Employment focus for new submarines
Nuclear-powered submarines were as much about Australia’s national security as they were about creating thousands of jobs for a future economy, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.
Mr Albanese was visiting UK’S largest shipyard in the port town of Barrow-in-furness in northern England where his controversial $368bn AUKUS trilateral security pact will begin.
Touring the plant with Britain’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, he got a glimpse of how Australia’s largest ever Defence project could roll out as he likened it to the post war boom of the car industry.
“AUKUS is more than our national security, it’s about jobs and economic prosperity, jobs for their lifetime. It’s about jobs and more jobs,” Mr Albanese enthused.
“The first product will begin to roll off here (Barrow-inFurness) in the 2030s and in the 2040s in Australia but we will start on construction of the transformation in Osborne in South Australia next year.
“We regard the development of an advanced, highly sophisticated manufacturing capability in Australia as having implications not just for our defence but for other industries as well, and I see this as being very similar to what the car industry provided for Australia in the post-war period.
“It is easy to underestimate the scale of what’s happening here and the impact it has on this local community.”
Of Barrow’s 60,000 population, 11,000 are employed at the shipyard.
The AUKUS pact was sealed in March in a trilateral defence agreement between the US, UK and Australia to help Australia establish a nuclear-powered submarine program ostensibly to counter China’s coercive military expansion into the Pacific.
The first Australian-built nuclear-powered submarines will be British-designed but fitted out with US combat systems including vertical Tomahawk cruise missile launch capabilities.
The SSN-AUKUS class will take over from the existing Royal Navy’s Astute-class boats when they enter into operation within the next decade and in the meantime the Federal Government will buy at least three second-hand American built submarines.
Mr Albanese said Australia’s challenge would be to recruit and train more than 5000 skilled workers and staying within budget to deliver the boats. Defence has factored in a 50 per cent $213bn “contingency” into the $368bn program.
Australia will send young apprentices to the UK to learn the craft and has already had personnel exchanges to teach Royal Australia Navy submariners how to operate the boat.