Defence shipbuilding review warns delays mean 20-year shorta

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Defence shipbuilding review warns delays mean 20-year shorta

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Defence shipbuilding review warns delays mean 20-year shortage
THE AUSTRALIAN JULY 17, 2015 12:00AM

Sarah Martin
Political Reporter
Canberra

Defence warned of ship shortage

Image
Work drying up: the first Air Warfare Destroyer built in Adelaide, the Hobart. Picture: Calum Robertson Source: News Corp Australia
Australia faces a collective delay of up to a decade for its replacement fleet of frigates, causing a shortage of warships over the next 20 years, the author of the government’s shipbuilding review says.

Rand corporation’s Joel Predd, who modelled workforce requirements for the government’s shipbuilding program, said the coming defence white paper would need to address the looming delays or risk having fewer ships available for the navy.

“It is really Australia’s decis­ion; they have a choice there: they can either retire on schedule and face a shortfall in the force structure — the number of ships that can be deployed — or they could extend the life of the Anzacs and pay the maintenance bills,” Mr Predd said.

“Australia of course will decide this but if you were to extend the life of the Anzac fleet in order to maintain a constant number of ships, then you would have to keep a ship that was supposed to be retired out into the fleet longer.

“If you added that time up — how much time the supposedly retired, intended-to-be-retired ships are out in the fleet — it would be in total 10 years across the Anzac fleet.”

Alternatively, the government could bring forward construction of the frigates, or introduce a new project following the end of the Air Warfare Destroyer program, which would allow the new warships to be built more quickly and minimise the delays to ­replace the Anzac frigates from 2026.

The warning comes after Tony Abbott last month committed to developing a contin­uous shipbuilding capability in Australia despite delays and cost blowouts plaguing the AWD project. “It is the government’s intention to ­develop a continuous build of major surface warships here in Australia to avoid the unproductive on-again, off-again cycle that has done this industry so much damage,” he said. But the shedding of shipyard jobs has begun. BAE Systems­ has cut more than 500 workers from its Williamstown shipyard in Victoria, which faces potential closure because of insufficient demand after it completes work on the AWD program next year. It announced last month it would not bid on the government’s $600 million contract for 21 Pacific ­patrol boats, saying it would not be viable to rebuild its workforce for a 2018 start date.

Forgacs has cut 160 of its 450 workers in Newcastle, with the rest dependent on a change in shipbuilding policy.

Under Rand’s modelling, the supply of the future frigates would be delayed by an average of 15 months for each of the eight vessels relative to the retirement of the Anzac warships, totalling 10 years. The delays are caused by the gap between the end of the AWD program and the start of the future­ frigate program, the ­ ­so-called “valley of death’’.

But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said the delay was a product of Rand’s inherently pessimistic modelling.

A spokeswoman for Defence Minister Kevin Andrews said ­ Defence had “advised government that decisions required to avoid Labor’s ‘valley of death’ would need to have been taken in 2011 or earlier — when Labor was in government’’.
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