Rex Patrick (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

And we now have people like retired Mr Moffitt suggesting we pick up the full-cycle docking work that is being carried out in Adelaide and spend more than a billion dollars to carry it across the Nullarbor, knowing full well that a significant majority of the 700 workers, each with more than an average of 11 years experience, will not shift with that work. Indeed, this point is conceded by Mr Moffitt in his blog when he says:

… the existing specialists are in SA and probably won’t want to move westward, given the exciting new frigate and submarine work on offer in Adelaide.

This is a tacit acknowledgement that the vast majority of the roughly 700 staff working on Collins won't move west—and the corporate knowledge of ASC will be gutted. If you were going to do the shift, you would have done it years ago; you would have done it when the system was broken. You don't spend the money fixing it to then break it when you shift it again. That's crazy. It's nonsense on stilts. It makes no sense. I just want to make it clear: I'm highly respectful of the men and women who serve in our defence forces, particularly those that serve in the operational units of the ADF, but I'm entitled to be critical of those senior officers who sit in their comfy chairs at Russell Offices or Campbell Park or Brindabella Park and think of ways to spend billions of dollars just moving deck chairs. Unlike individuals or businesses that have to earn money and then think very carefully about how they spend or invest it, Defence just gets the money handed to them. And the money the defence forces waste is sometimes incomprehensible to people: a billion dollars wasted on a Seasprite helicopter that never saw service and the LCM2000 project that resulted in a landing craft too big for the ship it was intended for. When they went to replace it, the watercraft for the LHDs was not buoyant enough to carry the Abrams tank. As Joe the Cameraman from the Channel 9 said, 'They can't bowl and they can't bat.'

Mr Moffitt talks about doubling the number of submariners, saying we now have fewer than 1,000 submariners in the Navy. And he said 'the fact that the RAN must expand this workforce substantially for the new submarines is barely mentioned' in the debate we're having on full-cycle dockings. But this is not a debate about submarine power; we're discussing submarine engineering and industrial capability. Having read his opinion piece, I'm not sure how it advances the debate or lines up the right questions for debate. My impression is that it was a mashup of a variety of points stitched together. I can only assume that the point of it was to simply confuse people. If that was the aim, he hit the bullseye.

It does not make sense to shift submarine sustainment to WA. We have a perfectly working situation now. It will cost more than a billion dollars to shift it. It will result in a massive loss of corporate knowledge. It will result in a loss of submarine availability. There are arguments about wanting to have this capability next to where the submarines operate from. I get the reason why we have our intermediate-level dockings and our mid-cycle dockings done there, but for a 24-month docking we take a submarine across to Adelaide. The crew then posts to another submarine and, in the end, we have submarines on both the west coast and the east coast, in Perth and probably in Sydney or perhaps somewhere near Jervis Bay or Newcastle or Wollongong. That's on record in an FOI that I've received. It makes no sense. If you're going to spend a billion dollars of hard earned taxpayers' dollars, spend it on growing something or building something new, not shifting something because it's a convenient idea in the minds of some senior Defence officials. It's a silly idea to shift full-cycle dockings to WA and it must not go ahead. It does not make sense. It's not in the national interest.