Helen Miller
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Helen Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Let's not talk about soft play again.
But other governments have done this too.
In some ways, this government hasn't yet had to make the big decisions.
It hasn't had to yet decide which government departments to cut or which taxes to raise.
So in some sense, they're doing the easy bit now.
They're doing the feel-good bit.
I think it will be interesting when they have to make the difficult decision.
They're going to have to either cut back some departments or raise taxes if they want to find any new money for any of their new priorities.
That's going to be the moment where they're going to have to do that and keep the good vibes rolling.
It's going to look pretty odd having argued really hard to go to 3% to then be in charge of that decision and say, actually, I've changed my mind.
I mean, I think we should remember as a country, it's not inevitable.
It is a choice that we can make about how much to spend on defence.
And you can argue for three or another number, but there's no law of the nature says we have to be three.
But yeah, John Healy was quite clear that he wanted to get to three.
But as we were just saying, that is a big increase.
To get from where we are now to 3%, you need to find something like 10, 11 billion.
If you want to get all the way to 3.5%, you have to find another 20 billion.
To give you a sense of scale, the previous government had penciled in a small increase in the size of the state between now and the end of the parliament.
If you put defence to 3% of national income, that takes up the entire increase.
That means that everything else would have to get flat, like no increases.
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