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

I thank the Senate for leave to take note of this report. It's important because Australia has a problem with our defence procurement. The problem is that too many decisions are being made around procurement and upgrades without key questions being answered. For the young men and women who operate equipment on our behalf, the questions are: will it achieve the mission, and will it be safe while I'm operating the equipment? For the government, the question is: will it give us military response options which come with an acceptable level of project risk and cost? For the taxpayer, the question is: is it a good use of money?

This doesn't apply to every procurement or upgrade. Many go well, but there are enough significant failures—and you can think back through history to things like the Seasprite debacle—where we see that it is not done well. This report highlights that the things that we saw 20 years ago, with Seasprite, have not been remediated in terms of defence's ability to consistently answer these questions. Now, more than ever, with the strategic circumstances we see, with the strategic update of 2020 and the Defence Strategic Review, where we have a requirement to buy a bigger scope and more complex equipment across cyber, land, space, air and sea domains, it's more important than ever that we can answer these questions as part of making these decisions.

Why is this the case? It comes down to the fact that we need people who have the right skills, the task-specific competence, to make those assessments. Task specific means that people are the right fit for the job. Say you had two surgeons, a neurosurgeon and an orthopaedic surgeon, and both were very competent. If you had a brain problem, the orthopaedic surgeon is not the person you would want to do the work. What we see in defence, and it came out clearly in this report, is that often that distinction is not made, and people without the requisite skills, qualifications or relevant experience are tasked to provide assessments which they are not qualified to do.

We see a lack of independence where people who are concerned about the cost or delays to a program schedule get to make decisions about how much risk assessment will be done and who will do it. Often that drives programs into a direction of failure, not being good value for money, not meeting the mission outcomes or, in some cases, not being safe.

We also see a failure in transparency. We don't see that, when information is provided to capability managers or to projects, that is consistently passed up the chain to senior decision-makers. And there is a lack of accountability for people in the system when they do not do the right thing and apply the voluminous defence policy that exists in this area. There are no consequences for people who don't apply that. In fact, there is so much policy because every time this has been highlighted—and the ANAO highlighted these problems back in 2002 and again in 2015, and this same committee in 2012 highlighted concerns—there has been a flurry of activity, but it's led to more process, as opposed to outcomes.

What we see, consistently, is that people who have the right qualifications, who are competent, with the task-specific competence, are either not tasked or not listened to. In some cases, we actually see capability managers on projects seeking to substitute the informed, objective advice of trained test organisations with the subjective opinion of operators or others, and the Defence system not recognising that those are two quite different sets of information and making decisions which are to the detriment of the young men and women who operate the equipment, to the government and to the taxpayer.

We look at civil industry and we see similar patterns in things like the Boeing MAX aircraft. We were all horrified at the decisions that were made there to prioritise market access and sales ahead of safety. Yet we see schedule and a mission focus—ahead of safety—often being the drivers of some of the groups within Defence.

What has the US done? They established, about 10 years ago, the department of operational test and evaluation, which actually provides that independence, the task-specific competence, the transparency and the accountability. And this bill, the Defence Capability Assurance and Oversight Bill 2023, to establish the Defence Capability Assurance Agency, seeks to provide those same things. It provides assurance to the mums and dads, the war-fighters, the government and the taxpayer that our defence decisions are based on accurate assessments of risk on a consistent basis. I recommend that the bill be passed.