House debates
Monday, 20 March 2023
Adjournment
Defence Procurement: Submarines
7:45 pm
Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Last week the Prime Minister announced the key features of our future submarine program under the AUKUS arrangement. It's another example of the Albanese Labor government acting decisively to resolve and clean up matters that have been left in a mess by the former coalition government. I have concerns about some aspects of the arrangement, but it has to be acknowledged that the work done in a short time to address this core piece of defence procurement and capability has occurred alongside a remarkable surge in both the quality and volume of our diplomatic engagement, and a significant increase of development assistance to the Pacific.
There are some features of the AUKUS announcement that are characteristic of the Labor approach. It's notable that, in making the announcement, the Prime Minister emphasised our commitment to the cause of peace. It's notable that both the Minister for Defence and the Minister for Skills and Training have each emphasised the contribution that well-managed defence procurement can make to innovation, skills and industrial capacity. But it should be a statement of the obvious to say that with an undertaking of this scale, complexity, cost and duration there remain considerable risks and uncertainty—that is the plain, hard reality—and if we're not able to have a mature and sensible conversation about those risks there is very little chance we will manage them effectively.
The key feature of the arrangement involves the purchase of US Virginia class submarines at a time when their own production schedule has been under pressure. The design and construction in Australia of the new proposed SSN ORCA submarine will require an unprecedented level of sophisticated manufacturing capability. As the representative of one of the two principal defence shipbuilding precincts in Australia, I back our capability. But we know from both the Collins and the French submarine projects that building submarines inevitably takes longer and costs more than you anticipate.
While I support the work of the government, I'm not completely convinced that nuclear propelled submarines are the only or best answer to our strategic needs. I'm not privy to the details of the strategic review, but I find the questions posed by people like Peter Varghese and Allan Gyngell on this topic relevant and substantial. I am concerned about the question of nuclear waste. We haven't yet managed a storage solution for low-level waste after 40 years and more than $50 million. We haven't yet commenced a proper process for the storage of intermediate-level waste. Now we are taking on the challenge of safely disposing of high-level waste—a problem no country has solved.
It's worth noting the UK has 13 out-of-service nuclear submarines that, for decades, have awaited defueling and decommissioning. None have yet been decommissioned. Nuclear waste from US submarines is also currently held in temporary storage, after 30 years and $7 billion, without arriving at a permanent storage solution. And I'm not yet convinced that we can adequately deal with the non-proliferation risks involved in what is a novel arrangement by which a non-nuclear weapons state under the NPT comes to acquire weapons-grade material.
The IAEA safeguard arrangements will be spelt out in due course, but there will be some notification on inspection challenges inherent in the nature of submarines that move around considerably and, as you'd expect, secretly. There is no particular reason to expect the AUKUS arrangement will be the only one of its kind.
At the end of 2021, I canvassed some of these concerns in the course of the treaties committee in consideration of the high-level ENNPIA agreement that led to the arrangement that has just been announced. For having the temerity to ask legitimate questions about those non-proliferation issues the now opposition leader referred to me in this place as 'Comrade Wilson'. It's an irony that the opposition leader, for all his self-styled tough guy patriotism, appears to not the understand the fundamental difference between a liberal democracy and other systems in which asking perfectly reasonable questions is not only forbidden, but has dire consequences.
The quality assurance mechanism in our system of governance and decision-making is contestability. We must always be able to have a rigorous and challenging conversation about defence and security matters. The AUKUS agreement, arrived at with some characteristically questionable secrecy by the former government, and some strange ministerial arrangements, is not a sports team of which we have all suddenly become life members. It is a significant partnership with two of our most important and closest allies, but it will only be effective if we do our job as parliamentarians, which is to look closely and ask questions in order to guard against risk.
I could be proved wrong about some of my concerns. Perhaps they're ill-founded in a way that I don't perceive, and I can live with that, but I would be wrong already if I wasn't prepared to identify and voice those concerns which are based on work I've done consistently since I was first elected to this place on some of these issues.
7:50 pm
James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Serendipitously, I would like to follow on from the previous speaker's comments to discuss the AUKUS announcement from a different point of view, particularly as a South Australian and particularly because I am very supportive of the opportunity that AUKUS provides. It is an exciting capability for the Royal Australian Navy and that, in and of itself, is something to celebrate. But now my fear and focus, particularly as a South Australian, is to ensure that the economic and industrial outcome matches the hype of the announcement last week. I do have very significant and grave concerns about the deal as it has been outlined and the lack of confirmation and certainty of the industrial outcome here in our country.
Other shipbuilding acquisition debates that we've had over the last decade or so have always centred around Australian industry content, and the relevance of that is always to ensure that, when we're talking about sovereign capability, we know that what we're constructing and producing is going to happen, in a substantial sense, within our nation, so that we have that sovereignty. I think the framework of AUKUS was exceptional. The Labor Party have now done the detailed work and come back with a deal. I hope I am wrong in having serious concerns as to whether or not they have the capacity and capability to ensure that the outcome for Australian industry and the Australian economy is what it needs to be.
Two things frighten me. The first is that we are talking about acquiring between three and five submarines from the United States, and I very much hope that it only needs to be three. I very much support acquiring three because it is completely not possible for us to manufacture in this country submarines on a time frame that give us the capability outcome. I will be very happy to see three Virginia class submarines acquired for the Royal Australian Navy on the timeline that is outlined. If it ends up being four or five, that, unequivocally, will be at the expense of the promised economic and industrial outcome to our nation. If we're buying five submarines for a Navy that is aspiring to have eight, then that is absolutely not going to meet the economic and industrial expectations that I have, particularly as someone who represents the people of Adelaide in this chamber.
The other thing that frightens me greatly is that, on the timings that were released as part of the announcement, the AUKUS submarine will first be produced in the United Kingdom a full five years before we finish the construction of our first AUKUS submarine here in Australia. What that means to me is that there is an enormous risk that the vast majority of the economic value of submarine construction, which is through the supply chain, will see an enormous advantage going to firms in the United Kingdom by virtue of the simple fact that they will have already been supplying five years earlier into the supply chain for the UK AUKUS program. If we're not dramatically involved in the supply chain for, potentially, three submarines, that is not the outcome that is being championed, particularly in my home state of South Australia.
I'm not suggesting that that is necessarily going to occur. I am very concerned that there is a significant risk that it will occur, and it's incumbent upon me and everyone else to watch this very, very closely as the years unfold. Frankly, either scenario is still in the hands of future decision-making and what our government in this country does to make sure we secure the economic outcome. We have to make sure that Australian industry content is a part of all of these discussions and negotiations. We are paying, purportedly, billions of dollars to shipyards not in this country, and we're purchasing three to five submarines not built by Australians. What I am intent on doing as the member for Sturt is ensuring that the economic and industrial value of this matches the great outcome for the Royal Australian Navy.