As a war breaks out between the Defence Minister’s Office and his Department, and as the Auditor-General hands down another scathing annual Defence Major Projects Report, Rex Patrick examines the Future Frigate Farce and explains why Richard Marles and the Defence Diarchy has to go.

A shambles in Defence leadership

On Tuesday we saw media reports that the Future Frigate Program will likely be reduced from nine ships to three. 

On Wednesday Senator Lambie stood up in the Senate chamber and sum up the Defence Department as a “very, very expensive basket case”.

Here’s @JacquiLambie in the Senate this morning discussing the “very very expensive basket case” that is @DefenceAust procurement. Calling it how it is. #auspol pic.twitter.com/AWsdGE8uPZ

— Rex Patrick (@MrRexPatrick) February 7, 2024

On Thursday there were more reports in the media, this time triggered by the blame game that’s erupted between Defence Minister Richard Marles’ office and the most senior officers of the Defence Force and his department. 

Competitive leaking has surged on both sides of Lake Burley Griffin, the likes we haven’t seen since Joel Fitzgibbon lost his job as Defence Minister back in 2009.

On Friday, the Auditor-General release his annual report into the 20 current major Defence projects revealing, “The total approved budget for the 20 Major Projects has increased by $22.8 billion (39%) since initial Second Pass Approval by government” and the “total schedule slippage was 453 months (23%) when compared to initial project planning”.

Something has to happen with the dysfunctional Defence leadership, and what’s required is not what happened on Australia Day with the award of the Order of Australia to the Secretary of Defence, Greg Moriarty, on Australia Day. For the past six years he’s presided, with a bloated salary of almost a million dollars per annum, over what can only be described a shambles. Talk about devaluing the honours system.

I’ll come back to what needs to happen.

Frigate trim

It’s an old joke from the BBC TV series “Yes Minister” that the ship of state is the only ship to leak from the top.  

It’s nowhere truer that in our Defence Department.  

This week another leak coming from inside Defence indicated that the Government may take the troubled nine ship future frigate program and chop it down to just three ships.

That could only be described as just plain stupid.

Most of the cost of designing and producing a new class ship comes with the first ship. Most of the cost of fixing problems with a new class of ship comes with the first second and third ship. It makes no sense at all to limit an order to three ships. 

If Defence think that the future frigate ship design is good enough to buy three to put our sailors in and send it in harm’s way, then they should continue with the nine build program so that they can bring the unit cost down over a large build.

If Defence thinks the ship is a dud, it should cut our losses now and move to an off-the-shelf design, built here in Australia starting later this year.

Of course, such a decision would involve admitting to another massively embarrassing failure.  

But it looks like dumb and dumber are again in charge.

Dumb Ways to Buy: Defence “shambles” unveiled – former submariner and senator Rex Patrick

 

Selection incompetence

It’s worth looking into the Future Frigate program.

When the program first became a topic of discussion inside Defence way back in 2014 (yes, to go from an initial thought to still having no future frigates at all has taken Defence the length of World War I and World War II and then some) the plan was to go with an off-the-shelf design – that is, a design that was already at sea working.

They set a budget at an eye watering $30 billion dollars.

When the tender came out in 2016 the position of the Department was clear – they wanted a military-off-the shelf design with minimal change.

Subsequent investigations by the Auditor-General and Senate have revealed that Defence departed from that tender requirement without any process. They selected a design, BAE’s Type 26 frigate, that was not off-the-shelf and involved significant engineering, weaponry and other technological changes (into what is now referred to as the Hunter Class).

We now know from an Auditor-General audit and formally Secret – Australian Eyes Only independent review, that the down selection process was fundamentally flawed. All the focus was on capability – paper capability as opposed to fielded capability – and, contrary to law, there was no value for money assessment.

Documents recording the decision making processes of senior defence leadership do not exist. Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty AO can’t explain any of this.

At down selection the program’s cost had risen to $45 billion – a fifteen thousand million dollar increase – and the program is now more than 18 months behind schedule. Even with a $45 billon budget, the Auditor-General has found a further bureaucratic shambles and run-away costs.

Overweight and other problems

One of the big problems with the Hunter Class is weight. It went from around 8,800 tonnes to 10,000 tonnes.

Significantly extra weight means the propulsion system can no longer achieve the planned top speed, and that for any given speed more strain will be put on the propulsion system, lowering the ships range and meaning that the ship is nosier. That’s not a good thing for an anti-submarine frigate.

