The attempted pork barrelling was scrapping major local ship and submarine construction in Australia altogether, moving all major maintenance to WA and only buying small fast frigates and patrol boats from Austal. While it could be argued that the AWD build in Adelaide was Pork, choosing to maintain and expand an existing facility for the Hunters is actually commonsense winning over pork.
To have starved a third major ship building operation to death in three to four decades would have been insane.
As a relative newcomer to industry in this area, was the WA proposal you mentioned ever considered realistic?
(Not in terms of it being a good idea or not, but whether it was realistically considered?)
I defer to your experience, but as an outsider, it sounds so implausible to me that it reads almost like a strawman argument.
Is there an area I can look into to learn more?
To clarify, none of our Defence SME's members in the precinct have admitted to holding that position to me in the last three years or so.
They want to be involved, absolutely. Some of them happily jetted off to perform critical tasks on AWD (and came back for WAMA).
If what you say is accurate, this sounds like a Prime going off the reservation.
I'll just put it out there - "The WA Mafia" (the tag I've seen thrown around) don't speak for us, which is why the little guys like us had to start speaking for ourselves.
The maintenance position, I understand. Looking at where the ships were being deployed at the time, there is a certain (limited) logic there.
Flat maps don't necessarily do a good job of showing just how much closer Perth is to those hotspots.
