Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade I present the committee's report, incorporating supplementary remarks, entitled Review of the Defence Annual Report 2010-2011. I note that Defence has improved its performance in terms of preparation for questions asked by the committee and has responded more quickly to questions on notice. There are, however, issues that greatly concern me, even more so in this time of funding shortages for Defence.

There are a litany of failed or poorly-performing programs and capabilities within Defence, but there appears little in the way of lessons learnt. Within the Defence organisation there is a culture of circling the wagons when it comes to criticism. Circling the wagons is to be expected in combat, where you would expect members to do all that they can to defend their colleagues. However, it is unhelpful when it comes to engaging expert critics.

In the majority of cases, critics are not 'the enemy' but seek to improve Defence's capabilities. A case in point is the Joint Strike Fighter or JSF project. I have used this as a brief case study in additional comments. The fact is that the JSF has been criticised for about a decade by Air Power Australia. Defence has chosen to play the man, not the ball, with persistent denigration of Air Power Australia. I have heard variously from Defence that APA does not have access to the classified information and hence cannot analyse the JSF, and I wonder how Defence can then analyse the capabilities of Russian, Chinese et cetera aircraft given that they are hardly going to hand Defence classified briefing documents on their capabilities.

I have also heard, from another perspective within the force, that APA are really bright guys who are effectively giving threat nations the heads-up on classified details of the JSF. The irony of these countervailing perspectives is not lost on me. Unfortunately, this undermining of APA's credibility does have an effect on some colleagues who have not compared and contrasted Defence's performance with theirs. Despite thousands of staff within DMO with access to all the classified information, the costing models, development schedules et cetera available from Lockheed Martin, Defence has proved hopeless on, at a minimum, the issues of cost and schedule.

Defence has either misled the parliament while telling the truth to the executive or it has been hopelessly optimistic—for example, if Defence were to have been taken at its word circa 2005 we should already have JSFs in service for about $65 million each. Instead, we will see an IOC of late 2018 at the earliest, with a price of well over $130 million each, despite the strength of our dollar. Mislead or be incompetent—I do not know which is worse. And then we are supposed to believe LockMart's spin on the capabilities, mouthed very often by those in Defence who are acting more as sales people for LockMart than applying the due diligence and caveat emptor required. Cost and schedule are not causes, they are some of the consequences of a program gone wrong. Think of blow-outs in building a home, for example. The JSF is a symptom of a much bigger problem and there are a litany of other programs similarly afflicted. They are symptoms of a much bigger problem. Think of the Super Seasprite helicopters—over a billion dollars spent and nothing to show for it.

There appears to be an issue of a lack of communication within Defence. Defence said on the tanker project 'everyone viewed it as a much easier program than what it was'. Similar statements have been made on the Wedgetail as a way of excusing the ongoing problems. However, an industry technical risk assessment in 1999 identified all of the risks that have now materialised with Wedgetail, but they were ignored and the contractors were 'shot down'. Why is Air Marshal Brown not aware of this? Take night-vision goggles, something the commandos complained of to this committee in Afghanistan and at Holsworthy. Yet the Chief of Army, when asked about it, was unaware of the problem. Once again, why?

In conclusion, it is critical that Defence not only engages with but also engages in a contractual sense those independent experts who have demonstrated greater competence in capability and risk assessment than Defence has demonstrated. If this does not occur, along with a host of other reforms, Defence is destined to remain the underperforming organisation it is now—risking Australia's security.

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