The 2025 federal budget announced on Tuesday committed an additional $50.3 billion to defence over the next decade, bringing our 10-year defence spending to $764.6 billion.
$764.6 billion is an extraordinary amount of money, more than double the initial cost of the controversial stage 3 tax cuts that have since been amended.
To put $700 billion in perspective – making undergraduate university degrees completely free for all domestic students would cost about $7 billion a year or $70 billion over 10 years, according to the Australia Institute. Just 10 per cent of the defence budget.
With the new federal budget, the annual defence bill will hit a record of $53 billion this year, up from $39 billion last year, and is projected to surpass $100 billion annually by 2033, or 2.4 per cent of our GDP.
This is part of a massive defence shakeup to “keep Australia safe” amid what the Defence Minister Richard Marles called the most…
