Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

My questions concern this government's addiction to playing politics with Australia's defence and national security. There's an awful lot of talk about future capability, but there's very little delivery of present reality. For some time now it has been Labor's view that Australia is confronting the most difficult set of strategic circumstances since the Second World War, and it would appear that the government agrees with this. The 2020 Defence strategic update makes clear that Australia faces an increasingly uncertain strategic environment, and yet, when one examines what the government is actually doing in terms of responding to these challenges, when one looks at the capability acquisitions that turn important words into hard reality, what one sees is seven years of politically motivated decisions and mismanagement by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in respect of our future submarines. As the defence minister rightly said, 'Our submarine capability underpins Australia's credibility and influence as a modern military power.' That observation is exactly right, and yet on every metric the government has mismanaged this acquisition. Take the time frame: the Abbott government said the future submarines were needed by the mid-2020s, and now the first one won't be operational until 2035, a decade later than was originally promised. Such is the government's laserlike focus on this project, the defence minister herself was a decade out in naming the date on which the last of the 12 future submarines would come into operation, and in the interim the government has still not made a decision about the location of full-cycle docking and the life-of-type-extension work on the Collins class submarine, work that is essential to avoiding a capability gap. This is despite the minister promising that an announcement would be made by the end of 2019, and now the minister won't even commit to that decision being made before the next election.

When we look at local content, we again see more broken promises. Prior to the 2016 federal election, the government loudly proclaimed that there would be a 90 per cent Australian build in relation to the submarines. After the election, they couldn't retreat from that claim fast enough, saying that there would instead be a 60 per cent local build, and, when it came to putting their money where their mouth is, they failed to include any minimum content requirement in the strategic partnership agreement in respect of the future submarines. Now they want credit for a commitment that 60 per cent of the value of Naval Group's contract will be spent locally. This is a commitment that counts language training, conferences and hotels as local content, a commitment they announced over eight months ago and are yet to successfully negotiate into the strategic partnership agreement.

When it comes to the question of cost, for years this government has said that this is a $50 billion project. It was not until late last year that this sleight of hand was fully exposed, and what we learnt in recent weeks was that the government chose to hide a $30 billion increase for three years because it was an inconvenient truth—a wicked attempt to hide from the public and the parliament the inconvenient fact of a cost increase that has climbed by nearly $40 billion to a total acquisition cost of nearly $90 billion, an 80 per cent increase over the original amount. They've done the same thing with the future frigates, hiding a $10 billion blowout for two years while issuing press releases with costs they knew were wrong. That's the regard this lot have for taxpayers' money and the truth: $30 billion here, $10 billion there and no truth anywhere. And because of this government's mismanagement and failure to be upfront, there is now a crisis of confidence in the Future Submarine project—a direct result of seven years of putting their political interests ahead of the national interest.

We now have a wicked problem, which is that the first of the future submarines is 15 years away, the last is 34 years away, and yet this is the single most important acquisition in respect of shaping our strategic circumstances going forward. When you look at each of the metrics—when you look at time, when you look at Australian industry content and when you look at cost—this project is going in the wrong direction in every respect. What this country needs is for this government to stand up and actually explain to the Australian people how this critical capability is going to be put on target, and how this is going to occur. But what we hear from this mob is absolutely nothing. They are making our country less safe.

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