The government’s decision to pursue multi-decade domestic ship and submarine building programs sits oddly with decades of economic reform. Successive governments have striven to maintain competition in the Australian economy, and for good reason. …
The US government’s largest contracted military shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), recently opened an office in Canberra. It seems unlikely that HII would’ve done that without encouragement from the US government, via the US Navy. …
The first batch of three River-class OPVs (HMS Tyne, Severn and Mersey) were ordered for the Royal Navy in April of 2001, built in Southampton, and commissioned in the second half of 2003. A fourth, …
In a joint statement on 4 August 2015, Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews (then respectively Prime Minister and Defence Minister) committed to a continuous build of warships in Australia, stating: ‘It’s the first time that …
SEA 1000 boils down to a straight-forward project for those who know how to deliver submarines in the export market to an overseas techno-culture, and a very difficult project for those who don’t. The project …
Our modern navy needs to be increasingly a national enterprise, bringing together the private and public sectors of the economy to deliver a fundamental national objective—security above, on and under the sea. That means Navy …
The Government has a clear strategy for achieving a productive, cost-competitive and sustainable naval shipbuilding industry. We also know that Australia cannot afford a naval shipbuilding industry at any price. A reshaping and reform of …
The so-called ‘valley of death’ in Australian naval shipbuilding is already upon us, but we also have the means to reduce the severity and then to build on this traumatic experience to create a productive, …
It all seemed so much easier in the old days. Equipment got old and it was replaced, like for like. Not always of course. Remember we used to have an aircraft carrier? In fact, at …
Both Kevin Andrews, the Defence Minister, and David Feeney, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence, were kind enough to respond to my criticisms of the Government’s naval shipbuilding program in a recent column, and especially its …
Labor’s long-term advocacy for a shipbuilding plan for the Australian Navy (together with Customs, CSIRO and to support the Australian Antarctic Territory) is built on two foundations. The first is that a rational shipbuilding plan …
Andrew Davies and Mark Thompson have pointed out problems with the Government’s recently announced $89 billion naval shipbuilding programme. In an earlier piece on naval shipbuilding, they thought the Government had ‘the tail wagging the …