ABC 891 Adelaide

JOURNALIST: We talked a while ago about the subs and whether there was actually any ink on paper for a contract apart from announcements, Christopher Pyne, Minister for Defence Industry welcome and Liberal MP for Sturt, good morning.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning Matthew.

JOURNALIST: Will we see ink on paper today?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: At 12 o’clock today, so exactly, in fact ahead of schedule we’d said the contract would be signed with DCNS for design and mobilisation in October, we are signing it on September 30, you might well say it’s almost October but we are actually head of schedule which is great news so that contract will be inked today.

JOURNALIST: And what is in that contract, can you explain for our listeners what we’ve now actually got that’s locked in as opposed to the announcements that have been made before but weren’t backed up by a piece of paper so what have we got from today?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: From today we have a $450-500 million contract with DCNS to begin the design and preparation of the site at Osborne and the design of the submarines so now DCNS know that they will be paid, we are satisfied with what we’ve put in place for the contract, people will start being employed in Adelaide and at Cherbourg. There’ll be a team of Australians who will go to Cherbourg to start being part of that design process and we will start the planning, well we’re already well into the planning but we’ll do more planning over the next few months to begin construction at Osborne for the submarine contracts so we are well ahead of the game getting on with the job which is excellent. And we’ve also announced today that Lockheed Martin will be the combat system integrator, in other words they will integrate the US combat systems into the submarines, that’s worth about $1.4 billion so we are making great progress.

JOURNALIST: And is a lot of that work going to be in Adelaide, the systems?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: The combat system integrator, yes it will, so there’ll be a couple of hundred Lockheed Martin Australia technicians, engineers, scientists, workers et cetera down at probably Mawson Lakes or Osborne working in that general area over the next few years preparing for and then integrating the combat systems so it’s good news for the whole project but good news for Adelaide in particular.

JOURNALIST: Christopher Pyne thank you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Pleasure.