Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was delighted to attend last week the headquarters of Thales Australia in Melbourne for the next stage of the rollout of the OneSKY project. OneSKY is a major project. It was launched by then transport minister Warren Truss and myself as then defence minister in 2015 to put in place a modern air traffic control system for all of Australia. Currently, Australia operates under two separate air traffic control systems, and that is in a country which splits those two down the middle on the second busiest aircraft network in the world—namely, the flight path between Melbourne and Sydney. Bringing these together and bringing together the air traffic control of both civil aviation and military aviation under the OneSKY rubric will, in fact, put us in a situation of having, hopefully, the best air traffic control system in the world. This new system will control something in the order of 11 per cent of the global airspace not just over Australia's land mass but obviously in areas around Australia as well. This has already created some 450 skilled jobs in engineering and like skills in Melbourne, and this next stage will see a further 200 skilled jobs coming to Melbourne. It's a great project for Australia and, indeed, for Melbourne itself.