Come'on gf, Volk, what's wrong with giving some work to WA? Here in WA, work opportunities are drying up since the end of the mining boom. Besides, Austal makes good looking boats. Building OPVs will be perfect for them. Techport will still get the Future Frigates and Shortfin.
No problem whatsoever with work going to WA but like gf said the issue is when they politically undermine existing capability in other states with no regard for the actual needs of the ADF or retention of strategic capabilities. Also, as hard as I try to keep an open mind, Austal always manages to demonstrate that, no matter how low my opinion of them and their capabilities, they are actually worse than I ever suspected. IMO if an external expert ever did a review of their operations, i.e. similar to the Coles or Winter reports on ASC for example, they would be crucified. The reason their designs have issues is they literally don't know what they don't know and are too arrogant to listen when experts try to help them.
Rather then giving work to Austal I would rather it go to Forgacs, they at least know how to build ships. Also instead of this frigates here, OPVs there idea I would rather a model where each yard specialises on certain types of blocks for destroyers, frigates, OPV/OCV/whatever, amphibs and auxillaries; i.e. superstructure blocks with combat system integration, keel blocks, engineering spaces etc. This base load of work could potentially keep three or four yards busy and competent bashing steel, but also demonstrate which yard deserves to win the competitive tenders for the remaining general blocks as well as consolidation, final outfit and integration, activation, test and trials.
I am not anti WA per-say rather I am against reinventing the wheel for purely political (or more to the point pork) reasons. For example I firmly believe the Hawke government decision to shut Cockatoo was stupid, but then having done so and spending so much to get Williamstown up to speed, staving them of work was simply criminal. The move by the WA mafia to kill ASC and transfer building of all major fleet units overseas, so WA could corner all work on minor vessels as well as the lions share of sustainment works was little short of treasonous; it was nothing more than screwing the defence of the nation to get the biggest share of the resulting much smaller pie for themselves.
In my ideal world the Silver Bodgie would have let Cockatoo build the second required Durance (Success) AOR, this build would have gone much quicker because the design data had been sorted by this point (bloke on that build told me all data was delivered in French without units being specified despite there being a mix of metric, imperial and possibly (my faulty memory not theirs) US imp in it. This means they would still have open to refit the O boats and provide a smoother transition to the Collins and possibly even life extend a couple to permit a more sensible progression of the replacement program. A second Durance means no Westralia, and no Sirius and possibly no Bill and Ben with the logical way forward being to build the required capability locally, i.e. an Ocean type LPH. Cockatoo could even have been expanded to build the Collins Class instead of the new yard in Adelaide and could have built blocks for the AFP (Australian Frigate Project / Melbourne and Newcastle) and the ANZACs.
Williamstown could still have been upgraded and build the last pair of FFGs and then gone onto the ANZACs but Cockatoo could have been given the contract to replace the Perth Class DDGs in a simple one for one build of Flight I or IIA Arleigh Burkes, while Williamstown completed the ANZACs and moved onto the planned OPC/corvette build followed by a shared build of the eventual FFG replacements, the AOR replacements and additional, larger amphibs. No ASC, no Armidale class "coke cans" (RAN nickname for them) but potentially block and systems work around the country as Eglo in Adelaide had been building survey motor launches and blocks for the FFGs. Instead we killed and rebuilt the industry twice and severely injured it a third time, wasting hundreds of millions, perhaps billions that would have been better spent on capability and retaining the RANs engineering capability.
Once the RAN had the gear they needed for far less than it ended up costing because of political BS their would have been a stack of money saved that could have gone on doing things smarter in the other services, for example a new build IFV instead of an upgraded M-113, or maybe even upgraded surplus Marders from Germany, SPGs, more helicopters, new LCHs (or something better, Frank Besson class maybe). Possibly with extra cash the Army could have justified buying Apache over Tiger and ended up saving money.
Getting into the realms of fantasy now but when you look at what could have been achieved with the same budget, had certain mistakes, that were obviously mistakes at the time, not been made, you can see why some of us get so annoyed when pollies start pork barrelling. We have seen the money that was wasted because of stupid decisions and letting existing capabilities die, or even killing them deliberately to make a couple of electorates somewhere happy, and get pissed when we see it happening again.
