James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As has been indicated by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the coalition is supporting the Jobs and Skills Australia Amendment Bill 2023. We welcome jobs and skills as an area of focus because we do hold serious concerns about the forward profile of what our workforce demands are in this country and what the supply side of that is going to be. It would be remiss of me not to use as a focus not only the defence industry and the excellent opportunities that the AUKUS announcement provide but also, equally, the risk that if we don't get the workforce needs right then an enormous amount of opportunity might not be fully realised, particularly for my home state of South Australia.

Obviously, shipbuilding has been a significant feature of the South Australian economy for a very long time. That goes back to the Playford era, with the shipyards at Whyalla, and, of course, the Collins class submarine decision that saw the submarine yards developed through the eighties and nineties to build the six Collins submarines. We built the air warfare destroyers for the Royal Australian Navy in Adelaide. We are now cutting steel and completing prototyping of the Hunter class type 26 BAE frigates, the antisubmarine warfare frigates, in Port Adelaide. Most exciting is the opportunity to construct nuclear submarines, nuclear-propelled conventionally armed submarines, for the future requirements of the Royal Australian Navy through the AUKUS partnership.

The skills requirements around that are obviously some of the most complex that we've ever faced in the history of our nation, because building a nuclear submarine is going to be the most complicated engineering feat that we've ever undertaken. Just building conventional submarines is extremely complicated. I remember that in briefings on the Attack class submarine program, a gentleman who had worked for Airbus, putting together the A380s, said that there are about 125,000 parts in an Airbus A380 and that there were going to be more than a million in the conventional submarines that we were going to acquire before the AUKUS opportunity presented itself. So this is a spectacular opportunity, but one that is at risk if we don't get the workforce and training right.

Of course, what we know about the AUKUS deal is that we'll be building a submarine which is also going to be built by the Brits in Barrow-in-Furness, north of Liverpool, where they already build the Astute class submarine at the BAE shipyard there. They will be building the AUKUS submarine. They'll start that before we do here in Australia—specifically, out of the Osborne shipyard in my home city of Adelaide. They're talking about building theirs by 2037. On the government's announced time line, ours will be in 2042. So they'll have a five-year head start in the UK to build a submarine that will be identical to the one that we'll then build in Osborne.

The reason I dwell on that is that I foresee some serious risks, if we're not careful and don't maximise the jobs and the economic and the industrial outcomes in Australia. If the UK are doing what we'll be doing five years early then there's a significant risk, particularly through the supply chain. I don't think there's any likelihood that we won't assemble submarines at Osborne, and that's not an insignificant number of jobs. But the lion's share of the jobs are with all the companies that will supply that program. The companies supplying the UK program will be very hungry to supply the Australian program as well, and they'll have a five-year head start. That's something which is very significant, and a very significant risk—particularly given what has been confirmed to me and other members of parliament: there's no Australian industry content requirement in the AUKUS submarine program. Nothing in the agreements made so far requires a minimum amount of industry content or a minimum amount of spend in Australia.

When we were in government and undertaking significant decisions around shipbuilding, the then opposition, the Labor Party, had Australian industry content as an article of faith—as the most significant relevant factor in major shipbuilding decisions. To be fair, we, as a government, also made those industry commitments. We always said, 'Yes, this is the minimum amount of Australian industry content we're going to have in these major shipbuilding programs.' That's completely missing from the AUKUS agreement. So I'm watching this very, very closely and carefully because in obtaining this excellent capability for the Royal Australian Navy it's vitally important that we also make sure we secure the economic outcome. In turn, that provides the sovereignty we must have as a nation. We have to build these submarines and we have to have the lion's share of the supply chain coming from our own country. Sovereignty only comes around things like a shipbuilding program if we have the capability in our nation to sustain and maintain that capability.

In the case of the AUKUS submarines we know, obviously, that the nuclear propulsion system will be coming from our offshore partners. Obviously, that's something which has bipartisan support. We know that this technology is very significant, in the sense that, like many other countries which have nuclear propulsion, we don't have to refuel the reactor. My understanding, for example, of how the French operate their Barracuda and Scorpene nuclear submarines, is that they have to refuel the reactors every 10 years or so. We won't have to do that with this US technology, which the UK has also had access to for some time. This means, hopefully, that the reactor doesn't have to be touched for a good three decades, which is the whole life of the submarines. But we need to be able to manufacture and sustain the rest of the submarine here. That's so we have sovereignty and aren't relying on someone else if there's an issue with a particular component of the submarine.

