Michael West Media · AAP · Wednesday 15 April 2026
Australia commits an additional $53 billion in defence spending over the next decade under a renewed ADF strategy, marking the largest peacetime military investment in the nation's history.
Fifty-three billion more for defence and nobody can tell you what we're defending against that we weren't defending against last year. Menzies armed the country to face an empire. This mob's arming it to face a spreadsheet from AUKUS. Record peacetime spend — peacetime being the word that does all the heavy lifting in that sentence, because it assumes the peace holds long enough to finish the procurement.