Federal election Fact Checker: Has Defence Minister Peter Dutton been transparent on scrapped commitments?

Defence Minister Peter Dutton used his debate with Labor opponent Brendan O’Connor to again position national security and fears around China’s military ambitions at the centre of the election battleground. “Our country is grappling with security challenges of scale and complexity that we’ve not experienced since the Second World War,” he said. “It was a time for being “strong, not weak,” he added. Mr Dutton extolled the Morrison Government’s massive spending on defence, but in one of the questions put to him at the National Press Club, he was challenged on its transparency over contracts and commitments that had been scrapped. Among those was the quiet abandonment of a commitment to build a Pacific Support Vessel at Henderson in WA. Instead Defence purchased an existing vessel overseas for $93.4 million last year to perform the same role. No announcement was made of the change-of-plan and news of the discreet purchase in Spain’s Canary Islands slipped out at a Senate Estimates hearing. The Government denied it had reneged on a commitment to WA’s ship-building industry. Though the WA Government, which hadn’t been briefed on the change, certainly viewed it as a broken promise. Mr Dutton denied the Government had a habit of hiding scrapped projects. “In a situation where there’s been a decision that’s been leaked . . . and that’s put to an official within Senate Estimates before we’re able to make or we’re prepared to make a public announcement, I can’t change that,” he said. Mr O’Connor replied there were “a litany of examples where the government has not done what it said it would do, and often promoted things that are new but never mention the things that it’s cancelled”. “Clearly there should be more transparency. You shouldn’t be able to boast about building a support vessel and meanwhile, buy a second-hand one and hide it in the Canary Islands,” he said. “The government should [disclose the] things it changes its mind on.” The recent cancellation of the $1.3bn SkyGuardian project to buy armed drones was also revealed during Senate Estimates. The money has been redirected to pay for the “Redspice” cybersecurity package announced in the Budget. Professor Peter Dean, the University of WA’s first Chair of Defence Studies and the inaugural director of the university’s Defence and Security Institute said there had been a “shocking lack of transparency since Peter Dutton has become Defence Minister”. “Linda Reynolds and previous Coalition Defence ministers have been far more open and far more accountable, both to the media and to Parliament,” he said. “We found out the $5.5 billion (cost) for submarines that are never going to appear and a whole range of other things through the grilling of public servants at Senate estimates rather than being announced by the Minister and being held accountable for that. “(Mr Dutton and Morrison) repeat ad nauseam record levels of spending on defence but they’ve also got record levels of wastage in defence spending and record levels of projects that are late, over budget, overblown and there are capability gaps as a result of this,” Prof. Dean added. “$5.5 billion lost on a failed submarine contract has to be the biggest procurement disaster in Australian defence history. Of that $5.5 billion, you know how many submarines we got for that? We got one — the plastic model that the French government gave us.” “The future frigate program is $10 billion over budget, is running years late and has major engineering and capability questions. Meanwhile, the Army’s LAND 400 Phase 3 Project (for 450 next-generation infantry fighting vehicles), the most expensive capability acquisition program in Army’s history, has blown out from $10 to $15 billion in 2015 . . . to now $27 billion.” Verdict: Peter Dutton has failed to be transparent on scrapped defence commitments.