It might be designed and sold by the government and the press gallery as an exciting new era of nuclear-powered submarines and a new Anglophone agreement to confront China, but today’s submarine announcement is cover for the most staggering piece of project mismanagement in Australian history, and in our most important portfolio.
The government’s contract with France’s Naval Group for a new generation of submarines has been torn up. Presumably Scott Morrison delivered this news personally to Emmanuel Macron during his lightning visit to the Elysee in June, or he should be prepared for some ferocious blowback from the French.
We’ve already handed $2 billion, plus change (plus ça change, more accurately), to Naval Group for the design phase of the new subs. That’s gone down the drain. It was a tiny down payment on the $90 billion-odd it was going to cost to build the things at Australia’s low-efficiency, small-scale shipyards but it’s not a trifling amount.
Why has the contract failed? Because building a generation of submarines to a highly modified design in Australia was always going to be profoundly difficult, and because the French were naturally eager to build as much of them as possible in France — not just for French jobs, but because they could deliver them more cheaply there.
In the five years since the government announced the contract, that tension has never been resolved.
The whole debacle had its genesis in Liberal leadership tensions: Tony Abbott had the correct idea to purchase the vessels off-the-shelf from overseas — probably Japan — at a considerably lower cost. But his persistently bad polling, especially in South Australia, and the need to shore up the support of South Australian MPs in a coming leadership battle with Malcolm Turnbull, saw him change his mind and plump for building them locally — despite knowing that would add 30-40% to the price.
So, yes, we’ve already wasted billions and will waste many more, all because of an unsuccessful effort by Tony Abbott to save his leadership. Of such things is history made.
There’ll also be a break fee, of course, for tearing up the contract. A figure being touted is $400 million. If Naval Group is happy with such a small sum, that will be very surprising indeed — especially if Morrison blindsided the French, who now join the Japanese in having been dudded by Australia’s village idiot-level defence industry policy.
But even though we’re back to square one five years later, we’re stuck with the problem of politics: Morrison insists what is now being examined is that the new nuclear-powered American submarines will be built locally, meaning exactly the same problems as with Naval Group have just been kicked down the road.
Congressional representatives and senators for Connecticut and Virginia, where the Virginia class boats are currently built, are probably already thinking about making sure as much of Australia’s subs as possible are built there.
And if the cost of the local build under Naval Group was huge, just wait. In 2018 ASPI’s Marcus Hellyer estimated that buying the Virginia class boats off-the-shelf from the US would cost about the same as the Naval Group build — although it would depend to a degree on the Australia-US dollar rate. The Americans could build the boats faster and cheaper, but the subs are much bigger than the ones we were getting from Naval Group (and need much bigger crews, which will be a problem down the track).
But if we’re building them locally, it means, give or take, a 30-40% premium on the off-the-shelf price — meaning we could be looking at a substantial price rise above the $90 billion we were already looking at.
Maybe the Americans will give us mates’ rates. After all, the US boats will help us more effectively play deputy sheriff against China in the Indo-Pacific — except for all the places across the Pacific that nuclear vessels can’t dock. Like New Zealand. Or Hobart.
And this is all before you get to the problem of how the entire concept of whether you can have nuclear-powered submarines without a domestic nuclear power industry has never been tested. Or perhaps, as some pro-nuclear defence analysts have argued, having some nuclear-powered subs is a good backdoor way of introducing a domestic nuclear power industry in Australia.
Morrison insists the subs decision is unrelated to a domestic nuclear power industry. With a backbench clamouring for nuclear power, is he any more believable than normal on this?
A domestic nuclear power industry, as Crikey has reported for so many years, would be inordinately expensive and require massive government funding. But if we’re already spending $120 billion on nuclear subs, why not spend a few tens of billions more? It’s only taxpayer money, which the Coalition appears to regard as a mere plaything.
This is a very expensive way to get Christian Porter off the front page.
