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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 6 Hansard (16 May) . . Page.. 1708 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

people to live healthier lifestyles. That will have a big impact on federal health bills. It is always a difficult decision. I am not going to go into that any further.

Ms Dundas made a comment which I found a little annoying. She said that the government had declared war on the disabled. She seemed to have big problems with some areas where the government increased funding.

Mr Wood asked, "Are we creating a country worth defending?" The government has increased expenditure on border protection. I suspect that the majority of the Australian community is behind that. I am not going to go into the rights or wrongs of that issue either, save to say that the majority of the Australian community seems to be relatively comfortable with what the government is doing.

Australia takes more refugees per head of population for humanitarian reasons than any other country in the world except, I believe, Canada. That is a record we can be proud of.

To talk of declaring war on the disabled is incredibly emotive. Some commentators and newspapers say that defence expenditure should not have increased at the cost of individuals with disabilities. As I said in the adjournment debate earlier this week, Australia's expenditure on defence-I am not talking about money for border protection, which is largely separate from money spent on our defence forces-has been run down considerably over the last 15 to 20 years. It has gone down from about 3 per cent of GDP to 0.9 per cent in 1983, to about 1.7 per cent several years ago. I am pleased that following the defence white paper that is finally being addressed and extra money, albeit not particularly much in this budget, is being put into defence.

The federal government sent Australian men and women into East Timor on a magnificent humanitarian mission. We are very lucky that did not become a big shooting war. We were immensely stretched putting 5,000 troops into Timor. The white paper was to address issues such as that, so that our service men and women would not be in situations where they were so stretched they had supply problems with ammunition and tools to do their job. East Timor showed that this country had to reverse a very bad decline in defence expenditure. I am pleased that this budget has kept faith with the 2000 white paper.

Australia was ill prepared for Timor. It was ill prepared for World War II, because defence forces had been run down to an alarming rate. Believe it or not, we were probably fairly well prepared for the problems we suffered in that war. It was not a lack of preparedness but incompetent generalship by certain British generals, including General Haig, especially during the Gallipoli campaign. In World War II, apart from General Percival and the disastrous Malayan campaign, the main problems we faced were a general unpreparedness, obsolete equipment and not enough effort being put into defence. We came perilously close to being invaded in that war.

Defence is not a particularly sexy object. It is something the population does not concentrate much on, except in times of danger and need. Timor raised the consciousness of the Australian population about defence, as the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union probably did before that. I cannot think of anything in the intervening period in which defence was an issue.

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