The Hon. Julia Gillard, MP
Prime Minister of Australia
PO Box 6022, House of Representatives
Canberra
ACT 2006

Dear Prime Minister,

Reduce military spending

This financial year has seen Australia's annual defence budget grow to $32 billion. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2010), Australian defence spending has increased 50.2 % in the past decade. It is planned to grow by 4% to 5% annually for the next 20 years -- as former federal Labor MP John Langmore has said, "No other type of Australian public expenditure has ever been promised such largesse for such a long period".

With these billions of dollars, Australia is buying:

• potent, high tech, hard to maintain and rapidly obsolete weaponry and equipment, the through-life costs of which are said to be between 3 to 10 times the procurement price;
• "offensive" capabilities, such as off-shore power projection and precision strike, that will be perceived as threatening, and provoke regional states to build-up their arsenals;
• increased compatibility with the US armed forces and US intelligence gathering, compromising our neutrality and skewering our foreign relations;
• expensive governmental programs (at present totalling about $0.5 billion) to steer our local defence firms into sub-contracting to the big arms multinationals, when it is well known that investing a similar amount in civilian sectors such as health, education and clean energy would create more, and more urgently needed, jobs.

We believe that the size of Australia's defence spending and the sort of military force we are building are irresponsible and wrong-headed. Billions of dollars now devoted to building our military prowess could be used to improve health, education, public transport, housing and environmental repair.

Most of the threats to our national security are global challenges - climate change, water and food insecurity, population growth, overuse of non-renewable resources, humanitarian disasters - and require as never before international cooperation and a fairer distribution of resources. They can only be worsened by increasing military expenditure and building arsenals of lethal high-tech weaponry.

Yours sincerely,