During this election campaign, both major parties have tried to make it very clear that concerned about our spending on defence.

Over the past term, the Labor Government increased funding by $50 billion, increasing total spending to 2% of GDP. It is forecast to continue to grow to 2.3% of GDP by the mid-2030s. The Coalition thinks that is not enough, and has promised to increase it to 2.5% of GDP in 5 years and 3% in 10 years.

With all this concern about defence spending, you would think Australia was either at risk of imminent invasion or was spending far less than our peers. But the evidence shows that neither of these is true.

Australia has an outsized spending on defence. In dollar terms, Australia is the 12th biggest spender on defence. We spend more dollars on defence than Canada, Israel, Spain, or the Netherlands.

If we look at the top 20 biggest spenders on defence as a percentage of GDP, Australia still ranks 12th. This puts us ahead of China, Italy, Germany, and Japan.

Were Australia to increase its defence spending to 2.3% of GDP, we would be the ninth biggest spender on defence and the military. Australia would be devoting more of its economy to defence than France and Taiwan, and on a par with the United Kingdom. If Australia went to 3% of GDP, as the Coalition has promised, we would pass India, South Korea, and be closing in on the United States.

Do we really believe as a nation that our security needs are more urgent than South Korea, a country that is still at war with North Korea?

Australia is also the biggest spender in our local region. Australia spends more than Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, New Zealand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Brunei, PNG, Fiji, and East Timor combined.

The focus on spending targets is also a foolish way to consider any government program. We could double the pay of all our military personnel tomorrow. That would increase the amount we spend on defence, but would it have made Australia safer? We are committed to spending over $360bn on AUKUS, with little to no consideration of whether it would make Australians safer.

It is important to remember that the more resources we devote to defence, the fewer resources we have to spend on our other priorities. As former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

If political parties wish to be taken seriously about the need to increase spending on defence, then they need to also explain how that will be paid – either the government needs to raise more tax or it will need to cut spending elsewhere.