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

My great fear is that, despite the government's assertions about shipbuilding in South Australia, we are slowly sleepwalking into a shipbuilding skill shortage. Now, the minister, Christopher Pyne, says that 'the valley of death is over'—I'm quoting him here from his press release of 12 October last year:

The valley of death is over and we are now seeing a upturn of employment in naval shipbuilding in our state that will only continue to increase as these new projects gain momentum.

This is despite the most recent announcement that another 90 jobs will go at the government-owned ASC. That is a very concerning thing. Behind all of those redundancy announcements made by ASC—there are something like 1,000 jobs gone in the last few years as a result of this government's decision—and despite Minister Pyne's assertion that employment will be going up and that we are through the valley of death, we find jobs continually shed at ASC.

And these are real people—people like my mate Daniel, who's an electrician who just took a redundancy at ASC. He said to me: 'I knew it was coming. I thought I would take one now.' He is not the first electrician I have known who's taken a redundancy. I know Andy, who also took a redundancy a year before and has been in and out of different employment as an electrician since. Now, behind their very human stories—and they are capable people, so they will do other things—there's a decline in shipbuilding skills in South Australia. This is very, very serious. I have here a graph. This is out of the ANAO report. You can see the graph there. It starts off high and goes down low, and then it's projected to go back up again.

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