ABC Radio Hobart Mornings with Leon Compton

LEON COMPTON: On Friday of last week South Australia will be announcing- in fact the Federal Government announced that they’ll be building an Australian Maritime College on Monday when he was talking to us. Neil Bose is the head of the Australian Maritime College in Tasmania said well, we already have one of these here. Here’s a little of him expressing his concerns about what this new Australian maritime technical college to be built in South Australia might mean for the AMC we already have based in Northern Tasmania.

[Excerpt]

NEIL BOSE: The concern we’ve really got is it’s been described as a sort of over the top type of arrangement which will feed students in to other pathways into degrees and so on and that’s where it starts getting worrying for us.

[End of excerpt]

LEON COMPTON: That was Neil Bose talking with us from the AMC earlier in the week.

Christopher Pyne is the Minister for Defence Industry and also Federal Member for Sturt. Christopher Pyne, good morning to you.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning Leon.

LEON COMPTON: He went on to say that we already have an AMC in Australia, why are we building another one?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well we’re not. The naval shipbuilding college will not be competing with the AMC, it will be complimentary to it. The AMC is quite a different institution. It has research, international collaborations, an international reputation, it offers clearly degree courses and the naval shipbuilding college won’t be doing those things. It won’t be doing research; it won’t be having international collaborations. It’s a hub and spoke approach and therefore in fact it will be a boon to the AMC as people from all around Australia and from South Australia in particular come to Launceston to do those kinds of courses before returning to Osborne to do naval shipbuilding and submarine building. So in fact because of the way we’ve designed this it will mean more students at the AMC, not less, doing the courses that the AMC offers. Because obviously it would be foolish for us to replicate what the AMC is already doing.

LEON COMPTON: How long have you spent designing it Minister? Because it seems that there’s almost no knowledge of what you have planned in Tasmania either, in the Australian Maritime College itself or amongst the politicians that represent us here.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: The naval shipbuilding college has been in the planning stages for a very long time. We need 5000 workers by the mid 2020s at Osborne. We currently have 1800, so we need 3200 or thereabouts new workers. Now most of those, 60 per cent to 70 per cent of those will be skilled trades people. So they won’t be the kinds of people the AMC is turning out. They’re the people who do specialists ship welding and those kinds of occupations. And people are offering those courses around children whether from Geraldton to Queensland to Adelaide to Sydney to Tasmania, they will all be part of the naval shipbuilding college and the AMC if it wishes to, and I’m sure it will wish to, it’s been fully briefed before the announcement as was the University of Tasmania, they would I assume want to be part of that hub and spoke approach in order to get more students.

LEON COMPTON: Hub and spoke approach. Currently the Australian Maritime College is the APEX organisation in Australia when it comes to parts of this sort of this training …

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: That’s right.

LEON COMPTON: The concern is now from Neil Bose and you heard it there, that all of sudden we’ll be taking out orders from this new central maritime college, we’ll become a spoke instead of the hub and the whole wheel.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No, that’s not right at all. There’ll be no- the AMC as an institution will be utterly unaffected in terms of its management, in terms of its positioning in the market. What I’m saying is this is an opportunity for the AMC to keep doing the great work that it’s already doing but on a greater scale. There’s no suggestion that any of the people who might form a consortium to provide these skills to the Australian Government will become part of the naval shipbuilding college. The AMC would be offering services to the naval shipbuilding college. It wouldn’t be taken over by it. That’s not any part of the plan.

LEON COMPTON: My understanding is that you’ve been presented with a report that where the AMC tried to get on the front foot and proposed to you that they would be the administering body for this organisation. Why did you reject that?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I haven’t seen that report, so I can ask after it but I haven’t seen it.

LEON COMPTON: They put the idea that the AMC as the Apex organisation could organise, could administer this new training facility. Is that a possibility?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well that’s news to me. I haven’t been presented with such a report at any point. But I can tell you that the naval shipbuilding college needs to be based at Osborne because that’s where the shipbuilding and submarine building is being done. And therefore its headquarters need to be where the workers will be being trained and where they need to be doing the work. Now, if we were training everybody in another part of Australia in the class room, the criticism would be; what’s the point of training these people in the class room to then not have the practical skills when they get into the ship yard. So obviously we are- these people will be trained potentially for a year or more in the classroom and then they’ll need to be on the tools, in the ship yard and the submarine yard learning the trade. That’s obviously why it has to be at Osborne. Even your local Labor federal member of Parliament has said that’s why it has to be in Osborne.

