David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens support each of these amendments, largely for the reasons articulated by Senator Fawcett. If you just wanted a very short summary about why it is essential that, if not this bill, some other statutory mechanism to deal with defence procurement is urgently passed by the parliament and implemented by the government, you could just repeat the words 'Hunter class frigates' and the disaster that is the Hunter class frigates procurement. You could look at the sorry history with the Seasprites, as Senator Fawcett pointed out. There was extraordinary waste and delay in that procurement process by Australia. It was eventually cancelled because apparently they don't work. Meanwhile, New Zealand picks them up, and they've been working just fine at a fraction of the cost that Australia was going to procure and maintain them for.

If you wanted to finish it off with two further current procurement disasters, we could look at a government that has spent a billion dollars or more buying Taipan helicopters. There was institutional resistance within Army aviation to that for the last 20 years. There were internal fights and pushbacks. A range of highly controversial modifications were put on them. Now we're going through a very opaque process, for reasons that haven't been articulated by the government, of stripping them down, cutting them up into small pieces and burying them in the outback somewhere. From one view, that's the Greens defence policy: we take a whole lot of weapons of war, we cut them up into pieces and we bury them in the ground! That the Greens defence policy: we take armaments out of the world, and we disarm the world. But the process, the rationale, the decisions and the incredible waste that we've seen from government in that process—do the government say that's good? Do the government say it's all fine? Do the government say their internal controls are actually working?

If you wanted the last bit of icing on the cake: something as simple as an offshore patrol vessel, a grand patrol boat. Procure an offshore patrol vessel, don't put any weapons on it and then tack on some kind of second-hand gun—because you've gotta have a gun. Nobody thinks it's going to work. I was just checking: the first OPV, the SA Arafura, was launched—it's not a big boat—in December 2021. Do you know when Defence think they may have it in commission? Did I mention that it just has one second-hand gun on it? They think that sometime this year they might get the first patrol boat into commission. A patrol boat! An offshore patrol vessel! It was launched at the end of 2021, and they might get the first of them into commission by the end of this year. Nobody quite knows what they're for, anyhow. Nobody can quite work out what they're for. They don't have an identifiable purpose. Maybe they can chase fisherfolk in the north. Heaven knows how much we've spent on that.

If not this bill, then what? For the government to come and say they've got internal reviews, they've got this internal process and the people that have created the problem—Secretary Moriarty has got this in hand? Sorry, Secretary Moriarty OBA, SEQ, SPT—I can't remember how many honorifics he's got now through that self-perpetuating honours cycle that the defence department and the services put themselves through. Secretary Moriarty has got this in hand, has he? Yeah, sure.