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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-11-14 Daily Xml
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Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition

Ms CLANCY (Elder) (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Defence and Space Industries. Can the minister please inform the house on South Australia's presence at the recent Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water) (14:40): I am delighted to talk about this, which was at the beginning of last week. In fact, the Monday followed the very successful exposition up here in South Australia on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday immediately after our last sitting week when we had the Navy and Shipbuilding Careers Expo where we had not only HMAS Warramunga and a Collins class submarine for people to go around but a fantastic expo of job and training opportunities for young people. It was extremely well attended at Outer Harbor.

Then on the Monday commenced the Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition, often called Indo Pac, which was as I understand it the most successful to date. There were apparently a little over 27,000 attendees, which is up from the previous one which was only 25,000, which is already an extraordinarily large exhibition. There were 832 participating exhibitor companies from 21 nations, and I understand that there were 25 international chiefs of navy or their counterparts—a very important step for Australia in our time of making sure we are drawing closer to our allies and also preparing our Navy for defending Australia.

For South Australia we took the largest contingent we have ever taken which was around 80 exhibitors as part of the Defence SA showcase. One of the great pleasures I had on the day and a half that I spent there was to be able to spend time with those companies—not only myself to spend time with those companies but also for a while to have the Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles join me and spend some time with those companies.

One, for example, that particularly drew his attention was AML3D. That is a company that has developed a machine that is capable of doing the 3D printing in metal that means that they can produce entire parts or pieces of rudders and other parts of steering equipment for very large ships, including for the US Navy. They are able to do it with a rapid turnaround rather than having to wait for components to be made elsewhere and to come back.

Richard Marles was very impressed with that and even more so when I pointed out that some of the proofing up of that work was done at the Factory of the Future in Tonsley, run by Flinders University, which of course has been the recipient of some money from South Australia specifically for the purpose of enabling smaller companies and startup companies to be able to trial their services or their creating their products so that they are able to prove up for the defence sector what they are capable of doing—and that was a very good example.

Fleet Space was also there. The nexus between space and defence, of course, is a reasonable overlap, so it was excellent to have that very successful company there. Prism Defence; DEWC Services; and the Defence Teaming Centre, naturally, were there.

I took the chance while I was there not only to catch up with the Deputy Prime Minister, of course, but also to meet with some of the primes who are the crucial companies that purchase from our supply chain. It is so important that they are aware of the capability in South Australia and also participate in developing it. Lockheed Martin, SAAB Australia, Babcock, Nova Systems and Kongsberg were the companies that I spent time with. They had very complimentary things to say about the supply chain in South Australia and also Defence SA's longstanding effort in making sure that our supply chain is well exhibited and understood by the primes. Altogether it was a very successful expo.

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