AUKUS Agreement

Mrs PEARCE (King) (14:28): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on how South Australians are benefiting from the AUKUS agreement?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:28): I thank the member for King for her question. The member for King has an electorate that is becoming increasingly younger, and as we see families move into electorates such as the member for King's, they will increasingly turn their mind to the roles that young people will perform in our changing economy here in South Australia.

Just last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the labour force statistics, and those labour force statistics again put South Australia as the equal best jurisdiction in the country in terms of the unemployment rate. Only Western Australia has an unemployment rate as low as the one we enjoy here in South Australia.

The challenge isn't creating jobs; the challenge is actually making sure that we are creating jobs that are becoming increasingly productive, increasingly modern by nature, higher skilled and therefore demanding higher wages. The AUKUS opportunity is an unprecedented one in terms of its scale to be able to achieve that objective.

Just this week, in conjunction with Huntington Ingalls, we saw a number of South Australian manufacturers, or participants in the manufacturing industry, being selected to participate in the Supplier Capability Uplift Program, which is being designed by Huntington Ingalls, which is one of the two manufacturers of US nuclear submarines operating out of Newport News in Virginia.

The partnership that the state government has formed with HII is through our memorandum of understanding, which we signed some time ago—I think it was late last year. We had the MOU late last year with HII. That then resulted in the establishment of the Supplier Capability Uplift Program, which I was able to announce in May this year, when I was travelling to Newport News. Yesterday, five South Australian manufacturers were announced as being selected to participate in that program: McKechnie Iron Foundry, Century Engineering, Levett Engineering, H-E Parts International and MacTaggart Scott Australia—good South Australian companies employing South Australians, with a keen eye to produce equipment that won't just be necessary on the SSN-AUKUS program but also actually supply into the Virginia class program.

Herein lies the whole point for South Australia: you cannot think about the AUKUS program as a chance for South Australian businesses only to contribute to the submarines being built at Osborne. You realise, once you go into the detail, that the AUKUS program is an opportunity for South Australian businesses to supply to a global supply chain that builds nuclear submarines with our UK and US partners. The size of that opportunity is very substantial indeed. It is a massive opportunity that we want to help realise and we are wholeheartedly committed to, which is exactly why we are partnering with companies like Electric Boat, Huntington Ingalls, amongst others.

The news yesterday for McKechnie Iron Foundry—I was down at the McKechnie Iron Foundry yesterday. While other people were focusing on other extreme oriented issues, we were focusing on talking to the workers there about their opportunities and the capability for that business to grow very substantially indeed, to provide more work—more well-paid and secure work—to another generation of South Australians. That is what we are focusing on, and we know just how stark the contrast is.