MARLES BACKS DEFENCE SALES
AUSTRALIAN businesses manufacturing drones, ships and other hi-tech military equipment will be backed to bid for big overseas contracts under a plan to put the nation at the forefront of the security industry.
Defence Minister Richard Marles has revealed he wants Australia to be the country others turn to for cutting edge manufacturing, which will in turn sustain and create local jobs as well as boost the nation’s security credentials.
“We should as a nation … seek to have a defence industry,” he said.
Mr Marles said Australia
should do its best to maximise local content on various builds for the Australian Defence Force, but for long-term sustainability there needed to be a focus in servicing other allied countries too.
“The starting point here is to actually articulate the strategic rationale for defence industry, which is in essence about Australia being taken seriously in the world when we do defence industry,” he said.
“If you look at countries which do defence industry, they do it because they have a strategic rationale for doing it.
“(In Australia) that has been lacking over the last decade.” He said an example of where an Australian business had been on the verge of securing a major contract was West Australia’s Austral, which bid to work on the next generation of US frigates.
“Now they didn’t succeed in that tender, but it’s also worth noting, not a finger was lifted by the former government to support that bid.”
Mr Marles said this was a “breathtaking failure” of the Coalition.