Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the answer from Senator Abetz to Senator Conroy. I got a bit of a chill out of the last two contributions from the other side. I mean, you are in government, and you are promising to deliver, but you are breaking those promises and regurgitating five years of history about what some other government is alleged to have done. It is not all that comforting to the hundreds and thousands of working men and women in South Australia who simply want to contribute to the best of their skill and ability, nor to the small businesses surrounding those manufacturing jobs who want to participate in the economy to the best of their ability, the small to medium enterprises and the large businesses that this huge expenditure hangs off. What they got from the other side in contributions from Senator McKenzie and Senator Reynolds was absolute rubbish.

I want to put this on the record: MPs who conscientiously listen to their electorates—who think about policy—are assets, not inconveniences. They are worth a lot more than those who toady up to the media with the latest line approved by their leadership and reflect back what they think it wants to hear. That comes from an article not from Labor but from the Hon. Peter Costello. It was free advice to the Abbott government. The 'woodchucks' that he refers to in that article—I did not know what a woodchuck is; I had to Google it; it is a sort of a rodent, also known as a whistlepig—are eager for promotion and will say and do anything the leadership wants. That is where we are today. Someone on the other side had a little bit of intestinal fortitude and tried to stand up for his electorate because they are invading his space. He said: 'What are you doing about securing our small businesses, our small to medium enterprises, our big businesses and our jobs?' He stood up and tried to get a commitment.

Australian companies can tender for the biggest procurement decision in Australian defence history, and a government owned asset can tender for the biggest procurement contract in Australia's defence history Heaven forbid! If you approached voters in the street and said 'Do you think it's appropriate that Australian businesses and Australian government enterprises tender for the biggest defence contract in Australia's history?' I am not sure you would find anyone who would say 'No, we shouldn't. We should restrict it to a select group of international partners who we think we have more confidence in'—none of which has actually built the submarine that we need or operated a submarine under the same conditions as ours. And there is an abundance of evidence coming into the Senate economics committee inquiry and this parliament from all sorts of people with an interest in this area. They are all saying, 'It's a pretty simple process. We should have a complete competitive tender, and the assets the government owns would be foremost in that tendering process.'

We know from the Collins class submarine and the Navantia design that there have been huge problems with submarine plans drawn up in other languages. We know this from our learnt and lived experience. We know from the Australian National Audit Office reports that there is an average of 2.75 revisions to every drawing that is put in front of a tradesman, and we know that they have had to rebuild the work. And we know through the Auditor-General's contribution to the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit that the productivity has been mainly about revision of drawings, a lack of clarity of drawings and doing the work twice.

I want to finish with this: we have many thousands of South Australian voters, many thousands of South Australian skilled workers—union members, and proudly so, some of whom were in this place yesterday—who simply want a fair go. And it really is beyond me that any government of any colour or any persuasion cannot see the clarity of letting people compete for the work and give a damn good result.

Question agreed to.