Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question and her passionate advocacy for the South Australian defence industry. The truth is that the Australian defence industry is a critical input to our national defence. Over 100,000 Australian defence industry workers get up every day to support the men and women of the Australian Defence Force. This will increase as we increase our defence funding to deal with the strategic challenges that we're seeing at the moment. Twenty thousand direct jobs will be created to support the nuclear propelled submarines alone.

The truth is we'll need many more workers as we get on with the job of implementing the Defence strategic review recommendations, including modernising the Australian Army, enhancing the lethality of the Royal Australian Navy, giving more strike options to the Air Force and establishing sovereign missile manufacturing capability in this country. That means more business for Australian industry and that means more workers are needed. That's why the Albanese Labor government is making very significant investments.

We're establishing the skills academy in South Australia to actually train workers to work in our submarine and surface fleet construction programs. We've announced $130 million for 4,000 additional uni places in STEM subjects. We've allocated $11 million to the WA Defence Industry Pathways Program. We're providing certainty to employers. We're taking the hard decisions around prioritising projects. We're increasing defence funding over the decade to give employers certainty to hire more Australian workers.

This differs from the uncertainty and chaos in defence we saw under the last government. Firstly they wanted to build submarines in Japan. Then they spent $3.4 billion on the Attack class submarines. Then they stuffed up the Henderson maritime precinct. They then spent—and this is my favourite—$114 million on the Naval Shipbuilding College. Guess how many workers they trained? Zero. There were zero workers trained for $114 million of expenditure. There were 24 ministers in the Defence portfolio in a shambolic 9½ years and the result was 28 major projects running cumulatively 97 years late and $6½ billion over budget. They also left a 10-year capability gap with our submarines.

The truth is that they talked the big game but they cut $12 billion from the defence budget and they added $42 billion of spending commitments without a single new dollar being added. By contrast, the Albanese Labor government is providing sober adult leadership. We're increasing resources to defence to face the challenges, unlike the negative 'no-alition' over there.

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