Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to speak once more on Labor's commitment to the future submarine project, to shipbuilding in Australia and shipbuilding jobs. I would like to acknowledge that today and tomorrow in Canberra we have a number of delegates and workers from the shipbuilding industry and their unions who are lobbying to protect the shipbuilding industry and their jobs—high-tech important jobs for Australia.

Tomorrow they are going to be asking senators and members to come outside and sign a pledge to support those jobs and keep those jobs in Australia. I urge all my senatorial colleagues to get out there and get behind them. I am pretty sure I know which ones will be going out to sign the pledge. I am pretty sure I know which ones won't be going out to sign the pledge, and that will be all of those coalition senators over there and Senator Bob Day, I suspect.

A fortnight ago I joined my fellow South Australian Labor colleagues at Techport at a rally to show our support for the South Australian shipbuilding industry and shipbuilding jobs. If you haven't been, Mr Acting Deputy President Williams, it is well worth a visit. It is a spectacularly efficient workplace. It is an area where some of the best jobs in South Australia are and it produces of course ships. It is where we anticipated, given the promises of the Prime Minister and the Defence minister, the new submarines would be built. But of course we know that there is no commitment now and that promise looks like it is going to be broken. Those future submarines may not be designed and built in South Australia.

I was at that event at Techport with my Labor colleagues, MPs Mark Butler, Nick Champion, Kate Ellis, Tony Zappia and also opposition leader Bill Shorten. He spoke to the workers and promised them that Labor would continue to fight for their jobs, for those 1,500 or so workers who came out that day.

I was able to speak to a number of them and hear their very real concerns about the future of their employment. They weren't just concerned about their own employment; they were really concerned about the future of South Australian jobs and the future of the industry of which they are so proud and in which they do such a good job.

Those workers understand that Australia absolutely needs this new project, the future submarine project, at Techport and they are very concerned about the promises that were made to them before the federal election when the Defence minister stood up and gave them a firm commitment that the 12 new submarines would be built there. They are very concerned that the current government seems to be backflipping on that commitment.

They were also promised by the Prime Minister just before the state election in South Australia that the submarines would be built there. He stood up with Steven Marshall, the state opposition leader, promising that the future submarine project would continue in South Australia. Those workers have been betrayed and are very, very disappointed with the current government. They have been asking us in the Labor Party to do what we can to support them and their jobs, because they understand how important those jobs are to South Australia.

There are other aspects of course to this debate. It is not just about the jobs in Australia and the importance of shipbuilding and the Australian Submarine Corporation to South Australia's economy; it is also to ensure that Australia is in control of its own defence capability.

We have heard from numerous experts in this field saying that Australia runs a very great risk, if it outsources the design and build of its new submarines to another country. We know that this is being looked at very carefully by the coalition government. They will seek to purchase submarines from somewhere else and therefore deny Australia the control that it needs to have over this very, very important defence capability.

I note that experts agree that Australia should maintain this design-and-build capability within Australia, because it ensures that Australia has control of the capability. But it is also very important at this particular time in our history, when we are talking a lot about national security, that we do have control of our own national security. That means that we maintain that capability in our own country, even if it does put a premium on the build of the submarines. I note that the coalition like to make the claim that Australian workers are incompetent when it comes to shipbuilding. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. We know that Australians can design, build and maintain these submarines, and they should be given the opportunity to do that.

The former Chief of the Defence Force, His Excellency General the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove, current Governor-General of Australia, is also very concerned that Australia maintains the capability within Australia to design, build and sustain our submarines. It seems to me entirely hypocritical of this government to even be contemplating design, production and build of the submarines by another country when, at the moment, national security is very high on the agenda.

The economic flow-on from ensuring that the build of the submarines continues in South Australia is without doubt. We know that as well as maintaining the 3,000 actual jobs at the Australian Submarine Corporation there is a big knock-on effect in defence industries in South Australia. More than 25,000 jobs in South Australia are also relying on the defence industries. We need to maintain manufacturing in South Australia so that those jobs are kept in South Australia. This is a very important industry in South Australia and I am very pleased that Labor senators are fighting to maintain it there. Labor senators will not cede control of our defence capability. We will continue to fight to maintain the industry in South Australia. We ask coalition South Australian senators, in particular, to stand up for their home state and support the workers, support the industry and ensure that shipbuilding continues in South Australia.