Nu Ship Canberra

A great video tour through Nuship Canberra which will dramatically increase Australia’s defence capabilities, and impact the Army as much as the RAN: That is great news for Australia and the ADF but elsewhere, after 6 years of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle, the news is all bad. Alan Dupont, in The Weekend Australian underscores the problems Abbott faces repairing the damage the ALP did to our economy. Perhaps the best way to understand the seriousness of defence’s budgetary problem is to benchmark against Force 2030, trumpeted by the Rudd government in the 2009 white paper as “capable of meeting every contingency the Australian Defence Force may be required to meet in the coming two decades”. Capable it may have been but funded it was not.

The subsequent savage cuts inflicted on Defence by Labor in pursuit of an illusory budget surplus effectively removed $18 billion from Force 2030 in the space of four short years, equivalent to nearly three-quarters of the annual defence budget.

I recall Rudd coming up with his 12 submarines as a blatant try at sounding like he and his party new what they were doing in matters military. Everyone who had any skin in the game just looked at each other, rolled their eyes and dug in waiting for the election to get rid of the idiot. The logistics of our current submarine fleet have two on patrol, two on build-up or wind-down and two on maintenance and we can just manage the manpower and dollars to keep that moving and Rudd wanted to double the trouble. Capable it may have been but funded it was not – like most of their ideas – NBN, NDIS and Gonski to name a few. The public needs to be reminded every day that the reason Abbott and Hockey are about to drop hard times on the country through the 2014 budget is because of the huge, obscene debt ramped up by the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle.