Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a couple of comments on the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade's inquiry into procurement procedures for Defence capital projects, which has been underway for a long period of time, and to acknowledge the comments of Senator Bishop, who is the in chair now. He obviously has a long interest in these matters. Senators will notice the surprising degree of alignment and the total absence of the kind of partisan spite and bickering that sometimes creeps its way into reports such as this one—after the secretaries have drafted the report, I must add. I think the additional comments by Senator David Fawcett add value to the report.

The report itself is a credit to the secretariat and the staff but also, I should say, to the members and senators involved, who applied themselves to a task that is inordinately complex and actually quite fraught. What we did not want to do was simply produce another report that wound up on the shelf, adding to the pile of reports on Defence procurement that now stretch back literally decades, without any evident change to the situation apart from an increase in the complexity of the bowl of org chart spaghetti and alphabet soup that now characterises the institutional arrangements around Defence procurement.

This inquiry was initiated by the Australian Greens. It was one that, by agreement with other parties and with the committee, amended the terms of reference, but we ended up agreeing to it. I hope that that spirit was carried through—and I believe it was—into the report that we are very fortunate and proud to be tabling today. I will speak briefly as to our reasons for initiating the inquiry in the first place and also on why we believe it matters. The most proximate and obvious reason is that the Australian taxpayer spends something in the order of $66,167,000 or thereabouts on the Defence budget every single day, according to an analysis by ASPI of the last Defence budget. That is, I think, our foremost responsibility.

That is a great responsibility upon us to ensure that that is spent as effectively as possible, because the buck stops here. The extraordinary complexity of the organisational chart of the institutional arrangements that go from a decision to an outcome and to a piece of equipment at the end of the line starts with us. We are the ones upstream of that entire process. The responsibility, for example, when the Super Seasprite costs $1.4 billion and delivers nothing is ultimately here. I think it is a credit to the senators who worked on this report that there is an acknowledgement—I think Senator Bishop spoke of this very sharply, as a government senator—that the responsibility has been on governments of both sides. We approve the defence budget here in this place, we critique it during budget estimates, and the responsibility lies with us.

Some of the examples that are canvassed in the report are the 68-month delay of the Wedgetail project that cost us about US$1.5 million a month and submarines that cannot be put to sea because they are too dangerous to crew and, even if we could, we would find it difficult to find the crews to put these vessels to sea. This report is an effort to be honest, to learn lessons and to apply the reforms recommended by numerous reviews that came before us. It does recognise that these projects are complex. In engineering and technical terms, they do push the boundaries, and it is hardly surprising that, from time to time, we see cost, budget and timing overruns, because things occur that are very difficult to predict and some of these projects push the boundaries of what is technically possible.

So this report has not taken the easy way out. As I admit—Senator Macdonald, who had very little to do with this inquiry, sought to blame it all on the Labor Party—it is nonsensical for a party that held government for 12 or 13 years to then say that this is all the Labor Party's fault. This report, I think, is much more even-handed in the degree to which it apportions blame—although, as Senator Bishop himself has identified, it should be apportioned all over the place. We recognise that it is not simple. Reading this report, other senators and the public will, too.

We provided some additional comments to the report to emphasise the need for transparency, and it is these remarks on which I will dwell, partly as an explanation for why we moved this inquiry in the first place. While this parliament is responsible for approving the defence budget and it is the responsibility of parliamentarians to understand it, we cannot do that if information is being withheld from the public domain. Obviously, national security requires a degree of secrecy. There are also, as this report identifies, some commercial-in-confidence concerns. But I think these excuses are far too entrenched. They are invoked reflexively, and that, I think, is something that really needs to change.

What the report does not do, and what I want to direct some remarks to now, is to examine the most crucial step upstream, and that is us—the point that we make in our additional comments; the process by which we decide what our actual security threats are in the strategic environment. That is what we do in the process of drafting a defence white paper. The last defence white paper ignored the warnings, in my view, of major think-tanks, including Lowy and ASPI, on the climate-security nexus and concluded, baselessly—on the basis of no evidence or, in fact, in the face of evidence strikingly to the contrary—that the security impacts of climate change would not be felt before 2030. This is wrong. There is no way to be subtle about it; this is absolutely wrong. That is not the conclusion of the Australian Greens. It is the conclusion of the United Nations Security Council; it is the conclusion of the US Centre for Naval Analyses; it is the conclusion of the European Union.

It is essential that the impacts of climate change be systematically built into security and defence planning because climate change is a driver of conflict—not in 2030; now! It is shaping our security environment now. And the kinds of decisions we make as we draw up a white paper will directly guide the kinds of procurement decisions and the materials and the kinds of forces that we are able to put into the field for two or three decades.

We understand the very long lead times involved in procuring equipment as complex as submarines, for example, or advanced air-warfare capabilities. The decisions that we make now flow downstream, through this tangled mess and the charts of acronym-laden institutions and agencies that Senator Bishop described so adeptly.

Entities such as the United States Navy and the various other entities that I mentioned earlier are facing up to the facts around resource wars—to what happens with fragile or failed states when water tables change, when food-growing areas move, when forces are completely reliant on fossil fuels for power generation and battle readiness. So it is not just that military technology has to change; it is that the security environment itself has to change. You could be forgiven for thinking that, in precluding any form of public input—which is what, I believe, this government has done, from the drafting of this defence white paper—we are potentially primed to make a series of extremely expensive and unfortunate mistakes in not having our eyes open to what the genuine security environment for which we are making these procurement decisions will look like.

We cannot afford to face backwards in the 21st century, buying equipment and attempting to sustain equipment and capabilities that are effectively about fighting the Second World War. When we look at who our first responders are when environmental disasters occur, whether they are here or overseas, we see they tend to be the Australian Defence Force. They are the ones who are the first responders. For example, we saw that in the impact of the disasters that befell Queensland last year—they were the first people we put into the field, as they were on the beaches in Aceh after the tsunami, and so on.

We need to be thinking very carefully about the kinds of security threats that we face, because they then guide the decisions that this report documents, I think, so effectively. If we get it wrong at this end of things and are building a defence force, effectively, around fighting the Second World War—which I believe is the kind of intention betrayed by the 2009 white paper—then everything that flows from that will be flawed. We are in a tight budgetary environment—and, honestly, when are we not? There will always be budgetary balancing acts that are required when some sectors are calling for the upgrading of military technology to withstand the impacts of climate change and others are stating that mitigating the effects of climate change will prevent resource wars and security risks in the first place. We think there is room in the context of the development of the next white paper—which will then directly feed the procurement processes that we have identified here—for facing forward into this century and being brutally honest with ourselves, as others around the world are trying to do, about the kinds of security threats that we face.

What shines through here is that there seems to be an obsession with acquiring the latest, the shiniest, military technology. In a climate-constrained world, do we really need submarines that will allow us to prowl around in the South China Sea? Do we really need to be able to put cruise missiles into East Asia capitals, or maintain platoons of battle tanks—presumably for fighting the Second World War over again? Or do we need to equip our forces with different categories of technology and pay attention, for a change, to sustainment and how we maintain the capabilities that we put together for dealing with the conflicts and the security challenges of the 21st century? So I thank the committee and its secretariat, and I thank the chamber.