Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, there are $20 billion worth of cuts. You can play smoke and mirrors, you can spin all you like, but $20 billion worth of cuts is $20 billion worth of cuts. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, and you should know that.

I would like to talk about the proactive nature of DSTO and the importance of that. We can remind ourselves of the experience with the Collins class submarines, which the minister has pointed out to this House, but can I also remind him of the fact that cutbacks to DSTO by the former Labor government actually impeded the due diligence on the science and technology on projects like JORN and the Collins class submarine. I say one thing to the minister: proactive due diligence in scientific and engineering assessment is a lot cheaper than rectification work. Rectification is very expensive. So I say to this minister: forget about the cutbacks. If you are talking about the opportunities for science and technology for Australia in defence then actually increase their budget, and the savings will come because there will not be the rectification costs. Because of the due diligence as we take first of line and develop new and emerging technologies, the costs will not be there in rectification.

So where do I see this playing out firsthand? One of the first operations of this government was through DSTO’s capability and technology demonstrator fund. One of the first painful cuts was taking their budget from around $26 million annually down to $13 million. This is a program that develops new technology and gets small-to-medium enterprises working hand in hand and reduces the risk profile for those small businesses. Some of the best military technologies in the world have been developed by small-to-medium enterprises—people with a vision, an idea and a dream looking for support to be able to implement that technology. A lot of that technology cannot be taken to the marketplace because it is defence-style work. You cannot just build it, put it on the shelf and hope somebody will come and buy it. If you are designing technology which is for defence, you need to work hand in hand with defence science and technology to make sure it fits their needs. Once that product or technology is developed there is a market for it, and the secrecy and the IP are protected because it has been developed in cooperation with government. The minister talks gloatingly about all the projects that have been developed and funded through this capability technology demonstrator fund. I say to him that the $13 million a year in cutbacks, halving the project, will see a massive reduction.

The minister has made a lot of statements in his speech about the Collins-class submarine and developing physical employment standards. In a previous life, he stood up for workers and, in particular, for occupational health and safety for workers. I remind him that cadmium has been found in the Collins-class submarine. It was identified 12 months ago, in August 2008, and it has taken till now to put safety warning signs on those submarines. I need to be clear on this. The issue is not the fact that cadmium is present on the submarines. Cadmium is required in the electrical equipment to reduce corrosion and make sure that the sustainability of the equipment continues. The issue here is one of occupational health and safety, where people are advised of the problem so they can wear personal protective equipment to protect themselves. This is the minister who made much, and rightly so, of Bernie Banton and the need for companies like James Hardie to implement occupational health and safety standards for the protection and welfare of their workers. This minister was previously the Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Procurement. This is an occupational health and safety issue which is of paramount importance to people who are submerged in a submarine for extended periods of time. They cannot leave the submarine. They have to breathe the air that is pumped around the submarine. They cannot walk away. They cannot go outside. They cannot go for a swim. They cannot go down the street. They do not have weekends off but are in there 24/7. And here is the man who took 12 months to put up a sign. I would hate to see what is going to happen if there is a large task that he has to undertake other than making sure that signs are put up to make people aware of the danger and threat of the cadmium in the equipment in these submarines.

Minister, you have now had a few days. I hope that you have actually put the call through to make sure that those signs are established on those submarines. It should not be too hard to get the signs on the submarines, because most of them are in port. They are in port because, in 22 months, you have not increased the manning levels to increase the capacity of our submarines to go to sea and you have not applied the funding to the engineering to make sure that our submarines can go to sea. The ANAO audit in 2008 showed a shortfall of 240 submariners to meet the current demand for a full complement of 667. The reality is that the ANAO audit showed that our submarines are operating at 43 per cent of capacity. So I say to you: your snail’s pace in delivering reform programs is not like the Greg Combet who was so vitriolic and vocal about workers and—

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