David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In respect of the government response to the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on its inquiry into the review of the Defence annual report 2013-14, I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I am pleased to see this response. It is a response to an inquiry that was conducted some time ago. The inquiry was post that annual report being delivered. With the fluxion of time, and an election in between, clearly the response had taken some time to come. But I am pleased, as I read through it, to see a number of the recommendations agreed with. There are a couple that are not that I would like to comment on.

For a start, recommendation 1 goes to the skill sets, the competence and the experience of people in Defence. The recommendation was:

… the Job Families Project be further developed to incorporate accurate assessments of both qualifications and experience that are required for a given role.

This is important. If you look at other safety-critical areas, such as the oil and gas industry, they normally work on quite a strict matrix of both qualification and experience before somebody is delegated a certain level of authority to make decisions.

What we have seen too often in the past is that, where Defence feels it has been constrained by the posting cycle, or by the people who are available, whether they are in uniform or the Public Service, people are put into a role even if their qualifications or experience are not necessarily the most appropriate or, in some cases, I would argue, even adequate for that role. Over a number of inquiries, I have been making the point that, whether we are talking about somebody who is a contract negotiator, somebody who is working in a force development area or somebody who is engaging with industry, the competencies required for the role—that mix of qualification and experience—should be clearly defined.

The concern I have had with the Job Families Project in the past is that, for example, if you needed neurosurgery done, the job family for the person that would do that is somebody in the health stream of Army, somebody who is qualified and senior enough to be a surgeon. So the Job Families Project identifies such a person. They are available, so they get posted. But if the person happens to be an orthopaedic surgeon—they are still in the medical family and they still have that level of training with good qualifications—the actual task-specific competence may not be there for the job you want. Neurosurgery should not be done by an orthopaedic surgeon. It is a very simple example.

Defence has some areas where it does this well. In aerospace engineering, for example, the regulator—the Directorate General Technical Airworthiness—will look at the person whom the Chief of Army, Navy or Air Force wants to post into a position and will assess their qualifications and experience and say what level of authority they will delegate to them. Within that airworthiness framework, Defence has a model that works well, but across many areas we see people posted into positions where they do not actually have the requisite experience to do those roles. I welcome the fact that Defence has agreed to this recommendation, or has looked to further involve the Job Families Project so that they actually do an audit of the qualifications and experience that any given role might need so that they can identify the gaps and help those people achieve the goals.

There is also a link with this recommendation in the Defence Industry Policy Statement and the first principles reviewwhich look at the kinds of programmatic capabilities that Defence requires. Again, I will come back to aerospace engineering, because it is one that I think is a good example to work with. For many decades Australia has had that quite robust system of taking graduates from university, training them in aerospace engineering or in structures or systems engineering and giving them hands-on experiences with maintained aircraft, and then they get posted to various parts of the organisation, whether they are maintaining or procuring equipment—being that classic smart buyer of equipment. What we are seeing as we have more and more of our aircraft purchased off the shelf is that the cost case that is often used to justify buying something off the shelf is that a lot of the design support network and the through-life engineering support is done by the providing country. If we buy something from the United States then either the US Navy or Air Force or the original equipment manufacturer will provide that engineering. What that means is that we have less opportunity for graduates here to actually get their hands dirty, so to speak, and get the competence—the experience as well as their qualification to do the role.

So, one of the things that I see that the Defence Industry Policy Statement leads to is that it has this concept of industry skills being a fundamental input to capabilities. The service chief now has the opportunity to look at these skill sets that are required and look at their workforces—not only uniformed but also including the Australian public servants and including industry people. Whether they are contracted, is in the services, or whether they are contracted into a defence organisation, for the workforce they are looking at, the spread of competence covers all three of those areas. So, for something like aerospace engineering, if we do not have the opportunity—because for things like the Joint Strike Fighter or the Super Hornet all that work is done overseas—if we want to have people who are competent to actually be in our technical airworthiness areas in the future and in our procurement areas and to be the smart providers, we have to look for other opportunities to give them that hands-on experience. In the past, with a program like the PC-9 replacement, we would see that as a training aircraft with no operational need to have all the back-of-house functions to support it, so we probably would have gone out to seek a power by the hour arrangement where somebody else would provide the aircraft on the flight line, ready to fly.

But the thinking of the first principles review and the Defence Industry Policy Statement is that if this is the most cost-effective way for Defence to develop its future workforce of aerospace engineers then perhaps we should actually look at taking this training platform and doing a certain amount of that design support engineering—that continuing airworthiness work—here in Australia so that we can take young graduates who have their degree and give them practical hands-on experience so that when we need people at that more senior level to interface with the US Navy, the US Air Force, British forces or the manufacturers we have people with the requisite level of competence to engage and be that smart buyer or that smart maintainer of our equipment. There is a fair bit in that one recommendation and I am pleased to see that the government has picked that up. We will look to develop that further as the Defence Industry Policy Statement is implemented.

That also goes to recommendation 3, which looks at ways to increase STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—engagement of young people. Increasingly, and it has probably ever been thus, we need to get lower down into the schools, at the year 9 and 10 type levels. This is so that when young people are making decisions about the subjects they will choose they will have a vision of what the job might entail, of the opportunities that working in an engineering type field might present to them, so that the subject choices they make at that mid-high school level are not limiting their options if they want to go on and pursue that technical type of stream. I am very pleased to see the government agree to support that.

Recommendation 7 is around the Joint Strike Fighter and a more comprehensive evaluation of project status. I have raised, in the past, the point about the conspiracy of optimism in how many Defence projects are reported to the parliament and that this has led to false expectation about the time frame and level of capability that will be delivered. Where there is any doubt or concern about the progress, through the manufacturing, testing or certification, that should be made abundantly clear in reporting opportunities, whether that be through ANAO reports, the annual report or reports on major projects.

In the past it is been disturbing to see summaries of really significant projects, like the Joint Strike Fighter, have an almost one paragraph 'It's all good, Guv' type story, when you read in open sourced American literature, through things like their Operational Test and Evaluation program, that there are significant concerns about the rate of progress.

I believe that whilst Defence, in their response, have indicated the US is the predominant builder of the aircraft and therefore it is their role to highlight if there are deficiencies in the program, our reporting should at least acknowledge and link or point to the American reporting. That is so the casual or interested reader, here, will realise it is not all an optimistic view and that perhaps there are other things they need to consider. (Time expired)