Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

We do go back and forth. We are supposed to go back and forth. We will do that then. In the employment one we did that, so we will stick to that.

It cannot be easy—and I do not envy the member for Corio—having to come in here and pretend that defence industry is not one of the most sparkling aspects of the government's policies. Of course, he did preside, in the government that he was a member of, over the lowest ever spending on defence in Australia's peacetime history since 1938. They managed to get spending on defence down to 1.56 per cent of GDP—the lowest level since 1938, the last year of appeasement. By contrast, the government will hit two per cent, two years early, in 2020. It is a story of investing in capability as our No. 1 priority and investing in Australian native, sovereign, defence industry capability as our second priority. I admire the member for Corio's attempt to try and paint it as a shambles, but he knows as well as I do that if you speak to anybody in the defence industry they will tell you that they have never had a more exciting period of support for defence industry in living memory. Not only did we get the foundations right; we are now getting the implementation right.

The member for Corio asked me specifically: do I expect that the schedule—the very ambitious schedule, I might say—that we have set for ourselves for cutting steel on the offshore patrol vessels, the future frigates and, of course, the Pacific patrol vessels will be met? As he knows, I cut steel on the Pacific patrol vessels in Henderson about a month or two ago. We are very confident that the end-of-2018 deadline for cutting steel on the offshore patrol vessels will be met. The schedule for the release of the request for tender was met. The tenders are being assessed by the Department of Defence. We will make a decision in the third quarter of this year about the offshore patrol vessels in order to allow the time necessary to be able to bring that cutting-steel time line about. On the future frigates, the time that we want to cut steel is 2020. We believe—in fact, I am certain—that we will cut steel in 2020. On the future frigates, the request for tender has been released to the bidders. They are working on their bids. We should be able to make a decision on that on schedule in the early part of next year, as we had intended.

All of these particular projects work together in concert. Of course, the worst thing that could happen is for the Labor Party to win an election and completely undo what is a very complicated jigsaw puzzle that all works together. We all know that Labor left us with the valley of death at the Osborne shipyards and submarine yards by not making decisions over six years. So I am absolutely confident that, with a combination of the naval shipbuilding college, the retraining of workers, the construction that will begin at Osborne in July this year—I will turn a sod in July this year at Osborne, which will get the infrastructure underway at Osborne South for the shipyard—and the decisions around the offshore patrol vessels starting in Adelaide and then moving to Henderson, what we have done will mean that the workforce will be as intact as possible at Osborne South. The offshore patrol vessels will then come online, employing hundreds of people. The future frigates will begin in 2020, employing 2,200 people, and the submarine project, which is the piece de resistance, if you like, of the shipbuilding program, will begin in the early 2020s—in 2022 or 2023. It will be a $50 billion program of 12 submarines, employing 2,800 Australians. So by the mid-2020s we will have about 5,000 Australians in South Australia living in Adelaide and working at Osborne on a continuous naval shipbuilding program. It will be the first such program in our nation's history, and it will have been delivered by this government.

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