Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move this motion regarding the future of the naval shipbuilding industry because it is an industry that is vital to our national defence capability. It is an industry that is essential for a maritime nation. It is also an industry that employs between 4,000 and 5,000 workers directly in regions such as the Hunter Valley, Melbourne, Adelaide, Western Australia and in Sydney. It is an industry that we must have in this country if we are to retain our national sovereignty. Four to five thousand workers are employed in this industry. There are many communities that depend on it, including in the Hunter Valley, where 900 workers at Forgacs have their direct future at stake in regard to the shipbuilding contract. If these contracts do not appear, the impact on local communities is going to be massive.

This industry is vital to our defence capability. Once it is lost it will be very hard to rebuild. A recent ANAO report into the air-warfare destroyer program commented that some of the challenges we are now facing in that program are a result of the shipbuilding industry being driven down after the completion of the Anzac frigate program in the early years of the last decade. This is an opportunity to learn from these lessons—to get it right and really put the industry on a sustainable basis. We need to be careful of unfair international comparisons on this industry. Some people will be tempted to look at how overseas industries perform and talk about effective rates of assistance. What is never mentioned in this context is that the shipbuilding companies they are compared to overseas are usually government owned and massively subsidised and often benefit from very long production runs that we do not have the benefit of in this country. We have a need to build 40 major naval vessels in the next 20 years, and I would submit that it is much better to have a smoother production cycle where the industry can plan and can build and maintain its workforce so that it has a sustainable future rather than a stop-start process, where at the moment 4,000 families are under threat.

Labor took a solution to the last election, which was to bring forward two supply ships and guarantee a certain amount of work to be done in Australia. We also talked about possibly looking at the patrol boat replacement. There are other options, including building a fourth air-warfare destroyer or in fact bringing forward the new frigate replacement and building that on the AWD hull, with simplified systems. I was pleased to note the positive comments made two weeks ago by the Minister for Defence. This should be a bipartisan solution. I am hopeful that those noises turn into concrete action, because we need to work together. Too many manufacturing jobs have been lost in this country recently, especially in the last three months. We have a proud shipbuilding legacy in this country. The Anzac class frigates were built on time and on budget. The minehunters built by Thales, up in Newcastle, performed very well. Also, despite some early teething problems, even the Collins class submarines present the best diesel capabilities in the world and have an excellent performance record. For example, in the US they scrapped the first example built of a new class of submarine, because of welding problems. By comparison, the Collins class is performing very well.

We need concrete action. I am very pleased that we have three speakers from the other side speaking on this motion. Hopefully they will come to this issue with a constructive approach. I pay tribute to the vigorous campaigning being done by local Labor MPs, including the members for Gellibrand, Newcastle and Port Adelaide, all of whom have shipyards in their electorate and are campaigning for local jobs.

This is a vital industry—900 families in the Hunter Valley depend on it, as do four to five thousand families around the country. We need this defence capability. We are a maritime nation and we need to be able to build and maintain our great vessels here, otherwise our sovereignty will suffer. I look forward to the contributions from others in this debate. I assure everyone that if we do not get concrete action this campaign will get more and more fierce, because our national sovereignty depends on it.

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