The government’s decision to award the construction contract for the next generation of the Royal Australian Navy’s submarine fleet to France, with the boats to be mostly constructed in Adelaide, is probably the least worst decision we could expect from a desperate government trying to shore up its electoral position in South Australia.
The Prime Minister today announced that the DCNS Group’s normally nuclear-powered Barracuda design would be adapted as a diesel-powered boat. The total cost of building 12 submarines over next quarter century is currently estimated to be around $50 billion, which in defence procurement terms means the final cost may well be closer to $100 billion.
The decision marks a repudiation of Tony Abbott’s “captain’s pick” decision to award the submarine contract to Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, despite the lack of Japanese experience with building boats for export. Abbott had opted for the Japanese bid due to his close relationship with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his desire for a closer strategic relationship with Japan against China.
However, that would have meant an outright breach of the government’s election commitment to build all of the boats in South Australia — an electorally toxic outcome that would have redoubled the impact of the government’s decision to chase General Motors and Ford out of Australia early in its term. With talk of seats like Boothby and Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt being written off, Abbott invented a new “competitive evaluation process” for the submarine tender involving German, French and Japanese bids, with a heavy emphasis on local construction. Nick Xenophon’s establishment of a political party to run both in the Senate and the House of Representatives — and his strong polling — further focused Coalition minds on neutralising the loss of manufacturing jobs.
According to Turnbull, the “bulk of the work” on the subs will occur in Adelaide, with additional work done elsewhere in Australia and the United States. The government has recently moved to establish a long list of naval shipbuilding projects in South Australia, and the submarine program — the first boat should be put to sea in the early 2030s — is the finishing touch to a procurement list drawn up exclusively with political considerations in mind.
Even advocates of local build accept that there is an immense local cost premium to building naval vessels here — based on previous builds like the Air Warfare Destroyer, the premium is around 30-40%, while the economic benefits of local build are doubtful. The decision to opt for a local build will thus cost taxpayers perhaps an extra ten billion dollars in order to subsidise 2800 jobs, or around $4.7 million per worker across the life of the project, a rate of effective assistance that dwarfs by orders of magnitude the kind of subsidies the automotive industry was receiving.
However, DCNS is itself the result of protectionism — the company is majority-owned by the French government.
There’ll be much talk of the economic and strategic benefits of a local build, but no evidence will be forthcoming — as the Productivity Commission pointed out a couple of years ago, there is virtually no analysis ever done of the economic benefits of local procurement for defence hardware. The only truly objective measurement that applies to today’s announcement will be the Liberal vote in South Australia on July 2. No one is interested in any other metric.
Am I alone in believing future warfare will be about terrorism, computer hacking into essential services (electricity, sewage, traffic control, air/flight controllers, banks, communications, etc ) plus maybe things like poisoning water supply or food. These things skillfully planned and organised, could bring a country to its knees in short order. Could someone please explain how F35 bombers and $2 1/2 Billion subs are going to save us from these future attacks?
You’re far from alone, Chris Ennor, at least on THIS site in holding that belief; but I’d recommend you seek information in more reputable sources where fortunately the Crikey Censorship system doesn’t control what subscribers are permitted to see.
I hope you’re not kept waiting too long before the Crikey Commissariat deigns to allow this Post through.
I remembered reading somewhere that some countries are looking into fully automated drone submarines.
If they’re like the Greens / Union / Labor Troika has been, Raaraa, neither of us can be sure of living long enough to see it.
That is correct, with on American arrested in the last couple of days for possible sharing of drone design/secrets to China. Underwater drones are stealthier and could be here sooner than you think. Traditional subs are vessels from a bygone era. F35s are stupid. Electrical components are cooled by jet fuel and are a current production fault. In Tindal who wants fuel cooling electrical components. This design flaw is subject to catastrophic failure.
The only thing I’m pleased about is that the Japanese aren’t building them (I’ve personally boycotted Japanese products for years because of their so-called lethal whale research).
If we’re going to have new submarines, then I think that they should have been nuclear powered.
Nuclear power is a real strategic weakness – with much of the maintenance needing to be done in Hawaii, the nearest naval nuclear facility.
Agree with another commenter that automated drone submarines are worth pursuing. $50B could buy an awful lot of unmanned mini-submarines, each of them able to carry a small number of torpedoes or missiles. With our own satellite in region secure communications to such subs should not be out of the question. Such a development and building programme could put Australia at the forefront of new technology rather than at the receiving end of others’ technological prowess.
US drones seem to cause an awful lot of collateral damage and perhaps breed a new generation of anti-US sentiment.
Living in Adelaide, it seems that the only angle coming out of the media here, is whether or not the Feds will ‘keep their word’ about building the subs in SA.
Doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that Labor might well win the forthcoming election, and they have been saying for the past three years that, if elected, they would do precisely that…build the subs here.
Its all wall-to-wall Xenophon, but what good will he be if the LNP decides to break this promise? They certainly have form in this regard. Only a Labor government federally will guarantee the subs will be built in Adelaide.
Wake up folks!!
Or, 12 becomes 10. Then becomes …….
On this particular design, media reports say that it’s a diesel electric design. Diesel electric boats have to stick a snorkel out of the water & run the diesel engine to recharge its batteries. That’s a relatively noisy thing to do and the snorkel makes both a radar target and wake generator. Those three things compromise the sub’s much hyped stealth, putting the boat & its crew at heightened risk.
Is Australia the only developed nation builds diesel electric subs in this age of air independent propulsion? If these sub’s are indeed air breathing diesel electric boats, I’ll be interested in the technical justifications for choosing that design.
The “technical justification” is that no country with nuclear subs is selling them to other countries.