Trusting our shipbuilders is the first step to ensure sovereign defence capability

The Federal Minister for Defence Richard Marles will reveal the biggest decision of his tenure so far in March: how to fill the looming defence capability gap left by Scott Morrison’s bizarre and costly decision to pull out of the $90bn submarine deal with France.

Under the AUKUS pact signed in 2021, the United States and the United Kingdom will help Australia build a fleet of nuclearpowered subs domestically – a process that will take decades. The US and the UK took 36 and 30 years, respectively, to transition from conventional to nuclear submarine fleets.

With our current fleet of conventional Collinsclass submarines due to be completely retired by 2038, the Navy is faced with the very real prospect of having no deploymentready submarines at all, perhaps for years.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has suggested Australia could plug this capability gap by buying two Virginia-class nuclear subs from the General Dynamics shipyard in Connecticut. This is an impossibility – something everyone besides Dutton has already figured out. Senior members of Congress and the US defence establishment have repeatedly said that America’s shipyards simply don’t have the industrial capacity to meet their own needs, let alone Australia’s.

In July, the Australian Shipbuilding Federation of Unions – made up of the AMWU, the ETU, the AWU, the CEPU and Professionals Australia – recommended that the new Albanese Government commission up to six domestically-built conventional submarines.

Not only would this fill the gap between the retirement of the Collins class and the eventual arrival of the next-gen nuclear subs – it would revitalise the domestic shipbuilding industry, create thousands of jobs, and form the defence manufacturing base of skills, training, and knowledge Australia will need in the future.

For too long, governments have treated defence manufacturing – and domestic manufacturing more broadly – as an expense to be trimmed rather than an investment that brings in returns, monetary and otherwise. Instead of putting in the work and building up local industry over generations, governments have bought defence builds off-the-shelf and allowed local jobs and knowhow to wither.

This has led us, in large part, to our current predicament. We are increasingly reliant on other governments and foreign suppliers for our defence needs – including repairs and maintenance of our ships and submarines. The pandemic showed how quickly global supply chains can snap, leaving those dependent on them at the mercy of forces beyond their control. As the geopolitical climate grows increasingly volatile, there is a profound need for Australia to maintain and grow our sovereign capability for defence manufacturing, production and maintenance.

There is also the security aspect to consider. Defence builds that are designed, built and maintained domestically would be much less vulnerable to the leaks that have jeopardised major defence builds overseas. As malicious cyber-attacks get more sophisticated and ambitious, keeping sensitive institutional knowledge as closely guarded as possible makes sense.

Despite decades of neglect, Australian shipbuilding still employs more than 30,000 workers across the country. Our great historic shipbuilding centres like Osborne and Henderson are still home to thousands of workers who know what Australian ships and submarines need. These workers are experienced, knowledgeable, and eager to help build the next generation of Australian defence materiel.

Nuclear subs don’t maintain themselves. They will need a highly skilled domestic workforce. You can’t buy that experience and knowledge off the shelf – you need to grow it, invest in it, and nurture it over many years. Building and maintaining a new generation of conventional submarines would be the perfect way to grow that workforce, laying the foundation it will need to build and maintain the ones that come after. amwu.org.au

That will require significant investment – not just in committing to domestic builds, but in skills development and maintenance, workforce retention, establishing and improving career paths, better using workers’ competence, and rates of pay. Any investment in building workers’ skills and capacities will not only deliver a superior product – it will have flow-on effects for our sovereign defence capability and the wider manufacturing sector.

All of this is possible if we have the vision and will to make it happen. When it comes to shipbuilding, we need governments to think in decades, not in three-year election cycles. We can’t maintain our sovereign defence capability if we allow our industrial base to fall into the “valley of death” every ten years and have to start from scratch every time a generation of ships or subs ages out.

If the government puts its trust in shipbuilding workers, they will repay that faith tenfold. A new generation of conventional subs will put Australia back on the path to sovereign capability, and ensure local defence manufacturing has a bright future.