Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Labor are happy to back the Senate's wise views about these matters and speak in favour of the amendments and against the parliamentary secretary's proposition to defeat the will of the Senate in this important respect. I am not going to spend time on the bulk of the amendments that the parliamentary secretary spoke to. I want to talk about the submarines amendment. If the government had responded positively to the hand of bipartisanship that the Leader of the Opposition extended in Adelaide at the submarines conference and was willing to put all the silliness—and it is hard to find another word for the fiasco that is the government's dealings on this submarine project—of the last 18 months behind us and come to the bipartisan position that the Leader of the Opposition offered this morning then maybe this provision in the bill would not be necessary.

Again, we see politics being played by the defence minister, pushing the proposal aside just because it was a proposal from the Labor Party. You do have to ask yourself, and a lot of people in Adelaide are asking themselves this: how has it come to this? We had a 30-year, bipartisan national project at Osborne in Port Adelaide, supported by facilities elsewhere in the country, to build a serious submarine-building and shipbuilding capability in this country—a bipartisan national project sustained through the Howard years, sustained through the Rudd and Gillard years and something which the Prime Minister when he was Leader of the Opposition reluctantly signed up to before the election. He sent his defence minister, the shadow spokesperson at the time, to Osborne in South Australia and committed that the Liberal Party, if elected to government, would build 12 submarines in South Australia.

Since then, we have seen a dramatic unravelling: the sacking of a defence minister because of his ridiculous comments about the extraordinary skills and capabilities of our shipbuilding and submarine-building workforce in Australia; the apparent captain's pick by the Prime Minister to award this incredibly important nation-building project, and all of the economic activity that goes with it, to Japan; and seeking to cover-up the media releases that we understand were being prepared in the ministerial wing to announce that. We saw this become a part of the leadership spill in the Liberal Party over the last several weeks. It is extraordinary for this to become a plaything of the Liberal Party's leadership spill.

And we saw the charade of this thing called a competitive evaluation process. The shadow parliamentary secretary, who will be speaking on this debate, and her colleagues in the Defence portfolio leafed through the Defence Procurement Policy Manual to find this competitive evaluation process, but no-one had heard of it before. All this provision does is seek to return the government to the usual way in which these procurement decisions are made, and that is by way of a competitive tender. It is what the Howard government did with the air warfare destroyer project. There was a competitive tender along the lines that the Leader of the Opposition outlined in Adelaide this morning, along the lines contemplated by the amendment to this bill approved by the Senate. And this also requires that the competitive tender includes as a condition—as the air warfare destroyer tender did—that the vessels be built in Australia.

Now, an extraordinary amount of evidence has been canvassed in the Senate inquiry and in various other pieces of commentary around this debunking of a whole lot of the mythology that unfortunately became a part of this debate, such as that to build these submarines in Australia would cost up to $80 billion—a myth that I hope has now been completely debunked by expert after expert, company after company lining up to this Senate inquiry and saying that these submarines can be built at a competitive cost of around $20 billion here in Australia, reinforcing the national security reasons for doing that, reinforcing the important reasons to sustain a strong industrial and engineering skills base in Adelaide and elsewhere in Australia because of that, reinforcing the important economic benefits that come from such an important, enormous expenditure of taxpayers funds, sustaining and driving economic activity in our economy rather than an economy overseas. There should be no problem with this government finally swallowing its pride, recognising that the Prime Minister got it wrong on this—he just got it wrong—and climbing down and getting onboard with the process that the Leader of the Opposition outlined this morning.

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