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

I thank the member for his question and acknowledge his advocacy for South Australian defence industry. In December 2013, Treasurer Joe Hockey stood at this very dispatch box and said to the Australian car industry, 'Either you're here or you're not.' And, with that, they left, with thousands of jobs gone and capability lost. This was the highest-tech, most complex manufacturing that we did in Australia, and the fundamentalist economic policies of those opposite laid waste to the jewel of Australian manufacturing. And, for all the hoopla that we've seen afterwards, the honest truth is that their attitude to industry policy was reflected in their attitude to defence industry.

Almost their first decision was to see Australia's supply ship be built in Spain, and thus they exposed the workforce at the Osborne shipyard in Adelaide to a valley of death. They wanted to have our next generation of submarines built in Japan, and so began 10 years of dithering around our submarine capability—on with the Japanese, off with the Japanese; on with the French, off with the French—so that, after almost 10 years in office, we saw no submarine steel cut in Adelaide under this government, and they exposed the country to a dangerous capability gap with our submarines which we have been left to fix. They were big on announcement and short on delivery.

The truth of defence industry over there was 28 different programs running a combined 97 years over time. And they never understood the strategic rationale for defence industry and the way in which it can build Australia's strategic weight and how we can be taken more seriously around the world. When Austal—an Australian shipbuilder building 12 per cent of the American service fleet with ships been designed in Fremantle—were bidding for the next generation of Australian frigates, those opposite did absolutely nothing. Indeed, the number of former ministers who visited the Austal shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, during that period of time was precisely zero. This government is very different. In the very near future, we will be announcing the optimal pathway to build Australia's nuclear-powered submarines, and at the heart of that will be developing the capacity as soon as possible to see nuclear powered submarines built in Adelaide—high-tech, high-skilled transformative industry That's because we are a government which is committed to seeing Australia be a country which makes things. We are a government which is committed to seeing our key defence assets be built in this country to drive Australian industry and to keep Australians safe.

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