LEON COMPTON: The response to that is that- it was made on this program yesterday, somebody I can’t attribute it, but somebody said here, if it’s good enough for the French company that’s building these submarines to do their training work at the Australian Maritime College in Launceston, why isn’t it good enough for the shipbuilders that are working in South Australia to do the same?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: And Leon, exactly what I’ve said. The people [audio skips] example naval a bachelor of engineering and naval architecture or ocean engineering or marine and offshore engineering will obviously do that at the AMC. But people who are doing an apprenticeship in fitting and turning will not do that at the AMC, they’re more likely to do that at a TAFE in Adelaide or a TAFE in Geraldton or somewhere else. So no one is taking anything away from the AMC. In fact there’ll be more, because of the Government’s $90 billion naval shipbuilding project which is bigger than the Snowy Hydro scheme and bigger than the NBN. This will be a boon to the AMC. There’ll be more students at the AMC, not less. So rather than anyone seeing it as a threat, they could see it as an opportunity.

LEON COMPTON: Former Liberal Senator Richard Colbeck who I’m sure you know said yesterday he had concerns that the technical college that you’re establishing might cannibalise the AMC. I know you’ve responded to that question a number of times in this interview, but again, I mean he is a credible person who has worked on this issue- on the future of the AMC, and yet he has concerns.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well look I know Richard very well of course and I’m happy to give Richard a full briefing on it and I’m sure that when he’s had the full briefing on it he’ll recognise that in fact this is a tremendous opportunity for Launceston and the Australian Maritime College. It is not a threat to it.

LEON COMPTON: The AMC head himself doesn’t seem to be fully briefed of these plans.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well he was briefed before the announcement.

LEON COMPTON: Okay. He expressed real concerns and uncertainty about what it would mean when we spoke with him earlier in the week. I’d be interested to hear how he responds to that.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well he’s very welcome- I mean we briefed him before the announcement; he’s very welcome to pick up the phone to talk to the people in the Department of Defence, to talk to the people in my office to get reassurance. Of course we want- we want everyone in Launceston to be part of this national shipbuilding project because it has tremendous opportunities to reshape our economy and it’s already working. Defence industry is showing up in the national accounts last quarter for the first time as one of the drivers of the economy. It’s a high tech advanced manufacturing high value job future and the AMC is very much at the centre of that from a workplace and skills point of view.

LEON COMPTON: One of the criticisms that’s also been made here, minister, is that this is in part political, that your party got routed in Tasmania at the last election, that you have seats you desperately need to shore up in South Australia and this is part of the motivation for the choice.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, Leon, there isn’t an election federally for over two years. So we aren’t in a constant election cycle. I know that social media makes us feel like we’re in a constant election cycle, but we aren’t, and the decision has absolutely nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the fact that we, for the first time, the Government is commissioning 54 naval vessels after six years of Labor inaction where they made not one decision to build any ships in Australia. We’re building 54, and of those, the nine frigates will be built in Adelaide. The 12 submarines will be built in Adelaide. The offshore patrol vessels will start in Adelaide and move to Henderson in Perth, and the Pacific patrol vessels are being built in Henderson in Perth.

So that’s why the skills component is critically important that it be in- for people who will be based in Osborne and living and working in Osborne, and that’s why the decision’s been made. It has absolutely nothing to do with politics at all. It’s just obviously the practical place where you would put such a technical college, and the AMC will be part of the overall skills project, and therefore it’s good news for Launceston. It’s good news for Tasmania.

LEON COMPTON: Who is the organisation who will actually head this up and put it together? Why not use the AMC and the existing structure of UTas to design the architecture and the administration of this new college in South Australia?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: We will be releasing a request for tender in either late April or early May to ask people to come forward, either individually or in the consortia to offer to run this service, and I’m sure AMC will confirm whether they wish to tender for it or not.

LEON COMPTON: So they could- it will be the sort of tender in which they might well be in the mix, then?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, I would hope so. I’d be very surprised if they weren’t. But that’s a matter for the- one, the request for tender has to go out, then the tender documents come in from the people who are bidding, and the best bidder wins. I’ll obviously get advice from the Department of Defence about that. I don’t just get to pick a winner. There’s obviously a proper process to go through. But I’d be very surprised if the head of the AMC wasn’t speaking to people, counterparts elsewhere saying how can we work together to make this a success? I’d be very surprised if they weren’t.

