{"id":13438,"date":"2012-02-07T00:08:36","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T05:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13438"},"modified":"2019-04-23T14:04:37","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T18:04:37","slug":"contrasting-canadian-and-australian-approaches-to-national-defence-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/07\/contrasting-canadian-and-australian-approaches-to-national-defence-spending\/","title":{"rendered":"Contrasting Canadian and Australian approaches to national defence spending"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2012\/02\/06\/matthew-fisher-australian-defence-spending-puts-canada-to-shame\/\" target=\"_blank\">Matthew Fisher<\/a> considers the way Australia deals with defence spending in comparison to Canada:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Australia may not immediately spring to mind as the country with which to best compare Canada\u2019s defence spending, but it is not that much of a stretch. They share the same values and allies, have similarly robust resource-based economies, generous welfare nets and military histories from the Boer War through to the war in Afghanistan that usually have dovetailed.<\/p>\n<p>Although Canada\u2019s economy is nearly twice the size of Australia\u2019s &mdash; and has about 40 per cent more people &mdash; Canada lags far behind in defence spending.<\/p>\n<p>Australia spent $29 billion on its armed forces last year. That is about $7 billion more than Canada did. Given the relative size of the two economies and populations, for the federal government to match Australia on defence spending would require an annual out-lay of between $35 billion and $40 billion, rather than the $22 billion that was spent last year.<\/p>\n<p>There are reasons why Australia spends more. But taken together, they do not account for the staggering gap between the two countries.<\/p>\n<p>Support for &mdash; or hostility toward &mdash; defence spending in Canada follows the usual political fault lines. This is in sharp contrast to Australia, where there is a broad political consensus that adequate funding is vital to the national interest. So much so, in fact, that for Australian parliamentarians and the media, defence spending is not a hugely controversial subject.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Fisher considers the way Australia deals with defence spending in comparison to Canada: Australia may not immediately spring to mind as the country with which to best compare Canada\u2019s defence spending, but it is not that much of a stretch. They share the same values and allies, have similarly robust resource-based economies, generous welfare [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,6,5,683],"tags":[145,31,448,30],"class_list":["post-13438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-cancon","category-military","category-pacific","tag-airforce","tag-army","tag-canadianforces","tag-navy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3uK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13438"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48016,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13438\/revisions\/48016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}