Time to torpedo delusional submarine contract with French
Engaging the French to build our submarines may provide South Australia with jobs, but the price of those jobs is too high both in terms of national security and cold cash, writes Piers Akerman.
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Economies globally have taken a big hit from the coronavirus but we’re in better shape than most because Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was trying to return the budget to surplus.
How do we recover? Here’s a quick solution that is a win-win-win.
Torpedo the delusional submarine contract with the French immediately.
If it costs us the billion dollars estimated in the short term it would be money well spent and recoverable long-term. The deal was a lose-lose (except for the French) from the outset and here’s how we got into it.
We bought the same fantasy that seduced the now governor of Western Australia, Kim Beazley, when he was former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke’s defence minister.
He must have been hallucinating when he swallowed the public service line that Australia could become a world-beating submarine building go-to nation if we developed (in concert with the Swedish outfit Kockums) a stand-alone, one-off reliant on a rapidly-disappearing diesel propulsion technology.
You know the rest of the story.
The heavily-unionised government-owned Australian Submarine Corporation was 18 months behind delivering the first of the Collins fleet and subsequent subs were delivered between 21 and 41 months behind schedule.
A report into the hopeless effort in 1999 concluded that “the Collins class was incapable of performing at the required level for military operations”.
Only after a $1 billion “fast track” or “get well” program was instituted did the submarines begin performing well in their role as stealthy patrol vessels.
Otherwise the exercise delivered a submarine in an incomplete form behind schedule over-budget and outdated before its launch.
As former prime minister Tony Abbott said in a 2017 address, the vessels couldn’t even shadow a Russian naval task force when it appeared to our north at the time of the Brisbane G20 meeting because they simply couldn’t get there in time.
Now, thanks to former Coalition prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his hopeless defence minister Marise Payne, and the South Australian-based wheeler-dealer minister for innovation and industry, Christopher Pyne, we are watching a slow-motion re-run of the same underwater horror movie.
We have engaged with the French Naval Group (formerly DCNS which was associated with corruption allegations in numerous client nations) to build up to a dozen diesel-powered submarines.
They are to be fitted with weapons systems provided by the US group Lockheed-Martin — which poses yet another problem as the Americans will not let the French anywhere near any of their top-secret hi-tech systems because of well-founded concerns about the security of the Europeans.
Essentially, the deal provides South Australia with jobs (as did the Beazley farce) but the price of those jobs is just too high both in terms of national security and cold cash.
The negotiation was carried out with no fallback option, no Option B, as Ron Finlay of the Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board told Senate Estimates we were “captured in a negotiation”.
Current Defence Minister Linda Reynolds says her French counterpart Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly, a former member of the Socialist Party, told her at least 60 per cent of the submarine build will take place in Australia but that’s nowhere to be found in any document. The lesson is clear, the navy shouldn’t be allowed near any contracts.
We’re paying a huge price for horrendous policy. Though the public service insists that we’re still on track to pay just $50 billion in 2017 dollars the value of those dollars is rapidly going through the $80 billion barrier and the delivery time is at best extremely fluid.
Now is the time to ask the Americans to step in — and all indications are they are open to the idea.
Buying or leasing proven US Virginia-class submarines would come at a fixed price, way cheaper than what we’ve currently agreed to pay and Virginia are the US navy’s most-advanced boat, there is no risk and upgrades are continuing at this moment.
It isn’t true that we’d need a full nuclear industry as the reactors aren’t replaced and we and the Americans would greatly benefit from a long-term base here. Greater integration with the US makes sense for Western Pacific security with China’s growing presence.
Repair the budget and enhance our national security.
It’s not too late to dump the Frogs and get things back on track.