Page 65 - Australian Defence Magazine March 2019

latory process but I think there’s a shift very much in the appetite for Defence to out- source some of the certification work.
ADM: Do you think that’s driven in part by the campaign to become a top 10 De- fence exporter?
NIOA: I’m not sure that the export strat- egy is driving the change in appetite for out- sourcing the certification. I think it’s being driven more by the constraint on the capac- ity that Defence has to do the body of work that is coming up and they’re just taking a practical, pragmatic approach to how they are going to achieve their capability out- comes. There’s recognition that industry is well equipped and has qualified people that can provide the services they need.
I think that Defence is still considering or
ABOVE: The
NIOA facility in Brisbane includes warehousing and testing spaces.
ABOVE LEFT: Land 40 has been a huge success for the company.
LEFT: Minister for Defence Christopher Pyne at the opening of NIOA’s Canberra office.
trying to understand what the Defence ex- port strategy is going to look like and how they respond to it as an organisation them- selves. They are certainly open to supporting it but I think that they’re still reviewing and revising how they go about supporting it.
ADM: What role do you see SMEs play in the wider Australian Defence industry environment?
NIOA: I guess it varies widely from SME to SME as to their level of success. Certainly this government’s and Defence’s current pro- curement strategies are favouring domestic manufacture and domestic supply, so that is good for SMEs in general.
I don’t think there’s a magic wand for SMEs as far as any policy setting that can say an SME is going to benefit more or less than
a prime or for a multinational. I think Aus- tralian industry will benefit from Defence’s current policy settings and if you’re an SME, if you do a good job, you should benefit along- side any other company that might benefit.
But I think it is still difficult, and probably always will be difficult for SMEs that are small to grow into a prime contractor or get signifi- cant shares of business from foreign prime con- tractors. I don’t see that solving itself quickly.
ADM: What would solve it?
NIOA: I don’t have a magic answer for it! The way we have done it is to invest heavily in our business over a long period of time. It’s not particularly remarkable but it’s the only strategy we could find where we felt we were in control of the outcome and that if we kept focused and we kept investing, we kept dem- onstrating a commitment and we focused on opportunities that were realistic and within our area of expertise that we could develop.
We have slowly but surely succeeded in that. We could equally have failed in that. So I’m not sure it was a magic formula or les- son for anyone else.
ADM: It’s the 20-year overnight success story then?
NIOA: We were established in 1973 and started doing business with Defence in 1996. We didn’t get our first prime contract until about 2015. So it took us 19 years working with Defence to get the first prime contract.
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“There appears to be an appetite in Defence for more industry involvement in the regulatory process.”
ALL IMAGES BY NIOA