I had the same thought, lucky old Porter, just shows how far Morrison will go for his mates. Again. But it’s only tax-payers’ money, and the bills don’t arrive for years, so no worries.
More likely a way to resolve the current sub contract with France while simultaneously kissing Uncle Sam’s @rse, getting Christian Porter off the front page (again) and being able to blame China (thereby even further ingratiating ourselves with the Septics). What is B$2 between friends?
Too true!
More likely this was planned, so that’s why Porter updated his disclosure when he did.
The Sub deal ranks right up there with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – reports suggest it’s a very definate Lemon !
Defence purchases have been citrus all round for years now. They need a purge.
The old plan was to build a conventionally powered version of a nuclear-powered French submarine. It was crazy. The new plan – to buy a nuclear-powered submarine instead – is worse. It will make the replacement of the Royal Australian Navy’s fleet of Collins-class boats riskier, costlier and slower. It means an even bigger slump in our submarine capability over the next few dangerous decades. And it deepens our commitment to the United States’ military confrontation of China, which has little chance of success and carries terrifying risks.
There is a reason why only six countries, all of them nuclear-armed, operate nuclear-powered subs.
For everyone else their advantages, especially higher range and speed, do not outweigh their much greater costs. Nuclear propulsion makes perfect sense for nuclear-armed ballistic missile subs, and for the “hunter–killer” subs that are designed to track and destroy them. But for other tasks, especially for operating against enemy shipping, conventionally powered diesel–electric subs are more cost-effective…..Hugh White
Hugh White is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. He is a former deputy-secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote Australia’s Defence White Paper 2000.
The whole article can be read here:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2021/09/18/the-submarine-the-ridiculous/163188720012499
The old plan was to build a conventionally powered version of a nuclear-powered French submarine. It was crazy.
The new plan – to buy a nuclear-powered submarine instead – is worse. It will make the replacement of the Royal Australian Navy’s fleet of Collins-class boats riskier, costlier and slower.
It means an even bigger slump in our submarine capability over the next few dangerous decades. And it deepens our commitment to the United States’ military confrontation of China, which has little chance of success and carries terrifying risks.
There is a reason why only six countries, all of them nuclear-armed, operate nuclear-powered subs.
For everyone else their advantages, especially higher range and speed, do not outweigh their much greater costs.
Nuclear propulsion makes perfect sense for nuclear-armed ballistic missile subs, and for the “hunter–killer” subs that are designed to track and destroy them. But for other tasks, especially for operating against enemy shipping, conventionally powered diesel–electric subs are more cost-effective…..Hugh White
Hugh White is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University. He is a former deputy-secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote Australia’s Defence White Paper 2000.
The whole article can be read here:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2021/09/18/the-submarine-the-ridiculous/163188720012499
What about the NBN?
Yes but at least this time we are not spending the money to keep Christopher Pyne. Buying a new set of submarines every election now seems to be part of the LNP game plan.
It has become a Coalition fetish and I don’t think the voter actually gives a toss about which sub is suboptimal. But the America war machine certainly does.
Then there is the challenge of operating and maintaining nuclear-powered submarines safely. This is an immensely complex and demanding responsibility, and would impose huge responsibilities on the navy, which has struggled in recent years to operate much simpler systems. No doubt the government and the navy intend to rely heavily on Britain and the US to help, but therein lies a problem. Apart from cost and delay, opting for nuclear subs deepens our dependence on the US and Britain, and that carries real strategic risks in the tense and fast-changing power politics of our region. So much for the government’s much-touted sovereign submarine capability.
Never mind, all aboard the Coalition Morrisin Australian version of the Kursk disaster.
“Morrison insists what is now being examined is that the new nuclear-powered American submarines will be built locally, meaning exactly the same problems…”
It’s not exactly the same, it’s worse. It’s the same problem raised to a different league because this time it includes nuclear technology where Australia has precisely zero experience to draw on. Morrison has aborted a disastrously misconceived defence project (well done) and immediately replaced with a defence project that includes all the same misconceptions, with brass knobs on. Genius!
