Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great pleasure to speak on defence matters in the parliament. I'm very fortunate in Wakefield to have the Edinburgh Defence Precinct, with a number of Army units and RAAF units, industry and a significant representation of white-collar public servants, and of course the DSTG, along with the Port Wakefield proof range; north of it, Cultana and Woomera; and, south of it, the Keswick Barracks.

South Australia has always been a defence state, but, increasingly, it has a larger and larger defence footprint. This is due to, in part, good planning by the national government and, in part, good planning by the South Australian government and Defence SA. It is a decision that was deliberately made by Premier Rann, was continued by Premier Weatherill and I hope will be continued by Premier Marshall. Defence and its planning, the defence estate and its planning, and defence procurement and its planning should have a strong bipartisan focus and a strong recognition that when we use the Defence Force, in the unlikely and unwanted scenario where we might have to use our Defence Force for war-making or for defence purposes, we will do that as Australians and not wearing our Labor, Liberal or other party caps.

In many ways this motion is a self-congratulatory motion from the government. A little bit of that is understandable, but we really need to remember that defence procurement in particular needs to be undertaken with small-p politicisation, rather than big-P Politicisation. What we should be aiming for is strong bipartisanship and high levels of trust between government, the Public Service, industry, unions, and all stakeholders like state governments and their instrumentalities, because when we're dealing with procurement decisions we're talking not just about multigovernment decisions but about multigenerational decisions. When I say 'multigenerational', I mean that today's politicians might make a decision that the next generation of politicians—Labor, Liberal or perhaps something else—will have to deal with.

We have to be very careful, I think, of engaging in the sort of partisan commentary that the member who spoke previously gave. I can remember seeing partisan commentary about Kim Beazley and about dud subs, something that has plagued our submarines. That commentary was immensely damaging to our sovereign capability in terms of submarines. Frankly, we saw it when Brendan Nelson was opposition leader, too, over the Seasprite scandal. So we don't want to use defence procurement in this place in an irresponsible way, because all procurement decisions have problems. All defence procurement has challenges. We only have to look at the F-111 for an example of that. It is something that underwrote our security for a very long time indeed but was mired in controversy in the beginning.

I hear the members opposite from Queensland talking about Land 400, and it's interesting to hear them make commentary about that. I would have thought a third government speaker could have been the member for Corangamite. She might have come in here and given a decision, because on Land 400 the government didn't just match itself against the opposition, the states or minor parties; it pitted itself against itself. It pitted one lot of backbenchers against another, and I think that that was a particularly poor way—

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