars offshore to fund the US and UK nuclear submarine industries. With this one decision,Labor is mortgaging our future in order to stoke regional tensions with a dangerous escalation in regional defence spending.”
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten said defence spending would come out of the defence budget. He accused Dutton of “making clear to the 575,000 NDIS participants that the Liberals will always be looking for an excuse to slash their supports”.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said Australians would have to wait until the May budget to judge how the government planned to pay for a rise in overall defence spending to 2.2 per cent of GDP.
However,he also said there was an expectation defence spending would bring value for money even as it placed increasing and ongoing pressure on the budget.
“In the context of a growing the defence budget,what really matters is that defence is not immune from the normal fiscal and budgetary rules that Treasury and Finance should have ... We have made an effort to open defence spending up to scrutiny,” he said.
For example,Marles said $3 billion in savings the government had found in other areas of defence over the next four years was “a really big statement around the affordability of this”.
Defence Minister Richard Marles says defence is “not immune” from normal fiscal and budgetary rules.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Dutton,who was defence minister in the Morrison government when the AUKUS alliance was formed,warned that the government should not pay for the submarines by “cannibalising” other areas of defence,such as the army or air force.
“Listening to some of the rhetoric ... there’s a bit of a ‘Magic Pudding’ episode going on here that somehow the money’s going to appear,or it’s going to be cost-neutral. This is not a cost-neutral decision,and the government should be very clear to the Australian public about that,” he said.
“Appropriately,the money is being spent because the times demand it. We need to be transparent with the Australian public that there is a cost attached to it because we want to preserve peace in our region.”
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Dutton said the AUKUS alliance would remain core to Australia’s national security strategy for decades and,as the party that conceived the idea,the Coalition would support it “come hell or high water”.
While many national security experts also welcomed the investment,anti-war campaigners described Tuesday’s announcement as an “outrageous assault on peace”.
Dr Sue Wareham OAM,national president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War,said the decision to spend $368 billion on nuclear submarines represented “one of the lowest points in Australian democracy in living memory”.