David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have not sought to insult the men and women of ASC. Indeed, what I said has been explained. The greatest insult I have ever seen to the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, and indeed to those employed in the defence industry, was when the former Prime Minister sent her bodyguard to the National Security Committee. That is the greatest insult to those men and women who are charged with providing the platforms and actually defending our country—to show no interest and send someone along whose security vet position is completely unknown to the National Security Committee.

I did say the wrong thing. But when you say that I have undermined the confidence in Australia's defence capability, can I tell you that ASPI adjudicated what you delivered in terms of the defence budget as 'an unsustainable mess'. When will you take responsibility for the fact that you elected to rip off the Defence portfolio in pursuit of a bogus exercise chasing a budget surplus that never eventuated? 'An unsustainable mess.' Compare that with the budget that we have delivered in Defence. You were simply the greatest underminers of confidence in Australia's defence capability in the six years that you were there, and you had your fingerprints all over the actual blatant facts of doing it. You ripped $16 billion out of the portfolio and delivered, as I say, an unsustainable mess.

Let's just talk about what, individually, the Labor Party did. I can recall when there was a circumstance where SAS pay was readjudicated and backdated such that serving soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan received debts from the government of $30,000, and interest was payable and taken from their pays. The initial response of the then minister was: 'It's not a problem. It has been fixed.' So there they were, out there fighting for us, and what thanks did the then government give them but a debt, a retrospective debt, of $30,000 and the deduction of interest? Of course, that very same minister had his brother in his office trying to do a hard sell of medical services to the Australian Defence Force. They actually commanded the surgeon general to go to the minister's office so that he could receive the hard sell. This is what they got up to. I have to say that the comparison is off the planet.

Then you say 'threatening the integrity of the future submarine program'. Well, can I tell you, the greatest threat to the future submarine program was the promises, the splash and all of the hype that the Labor Party delivered, and then, when the government changed, we found it was all a fraud. It was all a complete charade. It was all just a headline, it was a doorstop and it was nothing more than an exercise in fooling the Australian public. And that is what we are confronting. You set out to pretend that you were going to build 12 submarines, and I said that if this is fantasy we will have to reconsider it because time is against us. Collins has a limited life, and we must avoid a capability gap.

So here we are in 2014, and I have had to start from scratch, notwithstanding the promises of Kevin Rudd. Of course, you do not want to hear his promises that he would ensure that the submarines were built at ASC. If he wanted to ensure that, why didn't he do a contract? If he was going to cement that into place, why didn't he do what normal, faithful, high-fidelity governments do? They contract people. But, no, he did not. He said that construction work would begin in about 2017. Can I tell you, that is a very, very difficult proposition when we have not even got to first pass in the program; indeed, Admiral Moffitt said you had 20 years after first pass. Now, where are we? We are light years away from having a capacity to deal with this. We must take urgent action. That is a complete and full threat to the integrity of the program. We are now in a position where we are scrambling to make up the gap, the distance and the pain that the Labor Party has left us in with submarines. Kevin Rudd went on to say that he would start this process this year with guaranteed continuity of work for South Australia's defence industry. But not one dollar did he put on the table at that time for this program. He did, some years later, put $214 million on the table under Minister Smith, of which only $60 million has been spent. That is the greatest threat to the integrity of the future submarine program. So what we saw were promises, doorstops, no decisions and no action. He went on to say that a Rudd government 'would make it a priority to ensure that the necessary preliminary work on Australia's next generation of submarine was carried out in time for consideration and initial approval in 2011'. And, as we all know, in 2011, absolutely nothing happened. They just sat there mouthing '12 submarines for Adelaide' and doing absolutely no work. I took them at their word. I thought there was actually something going on. I could not believe that they would perpetrate such a fraud and play so callously with our national security. But now I see what went on: they simply pretended that they were going to do 12 submarines. Right? They pretended. There is not a design, there is not a contract, there are no engineers and there is not even any training.

Of course Senator Conroy talks to the Submarine Institute about having a plan. Well a plan does not deliver anything. Put the money on the table. The money of itself does not deliver anything. Contracts deliver something. There is not a contract. Contracts actually deliver something. Senator Conroy says, 'We had a land based test site'. Well, can you take me to it—because it has never been built. When the senator tells people what Labor's legacy for the submarine program is, can I tell you it is actually a great big fat nothing. It is a little bit like his understanding of this portfolio. So nothing was done.

Let's look at what this motion seeks to talk about. I have sought to establish that the greatest threat undermining the integrity of the future submarine program is the fact that the Labor Party pretended to the Australian public that there was, in fact, a program running. They pretended to tell people, 'We are doing work assiduously, diligently and knowingly.' And all the time the finance minister and the defence minister knew that there was nothing happening

The reason they knew that was: when they costed the program in 2009, pursuant to their white paper that had $275 billion worth of acquisitions, they were told by the department that the acquisition cost was more than $40 billion. We all know that, in acquisition in defence, it is one-third for acquisition and two-thirds for ownership. But we also know that if the program goes out over 20-plus years, you need to factor in inflation. So the out-turned dollar value of that $40 billion requirement to buy these mythical 12 Walt Disney class submarines was in fact $80-plus billion. That is why the file sat on Senator Faulkner's desk with a great big paperweight on it. That is why the finance minister said, 'We won't talk about that ever.' That is why successive defence ministers did not do anything. The numbers were so spooky.

