Conflicted Senate a security risk

The need to diversify the state’s economic base has been clear to Western Australia’s politicians for decades.

During each election cycle they promise the electorate they will work hard to achieve this goal but, four years on, nothing much has changed.

Our inability to diversify is partly caused by voter apathy regarding the role of WA’s 12 senators.

The state’s economic base cannot grow or diversify if we continue to elect Senate representatives who fail to protect WA and allow east-coast biased government policies to siphon money out of the state, as occurred with the GST fiasco.

The architects of Australia’s federation believed in state competition.

They were astute enough to recognise the less-populous states would need some protection from NSW and Victoria using their numbers to implement national policies that primarily benefitted their jurisdictions and hold on power.

The federation’s founders protected WA by ensuring each state had an equal number of senators, no matter their population size.

However, the Senate’s role has been distorted, becoming subjugated to party politics.

It is now hard to imagine a Liberal or National, Green or Labor senator from WA placing the state’s interest before party loyalty.

The lack of an independent WA voice in the Senate could lead to the Collins-class submarine full-cycle maintenance staying at Osborne, South Australia, rather than moving to the Australian Marine Complex (AMC) at Henderson, which sits under the defensive umbrella of Fleet Base West (HMAS Stirling).

I am not aware of anyone who disputes that the symbiotic relationship between HMAS Stirling and the AMC is a world’s best practice example of how to base and maintain a naval fleet.

The Osborne Naval Shipyard was established in 1987 for the Australian Submarine Corporation to construct the six Collins-class submarines.

Since then, Osborne has been reliant on major government naval contracts to continue its operation, which has led a dependency culture to grow within SA’s economic and political structures.

Any strategic benefit of building and maintaining naval ships at Osborne disappeared with submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles.

Just one submarine, operating from the vast Southern Ocean, launching a missile at Osborne is all it will take to destabilise the nation’s northward defence focus.

Threatening Osborne would provide an easy win to any aggressor undertaking asymmetric naval warfare, as it would force Australia to pull significant naval resources away from the Indo-Pacific.

Everything is easy with hindsight, but what were our politicians thinking when they located the nation’s principal naval construction and refurbishment facility thousands of kilometres away from where the east and west coast naval fleets are based and operate?

Surely someone pointed out that downtime of warships exponentially increases with the distance from the facilities required to sustain them in peacetime or repair them if damaged in a conflict.

With our region destabilising due to a more aggressive and nationalistic China, the decades of inept management of Australia’s security, by both political parties, is becoming clearer.

The Osborne shipyard looks increasingly like a major strategic blunder, just as not moving Australia’s east coast fleet from Garden Island, Sydney, is an example of politicians kicking the can down the road for someone else to sort out.

Fleet Base East (HMAS Kuttabul) is virtually impossible to secure and places numerous constraints on any expansion. Having large warships berthed so near to the densely populated areas of Kings Cross and Potts Point has become increasingly indefensible.

The east coast fleet should have begun a staggered relocation to Port Kembla or the lower Brisbane River 20 years ago.

Unfortunately, it looks like Canberra’s ruling optimists are still struggling to believe the risk of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific has significantly increased; political machinations continue to dominate and interfere with defence decisions.

The only reason the Osborne facility is still being considered for the full-cycle submarine maintenance is that SA has two independent senators, one who has threatened to disrupt the Morrison government’s legislative agenda if the sub work moves to WA.

If full-cycle maintenance of the subs stays in SA it demonstrates politics still trumps national security.

It also shows the benefits SA has obtained by electing a couple of independent senators who do not have divided loyalties.

David Kobelke spent 15 years managing CCIWA’s Australian industry participation unit