Where is the threat? At present the Department of Defence has several big procurements of quesitonable value in sight. It has got one fiasco in the making in hand. And it has several under its belt which can only be decribed as monumental wastes of money. Meanwhile, refugee boats arrive on our shore undetected.
The fiasco in the making is the six new Collins class submarines that will replace the Australian Navy’s long-serving Oberons. The Collins has major problems — an incomplete combat system and excessive noise. These will cost more than $1 billion to fix, perhaps as much at $2.5 billion. That would bring the total cost to $7.5 billion. For that we could have bought twice the number of the British Upholder-class submarines. The British submarines have the same theoretical capability as the Collins with none of the practical problems.
Some questions must be answered about the original order which was made in 1987, during the Hawke Government while the present Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, was Minister for Defence.
The first question is the appropriateness of having such a long-range submarine in the first place. Sure, the wall has crumbled since 1987, has changed defence perspectives somewhat, but there was plenty of time for a reassessment after 1989 before too much work had taken place. In any event, why should a country like Australia arm itself with six very long-range submarines? It seems we were determined to lock ourselves into forward defence and being an integral part of the US defence apparatus. But the real needs for Australia are much closer to home as the refugee boats testify. Even the turmoil in Indonesia does not pose a direct armed threat, but more a threat from a exodus of economic and religious refugees from Indonesia system to stopfor roughly the same price. Small smaller patrol boats would be more effective than long-range submarines.
Then there are two big questions about the selection of the builder and the place of building.
Why South Australia? Was it because that state needed an economic kickalong and was facing a state election at the time of the original order?
Why a Swedish consortium and why the change to the selection criteria that favoured the Swedish consortium just before the order was made? Was it because the Labor Government did not want to buy British/ Was it because the Swedish company better exemplified Labor’s industrial-relations view of the world with big unions and big corporations in co-operation (or cahoots)?
The Collins class submarines may be fixable, but it will be at a huge price. And a price so unnecessary. Australia could have still built a submarine in Australia. It could have built the upholder class submarine here, without all the costly experimentation that was entailed in the Collins bid.
The Collins fiasco joins the $1.1 billion Jindalee-over-the-horizon radar fiasco which was pasted by the Audit Office and the $100 million needed to fix ex-US Navy transport ships which were not even worth taking off the Amercians’ hands.
What of the future? Australian taxpayers can only look with trepidation as the Defence Department sabre rattlers lick their chops at the thought of buying yet more toys: $20 billion to buy replacements for the F-A/18 fighters for the Air Force and new destroyers to replace the HMAS Perth and Adelaide for the Navy.
Too often the Defence boffins enclose the Government decision-makers and the public in a box. They restrict the question to whether we buy a red plane or a blue plane or a red ship or a blue ship, leaving out the pertinent question of whether we want a plane or a ship at all.
The best we can say of this litany of poor defence procurements is that they were more cock-ups than conspiracies and that they were caused by folly and misguided ideology rather than corruption. But clean folly is not good enough. We must learn from the past and not repeat these blunders. We must open the process more and ask more questions publicly.