Defence secretary Greg Moriarty admits Hunter design ‘not mature’

Defence secretary Greg Moriarty has admitted the troubled Hunter-class frigates were not a ‘mature design’ when his department recommended the vessels.

A rendering of a Hunter-class frigate. Picture: BAE Systems Australia

Defence secretary Greg Moriarty has admitted the nation’s troubled Hunter-class frigates were not a “mature design” when his ­department recommended the vessels, violating a key government requirement.

The concession to a parliamentary committee follows Mr Moriarty’s claim in April that the department “demonstrably considered value for money throughout the procurement”, which has since blown out to $46bn.

It comes as the government considers slashing the program from nine vessels to six, or potentially as few as three, and shipbuilder BAE Systems spruiks a more heavily armed version of the frigate to address concerns it will carry too few missiles.

Mr Moriarty told the Joint Public Accounts and Audit Committee on Monday that BAE’s Type-26 Frigate, on which the Hunter frigate was based, was supposed to have been an off-the-shelf design, but “the design was not complete”. Asked by Labor’s Julian Hill whether, in hindsight, the department should have classified the Hunter design as mature, the ­Defence secretary replied: “I would not have characterised it as a mature design.”

Auditor-General Grant Hehir, who exposed the flawed Hunter procurement process in a bombshell report in May, said Defence had a long history of such failures.

“There are a series of audits that we have done over a number of years where Defence has ­proposed to government where things were a mature design or military off-the-shelf, where they have ended up not being that way,” he told the committee.

The deputy secretary of Defence’s procurement arm, Rear Admiral Stephen Hughes, said the department had introduced a more focused approach to assessing design maturity as a result of the Hunter procurement failings.

“There is a much more rigorous lens we look through, both from a risk perspective but also engaging with industry around those capabilities and their ability to turn that into a realistic outcome,” he said.

Mr Hill, who chairs the committee, said the revelations showed the former Coalition government “jumped into bed with BAE Systems on a now $46bn procurement with no value for money assessment”. “Defence’s startling admissions expose how the former government broke commonwealth finance law and procurement rules to buy imaginary ships that didn’t exist while pretending it was a mature design,” he told The Australian.

Mr Moriarty earlier acknowledged in a written submission to the committee that the 2014-2018 Hunter-class procurement was “poorly executed”, with insufficient attention paid to program risks. He added that “successive government ministers were closely involved as the process ­developed, and iterative advice was provided to government”.

BAE won the contract in 2018 to build nine anti-submarine ­frigates in Adelaide to replace the Anzac-class frigate fleet, with the first vessel to enter service in the early 2030s. The Hunter-class program is now among Defence’s most troubled, amid an $11bn cost blowout, construction delays of at least 18 months, and concerns the vessels won’t carry enough missiles to make a difference in a high-end military conflict.

Strategic Analysis Australia director Michael Shoebridge said Mr Moriarty’s admission of Defence’s failings was “damning”, and those responsible should face serious consequences. “Defence has failed on a core function and it is a failure of leadership,” he said.