Page 44 - Australian Defence Magazine Feb 2020
P. 44

44  DEFENCE BUSINESS  VIEW FROM CANBERRA
FEBRUARY 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
2020 HINDSIGHT
It’s always intriguing to look back on cabinet papers of governments long gone, peruse their decisions on defence matters and assess how those impact on the present day defence force.
A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | CANBERRA
THESE are the document released at end of each year by the National Archives of Australia (NAA). Traditionally these were withheld for 30 years but that was reduced to 20 years under the last Labor government.
For the transition period, two years’ worth of documents are released at once and for the latest release that was 1998 and 1999. This initially wasn’t a big time for Defence, although it soon became one with missions in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some decisions made two decades back are enduring effects. The big issue of 1998-99 was the GST. As economic reforms go, this was enormous and didn’t come easily. It’s now ranked up
there with the big changes of the Hawke-Keating years. Looking back, some decisions fall into another group - they sure wouldn’t have blown that much money had they
known what we know now.
Into that category falls the April 1998 How-
ard government decision to allocate $85 mil- lion for additional Penguin anti-ship missiles to arm helicopters for the Anzac frigates.
The idea was to have the funds ready to ac- quire the missiles from Kongsberg of Norway at the best possible price. Any price was too much, as the Seasprite helicopters for which they were intended never actually entered service.
In the money well spent column goes the Hornet Upgrade Program (HUG), for which the government allocated $1.3 billion for better radars, improved self defence capability, improved communications links and signature reduction.
The government said this was needed to maintain an effective fighter force “in light of regional capability de- velopments.” It also said investigations would also start into options for new fighters to replace the Hornets from about 2012-2015.
That new fighter was F-35 and we know what happened there. Long delays meant F-35 is only now entering service and has yet to reach IOC. In the meantime, the Classic Hor- nets have remained, supplemented by two dozen Super Hor- nets as a bridging capability. Though no longer at the leading
“IN THE MONEY WELL SPENT COLUMN GOES THE HORNET UPGRADE PROGRAM”
edge, they are entirely capable platforms. Another key decision of the Howard govern- ment related to the RAAF’s VIP aircraft fleet. In opposition, the coalition mercilessly pilloried Paul Keating’s imperial pretentions when he proposed upgrading one of the VIP
aircraft for overseas travel.
In government, suddenly the coalition
found they needed to replace the VIP fleet of
five Dassault Falcon 900 aircraft whose lease was expiring plus the RAAF’s ageing and noisy Boeing 707.
It considered various options. The conclusion was that big aircraft weren’t that necessary as three quarters of special purpose (VIP) flights carried eight or fewer passengers and only one per cent carried 26 or more.
It settled on two Boeing 737 Business Jets and three Bom- bardier Challenger 604s which were delivered in 2002.
This was fine for travel by politicians and their immediate staff but on major overseas trips, travelling media and sup- porting public servants, previously transported in the back end of the 707, had to follow on commercial fights.
That was fine right up until Garuda flight 200 crash land- ed in March 2007, killing 21, among them two AFP officers, two Australian embassy officials and a journalist following then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer to a conference in Yogyakarta. Downer was aboard one of the Challengers.
We do this better now. One of the RAAF’s KC-30A has been converted to VIP configuration for overseas transport of the PM and his extended entourage. ■
A decade later, Labor canned the entire project, flushing more than $1 billion of taxpayer funds and leaving the Navy with a warehouse of Penguins acquired at a cost of more than $200 million but no platform to launch them from.
In the end Defence recouped pennies on the dollar, doing a 50-50 deal for Kongsberg to overhaul and then flog our Penguins on the international arms market. Buyers appar- ently included NZ and Brazil.
A similar case is the decision to spend $230 million for further upgrades of the Army’s Vietnam-era M113 Armoured Personnel Carriers; replacing engine, transmission and tracks and addition- al measures to protect against modern small arms bullets.
In all, 431 vehicles were upgraded at a cost of about $1 billion. These may have been the best M-113s on the planet but underneath they still featured the original flat-bottomed aluminium hull and slab sides, with all their vulnerabilities to IEDs, RPGs and much else on the modern battlefield.
Not for the nothing is the Army shopping for a new Infan- try Fighting Vehicle under Land 400 Phase 3.
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