Senator QUIRKE (5:52 PM) —I think that a number of contributions this afternoon have been somewhat concerning—to me anyway. Probably the most concerning was the one by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence. In fact, he spent most of his time—I think some 16 minutes of his 20 minutes—talking about problems in the Labor Party and suggesting that Mr Beazley would not be the leader of the Labor Party. In fact, he said that Mr Beazley was suffering a declining support level within the ALP. Let me assure you that that is not so.

I do not want to spend 16 minutes talking about that, but I want to make just one comment about Senator Abetz. We all know over here that he has a thermometer firmly placed in Senator Newman and he checks the Fahrenheit level every day. I suggest that Senator Newman's body temperature probably dropped to about 90 degrees Fahrenheit today. Senator Abetz is jumping around over there, just waiting for the opportunity to replace her. I do not want to say too much about that because there has already been one point of order taken on relevance—and the senator in the chair said it was okay to go on for 16 minutes with this sort of drivel. Senator Abetz ought to be the last person in here to talk about the demise or decline of anyone on the frontbench—that is, until he gets there himself.

I am concerned about his contribution for another reason. There are a number of issues at stake here. Firstly, is it the case that we have adequate reserve levels in this country? I think the answer is no. Do we have the proper legislative provisions to support those reserves? I think the answer is no. Do we have a situation where we have to look at these issues with some urgency? The answer is certainly yes. The East Timor situation surfaced quite quickly on us. Somebody made the comment years ago that the defence forces in this country, or in any country, are an insurance policy that you hope never to use. That is very much like our household insurance policies; it is very much like the policies we have on our cars and, maybe, on ourselves. We hope that we do not ever have to use those policies. Certainly, for most of my lifetime we have not had to do that in this country. It has been a long time since Australia has had to participate in any forward deployment. In fact, for most of the years since Vietnam, Australia has had a pretty lucky time of it. It could well be argued that Australia and this end of the world has had a very lucky time since 1945. As a result, we have spent progressively less of our economy on defence, much less than we really should have. Both sides of politics are guilty of that charge. What we have done is rely on highly trained individuals who have filled the gap when necessary as reserves in our forces in all three arms of the service.

As a nation, we have concentrated our defence assets and scarce resources on buying equipment that takes years to procure. We have the strongest air force in this region and we know that it takes years to get new aircraft and even longer to train some of the pilots. We have built a powerful navy. We have a powerful navy for a very good reason: we are an island continent and we have a number of island possessions that we need to look after. We have spent a lot of money building naval assets in this country out of our scarce defence budget—a defence budget that has been $10 billion virtually for as long as I can remember, no matter which party has been in power. What we have always relied on is that, cometh the hour, we would be able to pull reserves out and use them. The Timor situation has crept up on us. You could probably say it has galloped up on us.

The defence department has done a pretty good job with available resources. The fact of the matter is that we have committed the 1st Brigade and the 3rd Brigade. Those two brigades are our front-line army resources. The 1st Brigade, sent up to Darwin by the Labor government as part of the army presence in the North—the APIN project—is now fully deployed in East Timor. The 1st Brigade has traditionally been on 180 days notice for any deployment. That had to be reduced to 28 days and then to 72 hours. It is now deployed; it is out of Darwin; it is in East Timor. The 3rd Brigade, which has always had a much higher state of readiness—as I understand it, between 28 days and 72 hours; certainly the latter in the course of this year—is no longer in Townsville; it is now in East Timor.

The problem we now have is one of rotation. The other week Senator Newman made it clear to the Senate that we will have no problems with rotation. I hope that her confidence is well founded because I cannot see where we can find two fully trained brigades to go into East Timor should this situation continue well beyond Christmas. I cannot see where we are going to find the replacement forces for rotation. If another problem were to evidence itself somewhere else and we needed to have some military response to it, we would have to pull troops out of East Timor to deal with it.

I can understand the decision making that took place in the Howard government some three years or so ago when the Ready Reserve was ended. I thought it was a bad decision, but I can understand people saying, `We don't need to pay our insurance premiums any longer; we should be okay for a few more years. For budgetary reasons we are going to end this scheme. In fact we will save some money out of it, which means that we can buy'—as I understand it—`some of the better equipment that is needed for 3rd Brigade and that we can actually speed up the process by which we put better equipment into 1st Brigade, in particular, to aircondition the tanks to make them more tropically friendly for the crews who have to operate them, to buy the ASLAV equipment that 1st Brigade desperately needed and to speed up the process for 3rd Brigade of sorting out the problems with the very old equipment that they have.' In fact, quite a large number of the armoured personnel carriers in East Timor that we see on TV each night served in Vietnam. They are 35 and 40 years old. They are well maintained but, as with all equipment that is well maintained, they suffer from an age problem.

I can understand that the government took the view that money that was spent on the reserves up until 1996 was money that could have been used somewhere else. In defence budgets, it is always the case that you can spend and spend but you just do not have the dollars for it. One of the things, however, that we now have to seriously address is the problem of the reserve levels in this country, and it has to be addressed at a number of different levels. Firstly, we have to ensure that there is adequate training for members of the reserve so that we can entice them into the forces, keep them in the forces and ensure that their level of training is such that we can use them if the hour comes when that needs to be the case. Indeed, I think that one of the things that must be heartbreaking for a lot of the defence personnel is to see that, quite often, people who are trained as reservists, for one reason or another—usually to do with employment—have to leave that service after a number of years, and it will take a length of time to be able to get someone trained up to do that job.

On the other level—and this is something that we can do something about here—Senator Collins's bill, in my view, puts in a proper legislative framework to give those people who make the contribution and the sacrifice of joining the reserves much more security than they currently have in terms of employment for when they want to return to their normal work. The comment made here by some of the speakers was that these sorts of arrangements had been made in Telstra and one or two of the government agencies for not all but many of the reserve personnel. I would have thought that, since the first week in September, one of the highest priorities for the government would have been to get this right and to ensure that there is going to be an adequate force level to, at the very least, be able to go to Timor and give some relief to those two brigades that are there right now.

We have heard the government talk about raising other battalions up to a state of readiness. I can only say that we really need to have much more than a battalion at readiness; we are going to need to have at least one full brigade. Even with one full brigade, the problem in Timor is going to be such that, without any fighting or any of the rest of it, we will still need to ensure that peace with one fully armed brigade well into next year. If the problems with the militia materialise—and I hope they do not—we may indeed need to have two brigades up there fully deployed and with other resources that we will have to find, presumably from our allies.

In the last six weeks this government should have been dealing with, at the very least, the issues of where the reserves are going, their security of employment and other necessary important provisions that will ensure that they remain within the defence forces. Over the years, the level of reserves in the forces has been dropping each year. This is a worrying trend that must be reversed. It must be reversed because those soldiers who are now deployed in Timor will need some relief in the very near future and so that we can restrict our defence budget. I support, as far as possible, restricting our defence budget, so that we can spend money on education, health and all those other things that also have budgets that cry out for dollars.

One of the key elements in this debate here today is that Senator Collins's bill addresses a path that the government really should have had us back here addressing a couple of weeks ago to at least give some security to some of those people who are currently in the reserves and others who wish to join. Unless we can build up the morale of our defence forces—and the reserves are an important part of it—our defence bills in the future will be extremely expensive. They will be more and more expensive as time goes on. I think that Senator Collins's bill addresses a part of the problem—not all of it, but a part of the problem. As a consequence of that, I welcome the bill's introduction here today. I think it is important that we get this through as quickly as we can. I know that there are other speakers who wish to address this today. (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.