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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-07-01 Daily Xml
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Defence Industries

Mrs POWER (Elder) (14:10): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier please update the house on the commonwealth's $270 billion investment in defence and what that means for South Australia?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:10): I thank the member for Elder for her interest in this very exciting announcement today by our Prime Minister, the Hon. Scott Morrison. He has done an outstanding job as the chair of the national cabinet, guiding Australia's response to the coronavirus. I think that we are the envy of the world in this country.

But not content with doing an outstanding job as a Prime Minister leading our country's response to the coronavirus, he is now leading the economic recovery. He is now leading that economic recovery, and we are the happy beneficiaries of some of the directions which he is taking now with a commitment of $270 billion worth of defence expenditure over the next 10 years.

As you would be aware, sir, South Australia is the defence state. We have enormous capability, whether it be research capability within our universities or the DSTG, whether it be our shipbuilding capability, whether it be our electronic warfare or our surveillance and reconnaissance capability out at Edinburgh. We have enormous capability here in South Australia, and we are fortunate that we have a government which recognises unequivocally the strategic defence capability of having a strong defence industry—sovereign capability for our nation—and that was made very clear by the Prime Minister's announcement today.

We are very, very excited about it, especially when you start to unpack that $270 billion announcement today and you look at some of the components and where we are here in South Australia. We already know that $15 billion is going to be spent in terms of our cyber capability. This is an area where the government has been working virtually since the day we arrived in office. We know that this is a growth sector. The commonwealth now recognises this as a massive defence initiative for our nation, and we are ready to support that here in South Australia with the recent opening of the Australian Cyber Collaboration Centre, which the Minister for Innovation and Skills referred to yesterday in this parliament.

There was also a strong element of expenditure identified in the area of space, and in particular in the area of satellites. All members should know that on Lot Fourteen we have the headquarters for the Australian Space Agency, as well as recently it has been announced that we will have Mission Control for the Australian Space Agency. But what we also need to understand is that Lot Fourteen and Adelaide is also now the home of the largest space-related research project in the history of the country.

The SmartSat CRC is a massive collaboration between university, the private sector and government. We have companies which are members of that program and which are already building satellites on that site—satellites for the CSIRO, satellites for the Space Agency and satellites for the Department of Defence—and the Prime Minister has messaged and made it very clear today that this is an area of great strategic importance for our nation.

So is hypersonics, and we know that we've got great research capability and also great testing capability in hypersonics at Woomera. The underwater antisubmarine warfare capability that we have here in South Australia fits directly into the direction that the Prime Minister is taking, and of course we are excited that there is a further $75 billion earmarked for a maritime build beyond the Hunter class and the Attack class that we are already working on in South Australia—so, much to be very focused on because we know this will create thousands and thousands of jobs for our state into the future.

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