Via The Australian today:
Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Marcus Hellyer has called for the Audit Office to investigate the rollout of the $50 billion project and whether delays in crucial contract negotiations between Defence, French submarine manufacturer Naval Group and weapons system integrator Lockheed Martin will result in extended delays in delivering the boats.
His call comes amid mounting frustration within the Australian government at the state-owned Naval Group, the French company selected to build the new submarines, as a crucial document, the strategic partnering agreement, remains unsigned.
…Mr Hellyer said the plan to replace the six Collins subs with 12 new Shortfin Barracuda models now faced long delays, due largely to a lag in initiating the project…If delays worsen, Defence could be forced to extend the life of all six Collins subs, a move that could narrow Australia’s strategic edge against newer, faster boats emerging in the region.
Surely the article is missing the key point. The new subs were never about defense, they were about keeping Chris Pyne’s job. From defense expert Brian Toohey in 2016:
…The government’s refusal to go with an off-the-shelf design will cost more billions, because the first of new submarines won’t be operational until after 2030 and the last until almost 2060.
This means the decrepit Collins class submarines will have to be kept going for more than 20 years beyond their planned 2025 retirement date – necessitating new capital spending and very high maintenance and operating costs that will soon pass $1 billion a year.
…Where were Scott Morrison and Mathias Cormann when this decision was taken? The government’s estimates of the added costs of local construction shows it will take more than $20 billion more simply to try to win a couple of Coalition seats in Adelaide.
Even The Australian choked on the pork at the time:
The Liberals under Tony Abbott were alarmed they would lose three federal seats in South Australia: Hindmarsh (1.9 per cent), Boothby (7.1 per cent) and Sturt (10.1 per cent). Sturt is held by Industry Minister Christopher Pyne and fear it would fall to Labor was one of the catalysts for the dumping of Mr Abbott. Mr Pyne was prominent during the submarine announcement.
Mr Turnbull admitted there would be a “premium” to be paid for building a new fleet of submarines in Australia rather than overseas but declared the impact would be “extremely manageable” amid questions over the cost of the landmark decision.
DCNS said the cost “premium” of an all-Australian build would be much less than the 30 per cent some were predicting.
The decision to build all of the submarines in Adelaide will see hundreds of construction workers benefit as a new submarine facility is built at the ASC shipyard and then 2800 jobs created as construction work begins for the new fleet. It is expected that the first steel for the new submarines will be cut in the early 2020s but the first Shortfin Barracuda is not expected to be fully operational until the early 2030s.
It will of course be the reverse. These giant Bondi cigars will end up costing double but we’ll let that go. Even on the conservative $25bn extra we’re going to pay, we get 3000 jobs when the same Coalition Government was only forced into the decision as some offset to the 50k jobs in the car industry that it hosed into the sea by refusing to pay $500 million. Nor is the industry scalable like vehicle manufacturing, it won’t export a thing and much more of its componentry will be imported than was the case for cars given we don’t have the intellectual property.
In the meantime we will fall behind other Asian nations which are engaged in a subs arms race when we could have had new and better subs at half the price while embedding a democratic alliance with Japan.
Go Straya.
