Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. The opposition's opposition to the National Reconstruction Fund makes completely plain that the coalition is opposed to Australian manufacturing and that they have an utter indifference to Australia being a country which makes things. But making things matters, particularly when it comes to national security.

The Albanese government is committed to Australia developing the capacity right here to build the next generation of nuclear powered submarines in Adelaide. But what that will require initially is, over the next five years, an additional 2,000 skilled workers being trained, and this is a massive challenge. But, once again, the country has been held back by the lost decade of those opposite.

When the coalition looked at this challenge, their response was to establish the Naval Shipbuilding College. This was an initiative which cost $114 million and it resulted in precisely 203 jobs being placed. There are lots of ways in which you can look at that number. That's more than half a million dollars per placement. Over a five-year period, that's about 40 jobs a year—or, looked at another way, given they had six or, really, seven different defence ministers, it's about 29 placements for each of them. Whichever way you look at it, it is woefully inadequate, because we need to train 2,000 workers over the next five years. Over the last five years, they trained just 200.

This is another example of the yawning gap between their announcement and their delivery—highly productive, when it came to fanfare; completely hopeless when it came to outcome. It's all about the half-time entertainment, never about the game. Everyone should be completely aware that the legacy of those opposite, when it comes to defence, is 28 different defence programs running a total of 97 years over time.

Coming out of the Jobs and Skills Summit last year, the Albanese government established a task force with the South Australian government so that we can have complete alignment, between both tiers of government, about the training investments required to generate the skilled workers that we will need for the future—because on this side of the House we understand one of the great things about manufacturing is the high-skilled, high-paid jobs that it generates and we also understand that the thousands of future naval shipbuilders will be, for this country, a great strategic national asset.

Honourable mem bers interjecting—

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