The new Auditor-General’s report details the ongoing concern, “There is a risk that [the Hunter Class Frigate] design may exceed the naval architecture limits on weight and stability at the completion of the [design and productisation] scope, which may limit or provide in-service growth margins that substantially limit future capabilities.

There are a range of other technical problems that were discussed in the Senate in February 2022 after an internal Defence report was leaked to the late Senator Kimberly Kitching.

So far the project has spent $2.6 billion dollars and we haven’t started building a ship yet and by the time Defence gets a ship in the water, if one bravely assumes there will be no further delays, it will be after four World War timeframes.

While the taxpayer is now suffering, and national security has been harmed, the person who was instrumental in pushing the BAE option, Tim Barrett, has left his job as the Chief of Navy and taken up work as a paid advisor to BAE.

Groundhog Day – including for AUKUS

So, Defence contracted BAE to build a frigate that was not off-the-shelf. The first was to be built in the United Kingdom and the second was to be built in Australia.

With all that has happened, have we not learned? Apparently not, our Defence leadership are true masters of the flat learning curve.  

The five AUKUS SSN submarines Defence proposes to acquire from the UK are not even paper boats. The first will be built in the UK and the second will be built in Australia. The only difference is, with a budget of $368 billion, the outcome will be so much worse.

If Defence looked at the future Frigate program honestly, they’d cancel the AUKUS subs. But self-reflection and honesty are rare characteristics among our bloated Defence top brass.  

Instead, they’ve doubled their bets again and again, each time hoping they have something that’s too big to fail, or at least that they’ll have moved to a cushy consultancy before the proverbial hits the fan.  

No doubt some of our admirals, generals, air marshals and top Defence bureaucrats believe that AUKUS is too big to fail.  

But rest assured in the real world of military strategy, conflict and international relations, failure can come fast and hard.  

Services no longer required

Over and over Defence is failing the public when it comes to procurement.

The diarchy at the top of Defence needs to go, and so does the uninspiring Defence Minister. Services no longer required, gentleman!

We the need to bring project management discipline into procurement decision making. Right now, we have admirals, air marshals and generals with little project management experience making recommendations on procurement to cabinet ministers who have no project management experience.

The Defence Department often looks back to the First World War as the source of Australia’s military traditions.  

But it’s not the Diggers of ANZAC that our Defence elite today resemble.

They have much more in common with the medaled fools of the creaking Austro-Hungarian Empire; incompetent marshals and generals, commanders who preened themselves in peace before leading to catastrophe a military force bereft of adequate munitions, equipment and logistics.

Without radial reform, our current Defence leadership will at best cost us dearly in procurement ineptitude and financial waste.  They may well cost us much more than that.  

Drastic change is needed, for the sake of servicemen and women who are being asked to defend us with aged and obsolete capabilities, and for the sake of our national security.

The scam within a scam. US, UK officials are flying high on the AUKUS teat.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Lobbying is the scourge of democracy. Independent Senator David Pocock and MP Monique Ryan are pushing legislative reform to rein in the power of money in politics. Richard Barnes reports.

Lobbying is the scourge of the Australian body politic. Described by the eminent retired public servant and publisher John Menadue as “pervasive and insidious” and here at Michael West Media as a toxic and powerful influence over democracy, it is now coming under political purview via an inquiry by the Senate into lobbyist access to Parliament House. 

So, get your submissions in quick smart to the Senate Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee. It doesn’t have to be long. Today is the last day.

There are over 700 registered “third party lobbyists” whose orange passes allow them unfettered access to the parliamentary buildings in Canberra. (And one can’t help but wonder whether it is with a feeling of pride that, when asked what they do for a job, these people reply,

I wield undue influence on the nation’s decision-makers to get outcomes favourable to those who engage me

But there are many more people who, while they are very much lobbyists, are not registered as such: “in house” lobbyists – people employed within an organisation purely to undertake that role; and people who, by virtue of their senior positions within industry bodies, are able to act as “ex officio lobbyists”: executives of businesses, industry groups, NGOs, not-for-profits, charities, think tanks, research centres, religious organisations, trade unions and other bodies – all of whom have the opportunity to give advice to government which is rarely disinterested but which is not officially defined as “lobbying”.

The Big 4 – PwC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG – are in this top echelon of lobbyists; so pervasive and so powerfully connected at every level of government that they neither disclose nor deem themselves to be lobbyists. It is in the way of the eminent surgeon who no longer calls themself Doctor, but simply Mr.

