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

I, too, would like to take note of the answers given today to Senator Conroy, which, once again, demonstrated the incredible mess that the coalition has got themselves into with regard to the future submarine project.

The government promised before the last federal election to build the 12 future submarines in my home state of South Australia, in Adelaide. We know they back flipped on that promise. We know that the hapless former defence minister slurred the Australian Submarine Corporation. And we know that the Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, has done a deal with Japan to give the work to that country without any sensible, transparent and accountable tender process.

It has been a saga of dreadful mishandling of the most important procurement process ever in the history of Australia. Today, I was very proud when the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, came out and offered an olive branch to the coalition—he offered a hand to the coalition—to get this most important procurement project right. We asked for their bipartisan support to put in place a decent, accountable process—an accountable process that would deliver for Australia and for South Australia the best possible, cost-effective submarines that are suitable for Australia's security. The process would guarantee the work is retained in Australia to build and to maintain those submarines and to ensure that we have the shipbuilding skills in Australia for the future.

The process that Labor put forward today in South Australia—in my home state—would commence with the four most prominent non-nuclear submarine designers from Germany, France, Japan and Sweden. It would be a 12- to 18-month process, involving a request for proposals, a project definition study and a request for tender, with a decision taken by the end of 2016 about where we would get the design for the submarine from. It is a concrete, clear, accountable, sensible process. It is the first time we have had on the table a real process to ensure that the submarines that we desperately need in this country are built and, most importantly, maintained in Australia.

It was disappointing that the coalition took barely any time to consider this very sensible bipartisan approach to them to fix this problem of the future submarine project. Almost immediately, the useless defence minister, Kevin Andrews, who was dumped into that position when he did not really want to be defence minister—