That's very relevant to this bill on jobs and skills—if we don't get the skills and training right. I'm guessing—assuming—that this agency which is being created will play an enormous role in identifying the necessary workforce and ensuring that it's trained to maximise Australian industry participation in the AUKUS submarine program. I hope that's the case, and that the government is looking very seriously at this to make sure there's no excuse to start giving contracts to UK and US firms at the expense of Australian firms. That's because the UK gets a five-year head start on this program and they'll have business saying: 'We're already producing that particular component for the UK AUKUS submarines and it's the same submarine. It's much safer to choose this UK business over an Australian business.' If, equally, Australian businesses are not being provided with the opportunities to supply into the UK program—and we're not insisting on that. We're putting billions of dollars into the shipyards in the UK and US through this deal. That's fine, but there better be an economic dividend for Australian businesses and Australian industry capability out of this.

What has not been envisaged or suggested is that we're ultimately going to spend a lot of money on an excellent capability for our Navy, which we all support, but the vast majority of the investment should bring with it a great dividend of economic and industrial activity in this country. We need this agency—which we're debating now—to be on top of this, and we need the government to have a broad agenda to make sure that the extreme majority of what could be more than $300 billion worth of Australian taxpayer expenditure will be spent in the Australian economy. Then we get an outcome for the Royal Australian Navy, from a capability point of view, but we also get an enormous economic outcome for this country.

I mentioned in an earlier debate some of the developing workforce challenges in our economy. Particularly in the care sector, we know that this is becoming more and more significant. I am anticipating and hoping that this agency, Jobs and Skills Australia, is also going to be looking very closely at that category. I said in that debate, and I reconfirm again now, in no way when we talk about the care sector do we suggest that the workforce is homogenous and they should be treated exactly the same way, whether they're in the aged-care workforce, healthcare workforce, disability care workforce or childcare workforce. There are very specific skill sets and very high-quality people that work in all those sectors. They are trained specifically for those roles they hold.

But the thing those various areas have in common is that they've all got the same very significant projected workforce shortages into the future. We've had debates in this place about child care and disability care and the NDIS. The health system, of course, more broadly has enormous workforce challenges. They all have a widening gap between the future demand for employees in those sectors and the projected future workforce. Those forward projections are getting quite frightening, and we need to urgently take very significant and comprehensive action to come up with a multifaceted solution to that growing challenge.

I'm sure all members hear this from these types of service providers and businesses in their electorates, all the time. I certainly do. It doesn't matter if it's aged care, if it's local health service providers, child-care providers, disability services providers—whatever it might be, they are struggling desperately with workforce, and that's right now. These are in areas where the projected demand is growing dramatically into the future, and no-one is arguing with or disputing that. We know we're going to need an ever-increasing and larger workforce in all those various care services areas. If we've got shortages now, where are we going to be in five or 10 years time? It's a very concerning outlook.

I hope, as the coalition supports this bill, that we're going to see a very serious body of work. I'm sure this agency, Jobs and Skills Australia, will have a big role to play. You'd hope so, given the outline of what the agency is meant to be doing into the future. But we need to see from the government, through agencies like this and more generally—and hopefully something specific in the budget—a really significant investment in the training and the skills for these massive workforce shortages that we can see coming down the tunnel towards us.

I've touched on a few areas of the economy where this is the case, but it's obviously much broader than that. We know that in many agricultural industries there are shortages in place as well. We in the coalition support the bill.

We do have amendments that the member for Farrer outlined, which obviously I strongly support. I hope that those amendments will be successful on this bill because they are important from a governance point of view and the way in which this ministerial advisory body is going to be established and appointed, who it is going to represent and what experience and expertise are going to be in place there. We very much commend those amendments to the chamber and hope that the government sees the value in them, because they will dramatically improve this bill as it stands.

More broadly, in summing up, I do call again on the government using Jobs and Skills Australia and any other capacity before them to bring forward a very comprehensive and thorough workforce training strategy for our economy, because we desperately need it. With that, I commend the amendments to the House.

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