Piers Akerman: PM Malcolm Turnbull’s submarine deal will cheese us all off

PM Malcolm Turnbull had a cheesy grin on his face when he visited the French city of Cherbourg to talk up his government’s submarine deal last weekend, Piers Akerman writes.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: AAP Image/Dan Peled

PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull had a cheesy grin on his face when he visited the French city of Cherbourg to talk up his government’s submarine deal last weekend.

But, like many French cheeses that airlines will not allow in their cabins, it reeked.

Turnbull made the preposterous claim that the deal his government struck last year with the French company DCNS, now Naval Group France, would “deliver an Australian fleet of 12 regionally ­superior submarines”.

This is nonsense as the submarines have yet to be ­designed. Further, Turnbull said: “France is the perfect partner for this great project.”

Huh? The French company has an inglorious history of ­alleged bribery with investigations currently running in both Brazil and Malaysia.

Last year, The Australian newspaper revealed DCNS had a massive leak of secret data on the six Scorpene-class submarines it was designing for the Indian navy. The leak of 22,400 pages detailed the entire secret combat capability of the submarines.

About the only accurate sentence in Turnbull’s gushing address was his statement “it is the largest and most ambitious defence acquisition program Australia has undertaken”.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: AAP Image/Dan Peled

At $50 billion for nothing but a blank drawing board “ambitious” says it all.

The submarine deal was all about pumping money into the mendicant socialist state of South Australia in the hope some jobs would be created.

At the time the contract was let, former local chief executive Sean Costello claimed that 90 per cent of the work would be done in the powerless state and at other sites around Australia.

Last month, DCNS’s new Australian interim chief Brent Clark wouldn’t commit to the 90 per cent target. Asked whether the figure was correct, he said: “I don’t want to give this committee a figure.”

He said while he did not want to specify a figure he would have an “aim point of greater than 60 per cent”.

He also confirmed to the committee that DCNS had no formal agreement with the Australian Submarine Corporation about the future submarines and said: “Quite simply, from our perspective ASC will be consumed by DCNS.”

Senator Nick Xenophon ­described the evidence as “a double whammy” and warned the submarine deal could turn into an “Ikea project where all we do is bolt together a bunch of components that have been shipped to Australia from overseas”.

“Sixty per cent falls well short of the 70 per cent achieved during the build of Collins and the 90 per cent promised by (Christopher) Pyne on Q&A last year and by DCNS before a parliamentary committee in March,” he said.

Defence Industry Minister Pyne defended the deal saying the new 12 submarines would be “built in Australia, by Australians, using Australian steel, creating 2800 jobs”.

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But welding is not an exceptionally skilled occupation, and an Ikea project is a good description for the submarine build. Defence is not so much about the platforms these days but about the packages the platforms contain and the systems which run them.

Our submarines will be using American technology for their weapons systems with Lockheed Martin Australia selected as the combat system integrator — even though the Americans will be reluctant to share their systems secrets with the French hull builders.

Which all makes former Prime Minister’s Tony Abbott’s recent remarks about the need to revisit the submarine project even more pressing and Defence Minister Marise Payne’s criticisms of his concerns even more profoundly stupid than usual.

Abbott merely asked that the nuclear option be examined. That would be eminently reasonable. Under the current plan Australia is essentially paying twice for submarines because on top of the $50 billion budgeted for the French, we will have to pay extra billions to keep the current Collins-class submarine fleet active until at least 2032-33. Then we will receive an obsolete diesel propelled submarine.

The signals coming loudly from the US are that it would be prepared to lease or sell off-the-shelf Virginia-class nuclear powered submarines to Australia and even base some of their Virginia-class fleet in Australia, which would assist us to provide the necessary back-up to any we acquire.  Senator Payne’s comment that: “We don’t have a civil ­nuclear industry, we don’t have the personnel or the ­experience or infrastructure, we don’t have the training ­facilities or regulatory systems that you would need to design to operate to construct a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines,” is humbug.

The Virginia-class subs don’t need refuelling. If the Americans based some of their subs here we would have all the ­infrastructure and training facilities we need.

As for the “regulatory systems”, can anyone imagine what Winston Churchill might have said if he had been told he couldn’t proceed with his revolutionary tank building project and change the face of mobile warfare because there was no “regulatory system” in place?

Senator Payne’s arguments are at least 20 years old and retrograde. She is a disgrace as Defence Minister.

If we proceed with the option the Turnbull government has decided on we will have an outmoded submarine, delivered late and way over budget.

Comparisons have been made with the shocking Collins-class project but an even better comparison is with the Wirraway, Australia’s fighter aircraft in World War II. They were sitting ducks for the Japanese. If we were serious, the Americans would give us the same deal it gave the British for its Astute-class submarines.

We would have submarines with greater range and capabilities and have them sooner and more cheaply, rather than an expensive make-work program for Adelaide.