Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Apparently, it is okay, Senator Gallacher, for us to say that a company has said something on the radio, so it must be a fact. Because someone has said in a radio interview that they could build something for $20 billion, that is now an established fact. That is not the process we are going to take in government. We are not going to rely on evidence from a radio transcript in a $20 billion decision for this nation. The decision is about the defence interests of our nation and will have decade-long consequences on how we can defend our nation.

The approach that we take when we are going to spend that sort of money, when we make a decision that will be about protecting the interests of our children and grandchildren in this nation, is to take the best evidence from the Department of Defence. They have the experts who are independent and are not working for particular companies—not that there is anything wrong with that, but everybody of course has their own barrow to push. We need to rely on independent evidence, and that is what this government is doing. We will not be cherry-picking evidence provided by particular people. We will be properly testing it through the process that the Labor Party also used on defence decisions when they were in government. It will be a two-pass process: there will be a first-pass process to go to cabinet and a second-pass process when more due diligence is done. That is what will happen and that will lead to better decisions by our government.

I was also listening to Senator Wong. She said that we do have the skills here in this nation to build a submarine. I have been to some of the Senate committee hearings—I am a member of the Senate economics committee—and I cannot think of one witness who thought that we can build a submarine alone in this nation. That cannot happen. It did not happen with the Collins class submarines; it is not happening with the air warfare destroyers. We will have to rely on expertise in other countries. Everyone recognises that. The Collins class was a multicultural submarine. It was made up of Swedish design, a US combat system and French propulsion. We will have to do the same with any decision we make in the future. It cannot all be done here, but there will still be plenty of work done in Australia, particularly in Adelaide, as the minister has outlined.

I want to finish with some evidence that was also presented at one of these Senate committee hearings. It was from Mr Glenn Thompson, who is the Assistant National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union. He put in his submission that the project to replace the HMAS Success, which has just been re-contracted, should have been approved and announced many years ago. I put that to him and said, 'I presume that this means it should have been done more than one year ago.' Mr Thompson replied, 'Absolutely.' So here we have the assistant national secretary of the AWU saying that the Labor Party should have made that decision years ago on that ship, and their own union bodies are damning them for their inaction. The reason that we are in this plot right now is that Labor had six years to do something on this and did nothing.