(Is it tautology to call an Australian defence project ‘disastrously misconceived’? I fear it is. The $5.6 billion Boxer armoured vehicle fleet delays over multiple technical issues with no obvious resolution. The giant high-tech too-expensive-to-fail, too-fragile-to-fly turkey known as the F35 aircraft. And so on. At the end of 2019 the Auditor General reported the cost of 26 defence projects had blown out by $24bn over what was originally announced and slippage of the forecast date delivery dates had increased to a cumulative nine years in the previous financial year. The opposition (AKA Rex Patrick, forget Labor) said back then “Billions upon billions of dollars are being wasted as defence takes on unnecessarily risky acquisitions.” But now that Dutton is in charge of Defence what’s there to worry about?)
(AKA Rex Patrick, forget Labor).
How possible is it to forget Labor? How possible is it to forget calamity after calamity since Abbot, Turnbull and now ‘master class’ Morrison government(s) have each led us further and further into mire? Labor . . . is the last remaining option open to electorate. What policy, political decisions they now take, determines national capability into extra-ordinary future decades loaded with challenges and threats?
Or arses are on fire. And none know where hoses are? Lord knows what Indonesia and all of South East Asia now thinking?This current Prime Minister has brought Nation to our knees. Why? Because he has only one vision. To remain in power! It is beyond his capacity to visualize national priorities much less a global precipice. What is emerging is a national emergency?
You are, I concede, near enough right that Labor is ‘the last remaining option open to electorate’. My point is that Rex Patrick is the nearest this country has to a real functional parliamentary opposition, though of course one politician alone will never form a government. Labor is a distinction without a difference from the Coalition on most important issues. When there is even a hint of national security being invoked it automatically moves in lock step with the Coalition. With the current Labor strategy of being a small target even the few worthwhile distinct policies Labor had have been ditched. And for reasons of space I’ll not run through the catalogue of shame that is Labor’s record in office, such as its leading role in devising offshore concentration camps for indefinite detention of refugees. So Labor might be called an option, whatever that means, but let’s not mistake it for an opposition. It is merely a party passing the time and hoping it some day gets a chance to govern.
SSR and Graybul, we are all on the same team. But have you forgotten an outfit called The Greens? They have a few more MPs than the excellent Rex Patrick, and have spent all day highlighting the same issues as outlined by BK, GR and others.
Barnino . . . No hav’nt forgot Greens. They at least acknowledge threats, but same obstructions exist.
SSR . . . Essentially lock-step. Even if exceeding painful to admit. Parliament houses our democracy built by the people for the people. But at present, that has all but become meaningless. I would rather see Labor go down fighting, than retain, warm, seats. Both Govt and Opposition appear unable to grasp speed and threat as our world changes or, one or both no longer care? All power to Rex’s arm, but most he can do is catch eye of electorate, and hope. We are moving into decades of doo doo, and in my view neither Party up to the challenge? Where in hell does that leave us?
All correct, the faith the tossers have in independents and minor parties leading us to the holy land is no different from the faith clothing the maniac Morrison. A brief perusal of legislation passed by these tiny vote catching narcissist and outliers should set them straight, but no, it’s all hail the independents and the minor parties who receive maybe 77 votes or less and who then control the nation, a concept so antithetical to democracy you’d think they’d have caught on by now.
Not to mention the fact that staring them right in the face is the National Party who are in power and who control the Liberals, who are another minor party, the Nationals though being the previous home of the 22 expelled WWII saluting crackpots. The Nationals get half the vote of the Greens and yet there they are, dictating to their bride the Liberals how they want it done in the bedroom of cash and control.
I think the 30-40% price premium for local manufacture is optimistic. At least the French engineering drawings would have been in metric units, and the design and documentation done to European ISO requirements
These USA boats will be designed in feet’n Inches, and to USA standards which no one knows/uses here. None of the materials will be available locally – everything will have to be imported.
