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

The debate this morning has largely focused on jobs and the economy, and it is being treated almost as a debate around industry policy—which is worth engaging in, but only up to a point. I will confine my comments largely to what it is that we would need this capability for and whether it is actually going to be fit for purpose for the time in which we imagine that these submarines would be deployed.

I understand perfectly well the reason why Senator Conroy has brought this amendment forward this morning and also why the debate has focused largely on treating defence policy as though it were industry policy. I think that is something of a mistake, but I also recognise that the South Australian economy is in desperate trouble. This came up yesterday, ironically enough, when we were debating Senator Day's amendment on whether we should open the doors to the nuclear industry. With the collapse of automotive manufacturing in South Australia, the decision—which is now well and truly on the record—of BHP not to proceed with the open-cut Olympic Dam operations at Roxby Downs and, indeed, the naval shipbuilding industry, all three of those pillars of the South Australian economy that have been relied on for decades are now called into question. The third one, the naval shipbuilding industry, is one that parliament might actually be in a position to do something about.

We make boots here that we supply our ADF personnel with. We assemble and maintain ASLAVs here in Australia. But we do not design and build our own jet aircraft, and nobody serious in the Defence community really suggests that we should. Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is naval shipbuilding: should we do it here? Is it the most cost-effective use of taxpayers' money if we are treating it not as industry policy but as defence policy? What is our strategy? What is our doctrine for the defence of Australia? What kinds of capabilities do we put together and assemble to carry out that strategy? Then the third order decision is: from where do we get those capabilities? Do we make those things here? Do we buy them off the shelf? Do we procure things off the shelf and then modify and sustain them here? That is the way these things should be done. What we have here—and it is not entirely this government's fault, in my view, because I would take this back to the 2009 defence white paper—is that process running in reverse. It happened under the previous government and it is happening, albeit in a rather more awkward and shambolic way, under this government. The tail is wagging the dog—industry policy is setting defence procurement objectives from which flow the strategy. In my view, that is precisely the wrong way to be going about it.

Nonetheless, we are an island continent. We depend for the vast majority of our trade on safe access to sea lanes and the law of the sea. It is my view and the view of the Australian Greens that we should maintain a shipbuilding industry here in Australia. The civil shipbuilding industry has been practically wiped out, which really only leaves naval shipbuilding—and we do have those shipyards in South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. We formed the view, setting aside those questions about what kinds of capabilities we should be putting together, that that industry is important and that it should be maintained—not simply in the construction phase, obviously, but it is a part of what the Australian Greens believe should be a more independent foreign policy and, indeed, a more independent defence policy to be able to maintain our own equipment. There is no real difficulty there.

I want to take us back to the 2009 defence white paper, because it feels to me as though we are dealing here with Senator Conroy's motion, which is something of a blunt object. I presume that will be part of Senator Abetz's point when he gets to his feet shortly. But we are dealing with, in my view, a cascade of very poor decisions that have led us to this point today. With the 2009 defence white paper Prime Minister Rudd, in line with his tendencies to follow grandiose announcements by wandering off and losing interest and getting engaged with something else, announced we were going to have 12 very large submarines that would cost X billion dollars to build and X billion dollars to sustain, and that they would replace Collins. We went through this process of having that decision effectively falling from a trapdoor in the roof into the defence white paper—there will be 12 submarines, we are going to build them here, we will now go through this process of assessing where they should come from. The questions of why 12, why they should have to be so large and such long-range submarines, what role they would perform, what was actually happening, and what was effectively perceived to be occurring in submarine warfare in the 2030s and the 2040s—which is when these vessels would finally put to sea—were effectively just set aside and not spoken of. And everybody knew which way that process would go.

In my role on the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee I was involved from the get-go in assessment. The government basically set up four options ranging from a completely off-the-shelf option where submarines would simply be purchased overseas but maintained here in Australia all the way through to a whole Australian build with the installation of the US combat system into them. Effectively, that was dubbed 'the son of Collins'. Everybody who was involved and engaged in that process at the outset through those four different options knew which way the process was going to end—they effectively knew that the United States government would never permit the installation of US combat systems in a German or a French boat. Where it was heading was very obvious from the outset to those involved: we were going to end up with a process of 12 very large conventionally powered submarines built here in Australia, and a lot of the process of assessment around the outside was—I would not go quite so far as to call it a sham, but everybody knew where this process was heading.

Then we came to the 2013 election and then the slow-motion debacle that got underway with Prime Minister Abbott. You could say he was flat out lying—I do not know quite where the President would rule on that—or at least significantly misleading the—I will withdraw that if it is going to cause concern.

The CHAIRMAN: Yes, thank you, Senator Ludlam.

But let us effectively say the Prime Minister was promising the people of South Australia that that is where these boats were going to be built and sustained while actually having no such intention, or maybe simply forgetting that those comments had been made immediately after the election. That set off this desperately politicised process that has come to this point today.

Yes, we need an able shipbuilding industry in Australia, but what kinds of vessels and what role will they be performing? You do not have to look very far through the defence literature to find some very significant concerns about the kind of vessel that is proposed to be built. Why 12? Why so large? Why now? These are the questions that I want to put to you, and the most significant question—about what role these vessels will perform in the very near future—is being significantly undermined. The real risk we are creating here is that these vessels will be obsolete on the day that they put to sea.

A very recent paper by the US Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments—they are somewhat independent and are a little outside the formal arms of the US military—proposed that increasing computer processing power opens up the possibility 'to run sophisticated oceanographic models in real time' that will reveal small environmental changes caused by a submarine and that it may be that in the mid-2030s and 2040s it would be suicide to send a large diesel-powered submarine anywhere in the vicinity of a fight, particularly as a crewed vessel, as the kind of submarine capability that we are proposing to build here in Australia here in the mid—