Boost jobs by giving Tassie shipyards a go

Make most of skilled labour by pushing locally made, says Glenn Thompson

WHEN Premier Will Hodgman has a moment to think about future job opportunities for Tasmanians, it’s a curious leap of mental geography that instead of thinking about his constituents or the mainland states of Australia, he casts his mind much further afield, to the other side of the globe and workers on the Baltic coast of Germany.

That’s where he wants to build two new car ferries to link Tasmania and Melbourne. Sending Tasmanian jobs, Australian jobs, to Europe. An odd decision considering we have a world-class shipbuilding industry of our own.

Hodgman’s thinking isn’t the bold kind of political leadership our state and the nation so desperately needs.

The Premier has ignored domestic shipbuilding as well as local firms in Tasmania.

There is simply no need to go to Germany to build a world-class ship. Tasmania’s own Incat is among the best shipbuilders in the world, competing globally and a major employer and exporter.

Incat has the capacity to construct large sections of hull and complete much of the ships’ fit-out, relying on its own local supply chain of smaller companies, each of them employing Tasmanians.

Mr Hodgman has also overlooked Melbourne, Adelaide, Newcastle and Perth, where shipyards are laying largely idle, waiting for the next generation of naval ships to come online.

Signing up with the Germans to build Tasmania’s next Spirits neglects enormous job creation opportunities at home. What Tasmanians desperately want from our politicians is confidence to back our local workers and companies with the expertise to get the job done in Australia.

ASC in Adelaide has just completed three ultra-modern Air Warfare Destroyers which has given the Federal Government the courage to back “Australian-made” warships into the future.

Modern shipbuilding no longer relies on a single hull rising from one slipway. Instead ships are built in modules, or blocks, sections of hull that can be built in several shipyards, and are transported to an assembly point, where they are welded together to make up the final structure.

Will Hodgman is talking big about future defence work coming to the state.

Perhaps the Premier missed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s announcements about a new fleet of submarines, another fleet of naval frigates and a flotilla of new patrol boats for ourselves and our Pacific neighbours, all of them to be built in Australia.

Australian shipbuilding is on the cusp of a new era, a “continuous build program” for the Royal Australian Navy that arguably, could keep our shipyards in work for the next 50 years and beyond.

But for the moment, as work proceeds towards the start of the naval shipbuilding program, there’s a pause in the tempo of the industry, the perfect opportunity for a patriotic premier to show what Tasmania can do, give Australian shipyards a go and get his ferries built and fitted out at home. It is no longer the case that taxpayers can’t get value for money when building ships in Australia. There is a highly competent and skilled shipbuilding workforce that should be given the opportunity to build parts of the hull and undertake fit-out and commissioning work.

My message to Premier Hodgman is this: You have been elected to do the best for Tasmanians, and jobs are how to best advance the state economy, and contribute to the budgets of workers’ families.

Instead of sending shipbuilding work offshore, we should be taking pride in our homegrown capacity, building ships and taking full advantage of the jobs and technology transfer opportunities big projects like this can deliver.