And forget about them coming with any form of warranty if we build them here. If they don’t work it’ll be our problem
No maate, our problem is what Morrisin has signed us up to in his Trump-like unhinged vision of gaining power at any expense, that fake medal pinned to his chest by the insane Trump has infected his whole being.
[Morrison] has tied Australia to a deal that undermines our sovereign capabilities, overspends on hardware we can barely be confident of operating, and drags us closer to the front line of a war we may have no interest in fighting.
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2021/09/18/the-submarine-the-ridiculous/163188720012499
Wasn’t the sight of Angus Campbell in uniform acting a prop sickening?
It’s far worse than Morrisin again handing out our money to maates for favours, it’s a national emergency in fact and Morrisin needs to be removed ASAP before he does anymore Trump like damage to this nation and its future
Hugh White is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.
He is a former deputy-secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote Australia’s Defence White Paper 2000.
He has a terrifying article in The Saturday Paper today about what this actually means for Australia other than the unhinged handing over of money to the America war industry.
And if the US, by miscalculation, does find itself at war with China, we absolutely cannot assume that it would win. That must, surely, enter our calculations about whether we commit ourselves to fighting alongside America. And yet that is what we are increasingly doing.
What should we do instead? First, we should recognise, as our neighbours in South-East Asia do, that confronting and containing China won’t work. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to live with China’s power and growing influence. That doesn’t mean doing whatever China says, but it does mean stepping back from Washington’s policy of trying to push back China by threatening war.
Second, we should be building forces to defend ourselves without relying on the US, rather than deepening our dependency in an ally that, for all its tough talk, is becoming less and less credible. That means buying submarines and other systems that work cost-effectively to defend ourselves, not serve our allies – which means buying conventional rather than nuclear submarines.
And third, we should step back and think about our long-term future as a country. Thirty years ago Bob Hawke and Paul Keating said Australia had no choice but to stop looking for our security from Asia and start looking for it in Asia. That remains true, and it is the very opposite of turning back the clock to the days of Robert Menzies and his two Anglo-Saxon “great and powerful friends”.
But that is exactly what Morrison has done this week. He has tied Australia to a deal that undermines our sovereign capabilities, overspends on hardware we can barely be confident of operating, and drags us closer to the front line of a war we may have no interest in fighting.
Subs won’t come into service till 2038. By then they will be obsolete as they nearly are now.Undersea drone sub technology is already advancing. This could be Australia’s biggest ever white elephant military purchase and keep us tied by the apron strings permanently to the US and a never ending cash cow for their MIC to exploit. War against climate change can take a back seat.
Agree. The nuclear propulsion is a non-issue when compared with the issue of hy we need them at all. “Boys’ Toys” to massage the macho LNP psyche – and, of course to keep wear threats alive, as they always favour the LNP politically……
Hardly are the bodies buried of our Afghani interpreters and supporters, who are still being tortured to death. Now we see Morrison and Boris Johnson are desperados, tying themselves to US foreign policy which has rarely improved above the level of MAGA. The Eurocentrism smells, the wars purely for electoral gain have always been a great evil. Climate disasters will hit the world first; the sabre rattling is for the petty school bullies. But these are over our dead bodies, particularly our children and the natural world.
Yes sadly there is always money for war and none for the environment and social good… I hate these politicians with such a passion for failing us all
This is looking a lot like what happened with the nuclear power station that was being built at Jervis Bay back in the early 1960’s….a the time the PM and all his merry cabinet men categorically denied that it was a back-door route to nuclear weapons They assured all and sundry that it would give us cheap unlimited electricity, and would also have the “advantage” of increasing the temperature of the notoriously cold water on the south coast by a degree or two for all those Canberrans who like to holiday down there. The cabinet papers released some years later showed that the most important aspect of building the nuclear power station, as discussed in cabinet meetings, was how good it would be when Australia had nuclear weapons….. LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE….!