Two major parties too close

For obvious reasons, there has been little willingness on the part of Labor and Coalition politicians to tackle the lobbying problem.

Now, however, thanks to Independent Senator David Pocock and the Teal Dr Monique Ryan, there is some action. Last year, Dr Ryan introduced to the House of Reps a private member’s bill, the Lobbying (Improving Government Honesty and Trust) Bill 2023, known as the “Clean up Politics Act”:

At the same time, Senator David Pocock has established a Senate inquiry into access to Australian Parliament House by lobbyists and the adequacy of current transparency arrangements relating to the lobbyist register, to be run through the Financial and Public Administration References Committee:

Some of us would go further than proposed by Senator Pocock and Dr Ryan, by simply abandoning the orange pass system and requiring all access to politicians to be by publicly diarised appointments only. Nonetheless, their proposals, if adopted, would represent a powerful weakening of the power of lobbyists and a strengthening of our democratic decision-making processes.

The Terms

The Senate inquiry’s terms of reference are in particular, around the (currently hopelessly inadequate) lobbyist register:

• transparency arrangements;
• the current sponsored pass system for lobbyists to access Australian Parliament House with particular regard to transparency and publication of lobbyists who are pass holders and their sponsors;
• publicly accessible information of Australian Parliament House pass holders who are lobbyists and their sponsors.

Submissions to the inquiry close tomorrow, Friday, 9th February. Here is the link to the Senate submissions website:

It is not too late to have your say. 

Climate Betrayal: how backroom deals with Japan locked Australia in for decades of gas

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What would happen in Australia if King Charles’s condition were to deteriorate to a point at which he could not fulfil his constitutional duties? Our constitution does not have the answer.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Recently, the Human Rights Law Centre reviewed every whistleblower case to go to judgment in Australia. They found no successful judgment in favour of a whistleblower under our public or private whistleblower regimes.

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The ICJ has found decisively that Israel has a case to answer for genocide in a preliminary judgement which will reverberate around the world. What now of Australia’s support for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu? Farah Abdurahman reports.

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Despite repeated urgings from experts, the Federal Government is refusing to establish a sovereign aerial firefighting capability. There’s plenty of AUKUS cash to invest in US and UK shipyards but nothing to keep Australian property and lives safe.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Australians ended 2023 to shock-horror reports of “the largest cohort of foreign fishers to be detained in over a decade.” The Return of the Living Dread? Not quite – just 30 Indonesian ‘trepangers’ – sea cucumber fishermen.

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A minor incident in the South China Sea between the Australian Navy and a Chinese ship last year was blown out of proportion by Defence Minister Richard Marles, acting PM at the time. 

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A quicksand of changed voter priorities, electoral boundary changes and taking past success for granted could undo the Teal independents wave of the 2022 election.

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A quicksand of changed voter priorities, electoral boundary changes and taking past success for granted could undo the Teal independents wave of the 2022 election.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

“Governments must not be allowed to use the $200 billion sovereign wealth fund to support nation building,” declared the retiring Future Fund chairman Peter Costello in Nine Entertainment’s AFR. Peter is also chairman of Nine Entertainment. Michael West reports.

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A newly released Congressional Research Service report confirms that Australian funds will be used to support the United States Navy’s nuclear ballistic missile submarine program. The Government has sunk Labor’s nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation pledges.

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Did 2023 see more or less transparency from Government? Is the Albanese Government more or less transparent than the Morrison Government?

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After an epic 12 month battle against improper secrecy in the Prime Minister’s office, Anthony Albanese’s 2022 diary has finally been released under compulsion of an Administrative Appeals Tribunal order.

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The Federal Court in Canberra today approved a settlement of $27.5 million to be paid to 220 Indonesian men who were wrongly accused and imprisoned by the AFP 13 years ago.

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As Defence Minister, Richard Marles is uninspiring. He’s not across his brief. His recent statement saying Australia will not be taking US or UK nuclear waste under the AUKUS program, he is plainly wrong and contradicted by his own Department.

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The Department of Defence has engaged a former Defence Deputy Secretary as a highly paid consultant to find a place on Defence land to store submarine nuclear waste.

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The Senate has handed down its report into the operation of Commonwealth Freedom of Information laws, and Labor reports ‘nothing to see here’.

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The Albanese Government has just announced another $3B into the US submarine industrial base, in addition to the $4.7B already committed. It’s money that should have been spent in Australia instead.

This post was originally published on Michael West.