Tory Shepherd: Why Defence needs to back SA businesses to build the submarines
If SA tech and know-how to build parts for the new submarines isn’t up to scratch yet, that doesn’t really matter. It’s not how it’s meant to work, writes Tory Shepherd.
Opinion
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Submarines are the spaceships of the ocean, former independent Senator John Madigan once said.
Australians chuckled in glee at this whimsy, but he was making a very salient point.
Our Future Submarines – the Attack Class – have to keep humans alive in the depths of the ocean while spying on our enemies, talking to our friends, trying to be invisible, acting as a mothership to fleets of drones, and preparing to fire off or fend off deadly missiles.
So, yeah, there are small businesses in Adelaide’s outer suburbs that are not up to the task of working on these beasts.
Not yet, anyway.
The reason the Federal Government is chucking billions of dollars at designing and building our bespoke spaceships of the ocean is so we can have Aussie boats.
There will be a fair bit of them that’s French, and some serious stuff from the United States, but they’ll be Australian, and we’ll be able to sustain them.
In that big envelope of Defence cash, there should be enough money to make sure the small and medium businesses of Australia can get up to scratch. And in that long timeline of building the boats – with the first set to hit the water in the 2030s – there should also be enough time to get those companies up to scratch.
This is how it’s meant to work.
Say a submarine has about a million parts. Some of them will never be made here – that includes the major motor and the combat systems. So they’re off the list.
Then there are a bunch of things it won’t be worth us making here – it’ll be too expensive or time-consuming, so Naval Group will use their existing supply chain.
Let’s say that leaves us with 600,000 parts that maybe can be produced here.
Half of those are probably already being made here, and are just right.
And let’s say Jo Blow out in Salisbury makes a certain widget. It’s a good widget, a fine widget, but it’s not good enough for the Attack Class subs.
Ms Blow should then get the help she needs to improve the widget. She might need a new widget machine, or a second widget machine, or she may need to send her Chief Widget Designer off to a widget course to learn new techniques for making excellent widgets.
And then that widget should be used on the submarines, and her company should become part of the sustainment supply chain, and she should be able to export it for other people’s submarines, for decades to come, hiring new Australian widget makers as she goes.
We’re not good enough, yet. But we’re only just beginning. And as long as Naval Group has the will to use Australian businesses, and Defence and the Federal Government have the way, Ms Blow’s widgets have a long future as vital cogs in the spaceships of the ocean.