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

The Australian submarine enterprise is approaching a significant decision milestone: where will the full-cycle dockings for the Collins class submarines be done in the future? Will it be in Adelaide, where it is currently done, or in Perth? The submarine enterprise is, according to its stakeholders, delivering and meeting their expectations. It has gone from what was probably best described as a collection of disparate entities working to their own interests to what is referred to as an effective enterprise working together towards common goals, achieving world's best practice and very high submarine availability. This is fantastic. It proves that Australia is capable of taking on the challenge of being a parent navy for a submarine class—something we know takes commitment, planning and leadership.

So it should come as no surprise that I am blown away when I see people framing up an argument to deconstruct a system that's working just to transfer it to another location for shallow reasons, at huge cost to the taxpayer and at great risk to submarine availability. I refer the chamber to a recent opinion piece on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's blog, The Strategist, by retired rear admiral Rowan Moffitt. After a long period of silence, he has popped his head up and weighed into a political debate. I don't understand why. He makes a very limited number of valid points. For example, in relation to transitioning ASC from a construction yard which built the Collins class submarines to a maintenance provider, he states, 'It took over a decade and the Coles review before an acceptable outcome was reliably achieved.'

Around about the turn of this decade, we had shocking submarine availability. At one stage, Cameron Stewart reported in The Australian that none of our six submarines could go to sea—not one! Not a single submarine could go to sea. The article reads:

The Australian understands the entire fleet of six Collins-class submarines cannot be put to sea despite the navy's claim that two of them remain officially "operational".

The situation is so dire the navy is believed to have deferred major scheduled maintenance work on its most seaworthy submarine, HMAS Waller, in the hope that at least one submarine will be available in the coming weeks.

That was where we were at in 2011. Bad press and pressure on the submarine by then shadow defence minister Johnston gave rise to a significant review of the state of our submarine force. This was conducted by John Coles over a couple of years. The Coles review, which became the basis for fixing our submarine enterprise, found that there were five root causes: unclear requirements, lack of performance based ethos, unclear lines of responsibility, poor planning and lack of a single set of accurate information to inform decision-making. The report was handed down in November 2012 and Navy and industry, including ASC, have done a great job in fixing the problem. As stated earlier, we now have a world-class submarine enterprise giving us unprecedented submarine availability. Australia and the Navy now have a sustainment model where the submarines undergo self-maintenance periods, with intermediate- and mid-cycle dockings in Western Australia and full-cycle dockings—the most complex deeper maintenance activities, which take 24 months—in Adelaide, where the deeper knowledge base is. And it works. We've spent hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars getting things to the point where they are now. We now have retired people like Mr Moffitt suggesting we pick up full-cycle docking work that is being carried out in Adelaide, spend more than a billion dollars to carry it across the Nullarbor knowing full well that a significant—

Stirling Griff (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Patrick, your time has expired.

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

I had 10 minutes for my adjournment speech.

Stirling Griff (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Okay. You have another five minutes.

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