MARK'S SPEECH IN THE HOUSE ON SHIPBUILDING IN THE PORT

Mark Butler MP.

Federal Member for Port Adelaide

Date:  17 March 2014

I thank the member for Charlton and the member for Gellibrand for bringing this important motion to the House. I also thank members on the other side—even though I might not agree with many of the comments from the member for Tangney—for joining in this very important debate.
As the member for Port Adelaide, the importance of retaining our shipbuilding industry is of particular significance to me and the constituents that I represent in this place. Port Adelaide has an incredibly proud history of shipbuilding, which dates back to the early 1800s, when HC Fletcher established his shipyard at Birkenhead, in the port. The port was one of South Australia's earliest settlements and continues to be the main service point for South Australian shipping. The schooner Jane Flaxman was launched at Port Adelaide in 1839, only three years after the settlement of South Australia. It is true that there have always been peaks and troughs in the demand for our shipbuilders in the more than 150 years that we have been building them in Port Adelaide, and this was particularly the case after the two world wars of the 20th century, when there was a shortage of ships in Australia due to wartime losses and to a downturn in shipbuilding.
Today, at Osborne, near Port Adelaide, there is the home of the Australian Submarine Corporation, or the ASC as it is now known, the main shipbuilder for the three Hobart class Aegis air warfare destroyers—the largest Defence project ever undertaken in Australia. More than 1,500 AWD workers are based in Adelaide and there are a number of other spin-offs as well. Just one example is Le Fevre High School, in the Port Adelaide electorate. Le Fevre high is developing itself as a maritime high school, utilising the new trades training centre that was built under the last Labor government. This means, for example, that students at Le Fevre high today can learn skills in shipbuilding or engineering and move straight from school into apprenticeships at ASC, providing them potentially with great jobs for their entire working lives until retirement, just on the basis of the submarine building and maintenance program that Labor committed to. Similar stories exist in other schools—in the western suburbs, the member for Hindmarsh's electorate, and in my electorate in the north-western suburbs and the northern suburbs.
South Australia and the Port Adelaide electorate in particular fared very well under the former federal and state Labor governments when it came to defence jobs. South Australia currently has 25 per cent of all of the nation's defence work, in a state that represents only seven to eight per cent of the population. These jobs would be sustained and many more would be created with the former federal Labor government's commitment to replace the Collins class and double our fleet with the Future Submarine project, a commitment to acquiring 12 future submarines and assembling them in Port Adelaide. As well, the former Rudd government committed to bringing forward tenders for the replacement of patrol boats and two supply ships, HMAS Sirius and HMAS Success, to address the so-called valley of death—the period between work finishing on the AWDs and beginning on the future submarines. This commitment is vital for shipbuilding in the Port Adelaide electorate, vital for protecting the jobs of thousands of workers and retaining shipbuilding skills in our state and vital for Williamstown, the Hunter and elsewhere.
Six months after the election, though, we have had no such commitment from the new government, a deafening silence that is causing very deep unease in South Australia. My colleagues the members for Charlton and Gellibrand, who raised this motion, share my concerns. In Newcastle, Forgacs will have to lay off 900 staff by the end of this year if the government do not announce new shipbuilding projects, and more than 1,000 jobs are at risk at BAE Systems at Williamstown in Melbourne. This is not just a question of jobs, as important obviously as they are to those families and to those communities; it is critical for our long-term national security that these vital naval shipbuilding skills be retained and nurtured.


The last member to speak in this debate, the member for Tangney, compared this to the closure of the Whyalla shipyards, the shipyards that build commercial ships. Frankly, that misunderstands the strategic importance of having naval shipbuilding skills in an island nation like Australia. Port Adelaide's rich history as one of the nation's earliest shipbuilding sites must not be let down by this government. Our shipbuilding industry is far too important. Our national security as an island nation is far too important, and it is beyond time that this government acted.