David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, on behalf of the Greens, I referred to the National Anti-Corruption Commission the $45 billion procurement of Hunter class frigates from the United Kingdom arms dealer BAE Systems. Let me tell you why.

When Defence in 2016 decided it needed new frigates it made a new short list. Despite there being better options and despite them being extremely risky, BAE somehow made that shortlist. Do you want to know why? So do we. Unfortunately, then defence secretary Richardson and the legion of minute-takers at Defence forgot to jot down the reasons. You may want to know why, despite there being much better options, BAE was later picked up as the preferred tenderer after having sneaked onto the shortlist in the first place. The new defence secretary, Mr Moriarty, also forgot to take notes on the decisions. These defence secretaries are very, very forgetful. So forgetful are they that Defence also missed including any value-for-money assessment, the core requirement in the Commonwealth procurement laws.

Luckily though, the whole process was overseen by an expert advisory panel, and with half of the people on the panel having previously worked for BAE, you can bet they were experts. If that's concerning you too, don't worry, because there was an independent review panel of this process, 50 per cent of which was former BAE staff. We could have saved a lot of money because it was predetermined who was going to get the contract. It was always going to be BAE. I don't know what to call this other than corruption—not individual corruption, not suitcases of money. No, it is something much more insidious—a corrupted system.