In Parliament today, Abigail delivered an adjournment speech challenging both State and Federal Labor's decision to prioritise increased military spending in their budgets at the direct expense of community health, housing and climate action.
Abigail said:
State and Federal Labor governments have handed down their budgets, laying out the choices they have made for how to raise, distribute and spend money on our behalf. We have been told yet again that there is no money to lift people out of poverty and hardship, put people into secure homes or cover medical bills. But there is plenty for the weapons of war. All the while, rampant greenhouse gas emissions create a pressure cooker climate that is already causing climate catastrophes here and around the world. The world is remilitarising, right when we need to work together to stave off runaway climate change and the devastation it will bring. This is by design—an active reconstruction of great power competition, with a fossil fuel-powered bloc led by the United States [US] undermining planetary safety.
The remilitarised world order led by the US extracts its pound of flesh. It demands loyalty from its allies in its devastating illegal rampages across the Middle East, with Prime Minister Albanese first out the gates to endorse Trump's illegal war in Iran, and continuing to arm Israel as it carpet bombs Gaza. But rhetorical support and facilitation of the arms trade is not enough. Washington insists its so-called allies join its expansion of military power and aggression against China and demands that NATO and Australia raise their military spending targets as a share of the entire output of the economy.
Make no mistake—the expansion of the US alliance imperial war machine is the greatest single threat to working class communities in Australia and around the world. Raising defence expenditure to the levels demanded will gut basic social safety nets, derail decarbonisation targets and lock in austerity and financial hardship for generations. Yet Australia continues to be a most obedient lackey to the American war machine. At a time of immense financial strain, the Labor Party is pursuing an industrial strategy seemingly designed to smash working class power and extract public wealth into private hands, throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the global war machine while chasing an AI-fuelled, data centre-intensive dream of productivity and growth that will devastate communities, the environment and jobs.
The war economy is a pure wealth extraction machine. Money leaves the health budget and the public housing estate and arrives in the accounts of the weapons companies, their executives and shareholders. The environmental toll of armed conflict is neither insignificant nor fleeting. It contaminates water, soil and air, erodes ecosystems, undermines livelihoods and burdens public health long after the fighting stops. As energy policy, it is incoherent. As an industrial policy, it is lunacy. Dollar for dollar, military spending creates fewer jobs than investment in health care, infrastructure or clean energy, yet that is what is now being promoted in Australia.
Last week in Townsville, Pauline Hanson took to the stage to declare that $57 billion a year for war is not enough and that it must climb toward 3½ per cent of everything this country makes. Then she handed the microphone to Gina Rinehart, the richest person in the land, who proposed that we give Israeli weapons firms free land and passage to build war drones on Australian soil—land that she said was otherwise wasted on wind turbines. This captures the recursive logic of the reactionary war machine, a snake eating its own tail. More spending on the military industrial complex drives greater environmental breakdown and climate change from expanded fossil fuel production to power the war machines. Those war machines displace renewable energy supply that would deliver the energy sovereignty that would negate much of the geopolitical leverage fuelling global conflict, manufacturing the very conditions for their own justification.
The war machine is a climate policy that will cook the planet and destroy the standards of living of working class people in this country. When the temperature climbs past what a body can safely work in, it is not the executive in the air-conditioned office who pays; it is the labourer, the warehouse picker, the farm worker, the delivery rider, the cleaner. When it is too hot to work, who is going to pay their bills? Who picks up the tab when harvests fail under flood and drought, and supply chains buckle and collapse? The war machine is not only displacing productive renewable energy investment; it is displacing public housing investment as well. Just last year Federal Labor passed its first housing legislation this term directing public funding to free housing for US troops and foreign arms contractors. There is no money for public housing, unless you work for the US Army or Lockheed Martin or Boeing, apparently. There is no justification for it. It is a ripoff and a scam. But that is the point.
As Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, "A failing war is just as profitable as a winning one." While the warmongers and billionaire class enrich themselves, the working class pays at the start and pays at the end, with gutted public services to fund the bombs and tanks, and with ravaged climates and unliveable heat destroying economies and ways of life in the increasingly close future. Security is not a submarine, a drone or a fighter jet; security is a safe and secure home. Security is health care you can afford, energy that is clean, public and cheap, and a planet that is still habitable. Every dollar fed to the war economy is a dollar torn out of the liveable world and handed to the people profiting off its destruction. Anyone advocating for war is not fighting for us.
Read the transcript in Hansard here.
24 June 2026