LEON COMPTON: I know you have to go in a minute or two.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No, I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying the conversation.

LEON COMPTON: [Laughs]. In Tasmania at the moment, minister, there is a concern that there are lots of opportunities in Defence that might be an enormous increase in expenditures, and Tasmania is desperate to provide some of our expertise and to take advantage of some of the opportunities there. We didn’t get the Pacific patrol boat contract. There have been opportunities for the BearCat, I think, or the Defence vehicle that went to parts of Victoria. What does Tasmania need to do to make sure that the Victoria- the Australian Government is considering Tasmania properly as the place for some of this new Defence spending?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, we had a workshop in Hobart in the last couple of months for people who- businesses who wanted to engage with the Department of Defence on our major projects like the offshore patrol vessels and Land 400, and that was very well-attended, and I told David Bushby – who’s obviously a Senator for Tasmania – that we would hold another one in Launceston, and I’ve asked the department to hold that. These have been very successful workshops all around Australia, because there’s a real buzz in defence industry in this country at the moment. We’re not just talking about the things that we need and building them in Australia; we’re putting $195 billion into making it happen because we want the economy of the future to include a significant defence industry manufacturing base, and business is really responding well. So we’ll have one of those in Launceston as well, so that businesses can find out how to be more involved.

We’ve established the Centre for Defence Industry Capability, because I’m sure, Leon, you and your listeners would realise we have- the number one priority is the capability of the Defence Forces. So we have to give them the highest quality equipment and platforms, from the Joint Strike Fighter through to the night vision goggles that they wear in combat. So we can’t have second-rate outcomes. That’s the number one priority. So we have to help those businesses in Australia who aren’t yet capable of supplying Defence. We want to get them to that point where they are.

We’re not just saying, though, you have to go and do it yourselves. We’ve got the Next Generation Technologies Fund, the Defence Innovation Hub, the Centre for Defence Industry Capability. We are trying to drive the capability of defence industry, because I see it as a sovereign capability for the national security of the country, and Tasmanians can share in that as well as any other business around the country. Of course, businesses are already capable of doing that, including in Tasmania, and there are businesses who we want to get to that point. There are some businesses who would like to be in Defence but will never be able to get to that capability, and that’s fine too. They need to know that and make their business decisions. So I’ll be coming to Tasmania in May to talk to people down there and to work with them, because I want Tasmania to feel as included as the rest of the country in this.

LEON COMPTON: We’d like to see you in the studio when that happens. Just a quick question off the back of the cyclone, of course, that’s gone through Queensland in recent days. Am I right in understanding that the Navy couldn’t provide amphibious vessels to help get stuff to shore in areas that might have been cut off by road because they were unavailable and in service?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No, you’re not right. The HMAS Choules is there offshore from where the cyclone hit, and the HMAS Choules is the boat that was on duty for relief and humanitarian reasons, so the appropriate vessel was sent as soon as the request was made and is there, so there was no question of unavailability of the correct vessel. The HMAS Choules came into that duty in mid-March. Labor has tried to play politics with this, which I think is very unpleasant, but the Army of course and the Navy are putting their best foot forward and are a great bonus in these kinds of natural disasters and are very welcome on the ground, and Labor should not play politics with it.

LEON COMPTON: Just a final question for you this morning. What is the question that can secure a guarantee from you that the Australian Maritime College in Launceston will grow and prosper under this new proposal that you’ve put up for South Australia, rather than be put at risk?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, because we need 5000 workers by the mid-2020s and because the AMC is the premier provider of very high quality degrees and PhDs et cetera, the AMC can only prosper by us spending more money on skills in the Navy shipbuilding area. The alternative of course would be not to build any ships, and then the AMC would be at risk, and that was the future under Labor. What we have done is actually secured naval shipbuilding for good. We will always now have a naval shipbuilding industry in this country for the decades and decades to come, and the AMC as the premier provider of this kind of education can only prosper from a growing of the industry that they service.

LEON COMPTON: Christopher Pyne, appreciate you coming on this morning.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Great pleasure.

LEON COMPTON: Christopher Pyne, Minister for Defence Industry and Federal Member for Sturt on Mornings around Tasmania.