Page 105 - Australian Defence Magazine Dec19-Jan20

DECEMBER 2019 – JANUARY 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
FROM THE SOURCE MELISSA PRICE 105
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 108
$200 billion is buying us much more than submarines and widgets, it’s bringing in overseas companies who are setting up, like Lürssen, like Rheinmetall and they have export as- pirations from their Australian base.
ADM: What are the checks and balances to make sure that those bigger international companies are leveraging sup- ply chains here and not the ones in their home market? PRICE: We haven’t finalised it yet but there will be an as- surance/audit process, which is something that I’m driving, to make sure that if you said you’re going to have a certain amount of AIC, I’m going to hold you to account.
It’s no secret that I’ve ensured that all of the primes, those major defence contractors, they know that I’m watch- ing very carefully, to the point where I’ve had one or two of them say to me, “Oh Melissa, I know you don’t care so much about us, you really care about AIC” and I say, “Oh no, I care about you a lot, I just want to make sure that you do the right thing by Australian small businesses”, and I’m feeling very confident that we’re on track.
ADM: Do budgets/schedules exist for the different phases of Sea 1000 i.e. figures set by the Commonwealth against which it can determine whether anticipated spending or AIC decisions by Naval Group are or are not acceptable? PRICE: At the moment we’re in the design phase, which is a two-year period and a contract of $605 million. Once the design phase is finished or when it’s nearing finalisation, we’ll then have a better idea of how we’re going to spend the money and where. So at the moment that
ABOVE: The Hunter class provides an opportunity for SMEs to work with BAE Systems.
the Defence community? And not just the shipbuilding side of the workforce equation.
PRICE: That’s right and I think the use of the term STEM, frankly you’re preaching to the converted. I don’t have a sub- stitute for it. I think we should just call it for what it is, that
perhaps detailed budget that you’re asking about, that doesn’t exist yet.
There’s still a lot that I can be getting on with in the meantime. In particular I had a very, very good trip to France; went out to Cherbourg, spent half a day with all these fabulous, most of them young, Australian engineers who are over there learning, the basis of that technology transfer. Most of them are from Adelaide; they all intend to go back to Adelaide.
“THERE’S A WHOLE SUITE OF SKILLSETS AND PROFESSIONS THAT WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO BUILD THOSE 57 VESSELS.”
we’re looking for people who have got an ap- titude for maths and science. But it’s not just people with an aptitude for maths and science, we’re going to need very, very good quality tradespeople who may not necessarily have that on their resume but they could have great attention to detail, a great work ethic, and are interested in being an Australian shipbuilder.
In November we had the inaugural two- day Skills Summit in Perth. It wasn’t one of those conferences where everyone just sits on their backside for two days, it was very interactive. It was a combination of industry,
You often hear about these are the initia-
tives of the primes. Until you see it, until you touch it you don’t realise how powerful it is or how valuable it’s going to be and I think those 50 or 60 Australians that are over there, that they are critically important to the success of this project.
That’s what I can do right now and in addition to that, it’s the skillset. You know, talk about shipbuilding; we’ve got 4,000 people approximately working in shipbuilding in our country. We’re going to build 57 vessels. We need 15,000 Australians working in shipbuilding and these are the things we can focus on right now and that’s what I’m doing.
ADM: On that front, you’ve been quoted as saying you don’t like the term STEM. What could we use instead to help spread the word around the workforce challenges in
education departments, obviously Defence Department and other training organisations and training departments from around the country. I can tell you, most of them did not have great understanding of what we are going to achieve with that $200 billion program of work. So that in itself was a great education for them.
When I was explaining to them I wanted to dispense with talking about STEM, because we don’t need everybody going to university, we also want people going to TAFEs and getting a whole range of skills. There was a lot of nodding in the room and I think we’re at that point where we need to be more exact with our language about what is it that we’re actually looking for, whether it’s project managers or schedulers or engineers or naval architects. There’s a whole suite of skillsets and pro- fessions that we need to be able to build those 57 vessels.
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