Scott Morrison news

A leaked confidential document gives an insider's perspective on how the Morrison government went about cancelling the French submarine contract, ...

Neither of the US or UK options will provide a sovereign capability and we would be reliant on operational preapprovals from the US to operate and deploy our most important Defence assets." "The Naval Group Australia Board was totally unaware that this was going to happen. It is at a size, crewing and capability that best fits the Australian requirements. Mr Gillis said the situation "was exacerbated when Admiral Sammut provided an estimate to sustain the fleet over a period until 2080. "NGA knew its estimate to build 12 vessels over the period of 35 years was stable and varied within 1 per cent from the 2016 contracted price. In the mind of some parliamentarians, Australia now had an instant $40 billion "cost blow out", and almost every media outlet in the country repeated the claim." One of the reasons that he used constant dollars was that it was so early in the program that the production schedule was not locked down and therefore an 'out year' or inflation adjusted figure for 30 or so years would have been nothing more than a rough guess. Built and potentially delivered in the 'early 2040s,'" Mr Gillis said. We did however know that the first of class would be delivered in 2032 and the last of class in the 2050s. "At no point was there any contract worth or expected to be worth AUD $90b and any reference to the cancellation with Naval Group of a AUD $90b contract is a deliberate lie and a total misrepresentation of the program," Mr Gillis says. Mr Gillis said the Naval Group Australia board was badly hamstrung in being able to "correct this narrative" because "the contract with the Commonwealth was very specific about what we could and couldn't say" and because the board "did not have any visibility of the other price estimates for Lockheed Martin or other costs that would have been incurred by the Commonwealth". "Not in all but in areas that would be critical in the defence of the Australian continent, especially in the protection of the shallow sea lanes and the littorals to our north.