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Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has assured industry representatives and the public that the newly announced infrastructure investment isn’t a “competition between Western Australia and South Australia”.
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The Minister for Defence made the comments during a press conference at Henderson shipyard in Western Australia on 16 October.
The federal government has recently announced a consolidated Commonwealth-owned Defence precinct will be established in the state.
The Defence precinct will support the build of new landing craft for the Australian Army and new general purpose frigates for the Navy announced by the federal government, with requisite large vessel infrastructure to form part of the precinct.
The Defence precinct at Henderson will also be the home of depot-level maintenance and contingency docking for Australia’s future conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines.
“The truth of the matter here is it’s not a competition between WA and South Australia. In terms of what the nation needs, we actually need to be engaging the workforces of both states,” he said.
“Acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine capability, building our own submarines, aside from anything else, it’s the biggest industrial project in our nation’s history.
“It’s bigger than the Snowy Hydro. And so in order to achieve that, we simply have to be engaging our industrial base both in South Australia and in Western Australia and, in truth, across the nation.
“Because as we build submarines in South Australia, we will be drawing upon companies all across the country, including here in Perth, that will be contributing to that supply chain.
“We’re investing in South Australia is generational as well. In South Australia we will be building our future submarines. In South Australia we are building our future frigates. In South Australia we continue the maintenance of Collins Class submarines. The Osborne naval shipyard, in time, there will be in the order of 7,000 people working there in the construction of our future surface fleet and the construction of our future submarines and the maintenance of our existing submarines.”
The Deputy Prime Minister confirmed that $127 million has already been announced for the WA infrastructure upgrades.
“We announced the optimal pathway to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine capability in March of last year, we provisioned $9 billion across the forward estimates,” Minister Marles said.
“From where we stand today, there’s $63 billion provided for across the next decade for the delivery of AUKUS. That’s actually in the budget. And our expectation is that the cost of acquiring this capability will be about 0.15 per cent of GDP enduring. And the building of this infrastructure here will be within that.”
Speaking at the same press conference, WA minister for defence industry Paul Papalia forecast that the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian Defence Force would likely be a critical boost to recruitment.
“I can tell you, young people today, there’s a couple of subjects that really gets them engaged. One of them is space and the other is it’s a pretty cool thing, nuclear submarines," he said.
“If I were 40 years younger, I might even consider not being a diver and going into submarines since they have nuclear submarines.
“We’re going to have in a very short period of time, our own Virginia Class submarine, [that] is the apex predator of the ocean.
“If you’re even thinking about going in the military, you want to go in the best possible equipment that you’ve got. The best available, the most impactful, the one that generates or projects power on behalf of a nation in the most effective way. These things are going to draw people to them. And the same can be said of maintenance.
“So most of those jobs are Western Australians. There might be some people that we need in the initial stages who’ll have the specific nuclear capability and experience and knowledge. But it’s not large numbers. What you’re talking about, most of those thousands of jobs are going to be multigenerational Western Australian jobs right here.”