What I am asking the former finance minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, to do is to have some courage to admit that, for six years, they perpetrated one of the truly great frauds of our time on the Australian public. They themselves made the greatest contribution, ever, to undermining Navy's capability in this country. They took our defence spending back to 1938 levels, just callously. They just said, 'The defence capability plan needs funding, but we're just going to rip the money out of it. You guys in Defence over at Russell, just move everything to the right. Just put it off into the never-never. We really don't care about defence. We care about pink batts. We care about school halls.' At the same time, they were saying to people up in the archipelago, 'Come on down, we've got compassion.' And when they did come down—50,000 of them in 800 boats—they expected the Australian Defence Force to stump up and man up and do the work whilst they were ripping the financial carpet out from underneath them.

When I went to Adelaide I wanted to say, as I have said on so many occasions, 'Let's get together in the Defence portfolio, take the politics out. Let's have the submarines, let's have a policy that isn't full of argy-bargy for the benefit of our service men and women—in this instance Navy.' I accepted the word of the minister of the day, Minister Smith. But I did put the caveat in, 'unless this is fantasy.' Of course, Senator Wong never wants to mention the words 'unless this is fantasy', because she knows that the whole thing was a great big fat lie. And she knows the value of the program. She knows that ASPI costed this project at $36 billion. She knows the government costed this program at $40-plus billion. That is why they did nothing ever on this. That is why they have, over six years, spent only $60 million. It boggles my mind that they can stand up here and talk about my sins in the face of what they perpetrated for six years.

Senator Wong wants to talk about petulance. My goodness! If we had a petulance Olympics she would be our gold-medal prospect. We would all stop to watch the TV because we would have a real chance at gold. She is undoubtedly our best hope in the petulance Olympics. She practices it every day. Who could forget when she was in government, not answering any questions—every time you put a bit of pressure on her. Seriously, this is far too important for petulance. When they were confronted with Manoora and Kanimbla being suddenly overnight completely debilitated by rust—because they refused to go aboard and have a look—they had to rush out and buy HMAS Choules. They did not plan to build a ship in Australia, they did not have a plan to build something in South Australia or Melbourne or up in the Hunter. They had to rush out and buy Choules for $100 million. When they were confronted with the fact that Aurora Australis was getting old and they needed a new icebreaker, what did they do? They contracted with a European firm, who were going to build European ships for us. Did they want to come to Adelaide? Did they want to go to Melbourne, did they want to go to the Hunter to build these ships? No. They committed but—guess what—there was no money in the budget for that. So the hospital handball fell to the Abbott government. This is how good they were at managing money.

They would contract to do things and think, 'Well, we'll the money for another day.' That is what we are confronted with. Then, of course, HMAS Success, our No. 1 replenishment ship, needed another hull. So what did they do? Did they take it down to Adelaide or Melbourne? No, they decided that they would take it to Singapore. The audacity of them to stand there and tell us how to run defence procurement. All they could do was cut corners, take money out of the Defence portfolio and go offshore and buy anything that they could when they needed to, because it was always such an emergency. There was no plan, no planning at all. The defence capability plan was in complete disarray, to the point where they went to the last election telling the Australian people, 'We have no policy on defence.'

With all of the things that had happened in our region, with all of the flood of people on little boats, all of the requirements that we had, they did not even see it as serious enough to have a defence policy to take to the Australian people at the last election. No defence policy. I tell you the one really salient feature about this is that I think the Greens actually had a better defence policy than the Labor Party. And then, of course, when they were in opposition they chose a giant of defence understanding as the shadow. He comes along to Senate estimates and has to tap people on the shoulder, saying, 'What does that acronym stand for?'

The point about all this is that the only thing that this shadow minister has brought to the game is to insult one of our best generals, to actually personally attack one of our best generals, to actually get him at the bar table at Senate estimates and accuse him in a most scurrilous, scandalous way, a most cowardly way. And guess what; he has never apologised to that person. He sees that as a badge of honour. This is the respect they have for serving men and women.

For my sins I have worn the odium of two hours this morning and several questions today for what I said and which I regret. I have said on several occasions that the men and women who are doing the welding and the fitting out of those blocks are doing a good job. The problem we have is in management, and may I say I am desperate to fix that problem because we must have a naval shipbuilding industry in Australia. We have eight future frigates we want to build in Adelaide. I cannot in all conscience and credibility go to the Australian people, go to my national security committee, go to the government and say, 'If we are going to cost three times as much as the international benchmark of these ships, we cannot do it in Australia.' I want to bring it down to 80 man-hours or thereabout per tonne. At the moment, it is 150 man-hours. The point is eight million man-hours per ship against three or four million, which is what we need. I am working day and night to see that we can deliver about 6,000 jobs to Adelaide if we can go forward with this project.

This is just a waste of the Senate's time It is absolute nonsense. You people have got your priorities really messed up—seriously—as my portfolio stands in testament.