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

'Not a single submarine seaworthy'. That was the news broken by Cameron Stewart of the Australian on 10 June 2011. He wrote: 'For the first time in a generation, Australia does not have a single submarine available to defend the nation'. Defence at the time denied it; the minister at the time denied it. But, subsequently, Cameron Stewart was proved right. It was the low point of our submarine force, and it was the low point of ASC in Adelaide. However, a lot has happened since then. We've had the extensive Coles review, commissioned by former Minister for Defence Smith and continued on by Minister for Defence Johnson in the Abbott government. That caused major changes across the submarine enterprise. We've had our full-cycle dockings of our submarines—and, just so everyone understands, that is not an oil change; that is basically a pulling apart of the submarine and putting it back together, brand spanking new. It used to take well in excess of three years. Now, we've got that down to two years. We've had HMAS Farncomb conduct a two-year full-cycle docking. We've had HMAS Collins conduct a two-year full-cycle docking, and now we have HMAS Waller down in Adelaide having its full-cycle docking. They're halfway through and expect, as I understand, that it will be delivered back to the Royal Australian Navy on time.

The Royal Australian Navy has never enjoyed the consistent submarine availability at any time in the Collins era as it does now.

In South Australia, ASC have a fantastic workforce of about 900 people keeping one of our key strategic assets at sea available for the Navy. They are operating at or above international benchmarks. So what is the Department of Defence going to do? They're going to disturb that. They have tasked ASC with developing options to send full-cycle docking work to the west in either 2022, 2024 or 2026, and I refer to testimony given to the FPA committee just recently. They want to pick up the function and send it from Adelaide to Perth. Well, to the government: there are 900 people that simply will not move. It's the APVMA scenario all over again. We will lose that experience and that corporate knowledge. It will also cost a significant amount of money, probably in the order of billions. And, indeed, it will harm submarine availability.

Why are they doing this? Because they want to build the Future Submarines shipyard in and around Adelaide, and for some reason Defence think they can't do that without disturbing the site where the full-cycle dockings take place. ANI, Australian Navel Infrastructure, has testified that there is room down in Adelaide, and the Chief of Navy, at estimates, has testified that there is no naval operational requirement for the shift. Indeed, our Future Submarines, and indeed some of our Collins class submarines, will be based in both Perth and in Sydney with Adelaide in the centre.

Minister Reynolds: don't fix what is not broken; don't jeopardise our submarine capability. Minister Reynolds, and indeed Minister Cormann as the shareholder minister: the workforce down in Adelaide know what's happening in the background. They've watched what's happened at estimates and they know there are conversations taking place at the moment, and it's demoralising. It's demoralising, and we are losing valuable artificers and valuable engineers with decades of experience. The government must abandon this crazy plan and announce that it is abandoning this crazy plan.