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

I too rise to make a contribution in this debate on an order for the production of documents in relation to shipbuilding. The first thing I want to say, as the chair of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, is that we get notified every year, every estimates, of the projects of concern. It's intriguing to note that all the projects of concern currently listed by the department are a result of limited tender. If you look at the projects of concern, they are all limited tender projects. So what we're asking for here is more clarity, more transparency, more openness, about the expenditure of billions of dollars worth of taxpayers' money, because we do not want to end up with another project of concern. I will give one example of a project of concern: the OneSKY project, which Defence is a huge partner in. It ended up with one preferred tenderer, at a cost deemed not to be value for money for the Commonwealth. That was the outcome of $400 million-plus of Defence's expenditure.