Thanks Todjaeger for feeding me so much about aluminum hulls, granted, notes taken. And again, thanks a lot.
Regarding to the economic part, we all know the economic benefit of spending money in Australia. What you guys don't get my point is, why it has to be spend on shipyards.
May be it can be spend on local build, but it can also achieved by imposing "offset" requirements. How about buy more produce from Australia, how about bio-chemical/medical research and investment in Australia? They save lots of Australian jobs too, and very likely to be more sustainable and more competitive in the global market than a submarine industry.
From my point of view, SEA1000 is a procurement project for our navy's submarine replacement. Not an alliance pack, not a job saving scheme or nation rebuilding project. First thing first should be get our navy the best submarine available. So if our navy found the Japanese bid is more suit to the mission requirement, even if those boats have to be build off-shore, why not? Just request for a 70% economic offset (and most of them can be spent on SA). The compulsory requirement should be fit for the job, not local construction.
But now, the whole navy procurements are getting ridiculously political, even more political than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, so political that the next government may just scrap them all like the mining tax. And for that, I have a strong sympathy to our navy. While other services have a relatively free hand to choose their gear, our navy has become the receiving end of all those politicians' shit.
Umm... It seems that a number of areas of significance were missed, or perhaps misunderstood.
In a nutshell though, using offsets (IMO at least) only makes sense for a handful of reasons.
The first being that local production will not be done due to a lack of scale/efficiency, and/or the production run would be too short, without any possible follow-on work to be sustained (consider the examples I already provided for modern Australian fighter and tank production.)
The second being that local facilities are already occupied with other projects and programmes, and are therefore unavailable.
The third being that the materials exported for the offsets are materials which Australia and Australian businesses/producers have been having trouble selling due to a lack of markets, or the supply/demand ratio is such that little or none of the costs to produce can be recouped via sales.
I am unaware of any sectors of the Australian economy which is having a problem selling domestically produced goods or materials, to the point where offsets would be useful.
Using the example of a single warship sourced from ASC I used before consider what appear to be the two choices:
1. An AUD$1.3 bil. build for domestic construction of a warship, and AUD$1 bil. in rawmats and/or agricultural products sold domestically and exported, with the various levels of gov't able to collect taxes and fees from businesses and individuals involved.
2. An AUD$1 bil. imported warship, offset by AUD$1 bil. in exported rawmats/agricultural products, with the various levels of Australian gov't only able to collect taxes and fees from the production and sales of the AUD$1 bil. in exports.
This above choices are a bit simplistic examples of the potential scenarios, and it deliberately leaves out the negative costing impact on major ship maintenance, modifications and repairs when vessels are imported. It also does not get into rawmat overproduction, and the impact an oversupply in the global market has on Australian resource companies. IMO offsets can help that situation if/when it occurs, but only to a small degree, unless Australia stops being a producer of a given rawmat which it has stockpiles of which Australia is unable to sell.