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

How is it that, whether it's Labor or the coalition, there is never enough money for schools, hospitals or housing, but they always seem to find the money for the tanks, the bombs and the nuclear submarines? Whenever Defence put their hand out, billions and billions of dollars just wash in. And what do they do with it? Too often they squander it and waste it. If you want to see the key example, it's the Hunter frigates procurement. We have just got the report from Defence itself on the procurement for the $45 billion Hunter frigate proposal. Forty-five billion dollars is the single biggest Commonwealth procurement anywhere at all—an extraordinary amount of money.

What does Defence's own assessment show? This is after the Audit Office panned them and after I referred them off to NACC. What does Defence's assessment show? Their own review, their sanitised version of the review, says that they failed to adequately do the short-listing—stuffed that up—failed to assess the risk and failed to assess value for money, didn't even keep the records. And then they come with this bizarre conclusion drafted by Secretary Moriarty:

The process was appropriately planned and conducted but for completing a comparative evaluation and ranking of the tenderers in a manner consistent with Defence procurement policy.

They did everything right except assess the actual procurement! You couldn't make this stuff up. But, worse still, this bloke who stuffed it up is still the secretary and was given a five-year extension from Labor. And the person responsible for the first half of the stuff-up, former secretary Richardson, is now in charge of the Defence Strategic Review oversight. In Defence, you get $1 billion, you set fire to it, and you get promoted, whether it's Labor or the coalition. Why is nobody looking?