PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks very much Wing Commander, it’s great to be here at Fairbairn to officially announce that Australia will be acquiring at least eight of these Poseidon aircraft that it has just been my pleasure and privilege to inspect.
I want to thank members of the US Air Force for giving me the opportunity to inspect this fine and highly capable aircraft which will be at the heart of our surveillance and maritime strike capacity for the decades to come.
This is a very important Defence acquisition. It has been quite a long time coming, but now we are going ahead. The first Australian Poseidon will be operational in 2017. All eight will be operational by 2021 and we reserve the right to make further purchases as determined by the White Paper process.
This is a $4 billion acquisition. Up to a billion dollars of that money is available to be spent in Australia, both on work associated with the aircraft and on work associated with RAAF Base Edinburgh in South Australia where these aircraft will be stationed.
The first duty of government is the defence of the nation. This is a Government which is absolutely committed to the border security of our country.
Yes, these are maritime strike aircraft. Yes, they are anti-submarine aircraft – but they are also border security aircraft with an enormous capacity to surveil our oceans as required.
Australia, our economic zone alone, is four per cent of the Earth's oceans. Our search and rescue zone is some 11 per cent of the Earth's oceans. It is an enormous part of the Earth that we are required to supervise and, if necessary, control, and these aircraft are going to be a very important part of our capacity to do that in the decades to come. I want to assure everyone of this Government's willingness to do that, as long as we are in office.
So, great to be here and I will hand over to distinguished colleagues.
DEFENCE MINISTER:
Thank you, Prime Minister, CDF, VCDF, Secretary, Chief of Air Force, Ambassador Berry.
Today marks the advent of a whole new strategic aura for the Australian Defence Force. We have seen since 1959 one of the most outstanding capabilities in terms of the P-3 Orion, in terms of maritime surveillance be used and spirally developed over 40 years to provide, Australia particularly, an absolute world-class cutting edge intelligence and maritime surveillance capacity.
The challenge for us is to come out of that very successful platform that we've deployed into the Middle East in the last 10 years – that is used by Japan, United States and New Zealand – and come into this current generation of very technically advanced aircraft.
So, with our air-to-air refuellers, we will have an endurance of 20 hours. We can double the amount of sonobuoys deployed. We will have Mark 54 Torpedoes launch from upwards of 5,000 feet.
This is a phenomenal strategic capability for Australia.
I'm so pleased to welcome all of our American friends who have brought this aircraft down and thank you for that. It's a delight for me to be there with my Prime Minister, with the service chiefs that are here today, to show them the cutting-edge capability that Boeing has produced and how excited we are that we are joining the club.
So, thank you. Can I hand over to the Chief of Air Force.
AIR MARSHAL GEOFF BROWN (CHIEF OF AIRFORCE):
Thanks very much, Minister, and I'm very pleased with the announcement today.
The P-8 is the world's most advanced maritime patrol aircraft and very much a worthy successor to our P-3 Orion. With the P-8, we'll continue a long relationship that we've had with the US Navy, with maritime patrol aircraft. It started over 70 years ago when we both flew Catalinas together. In the '50s and '60s, it was Neptune aircraft and certainly for the last 40 years it has been the P-3 Orion aircraft.
The other thing I would like to talk about is just give you a quick snapshot of Orion operations. Not many people realise that the Orion crews are probably one of the most deployed crews in the Australian Defence Force. They spend up to six months away from home, and just right at this moment, there are P-3s off Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, doing an anti-submarine exercise. We have P-3s up in Darwin, Cocos Islands and Learmonth, helping Border Protection Command and tomorrow this P-8 will fly to Perth and join our P-3s in an exercise with the Royal Australian Navy and the US Navy anti-submarine exercise off Perth.
The P-8 gives us an unprecedented capability to find, fix and track both surface ships and submarines and in combination with our wedged tail aircraft which you see out there at the moment which has an unprecedented ability to attract airborne targets. It will certainly help the Royal Australian Navy be able to have freedom of manoeuvre right through our region for the next 20 or 30 years.
That's certainly important in the execution of an Australian maritime strategy.
Thank you.
JOHN BERRY (UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR):
Prime Minister, Defence Minister Johnston, Geoff, thank you so much. Secretary Richardson, General Hurley, Air Marshal Binskin, and to our great Poseidon team who has helped to safely bring this P-8 to us today.
I encourage you while you are in Perth, which is Minister Johnston’s home town, one restaurant recommendation I will make – Little Creatures – worth the stop. I think you will enjoy it.
Today's announcement is the culmination of years, of careful planning and coordinated efforts by the United States Navy, the Royal Australian Air Force and Boeing Defence.
Australia is our staunchest ally, and they are a key partner in this region. This acquisition will further strengthen our alliance and improve our ability to work together to provide humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and to ensure our mutual security in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Poseidon is the most advanced, long-range maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft in the world. It provides superior maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability and it is coupled with anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capability.
In addition, the Poseidon is safer and requires less maintenance than the P-3s, a feature we can all be grateful for.
Since 2009, our Defence Departments have been in a co-operative partnership, and for the past five years, Australians have been working with us in Maryland, providing both management and technical expertise to this programme.
They are working as we develop the Poseidon, and in fact we will be welcoming five more Australians to that effort in the very near future.
Their participation ensures that upgrades and modifications will keep costs down for everyone, and will ease the introduction into the Australian fleet.
The US Navy P-8 behind us will be part of this year's tactical anti-submarine, warfare maritime exercise and we can't wait for Australians joining us soon with your own RAAF P-8s.
Congratulations to everyone on the team who have worked so hard for this important day.
Thank you, Prime Minister.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, or Defence Minister, Poseidon has had problems with things like radar and assistance integration. Have those problems been completely overcome and are we getting value for money here?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes to both questions. One of the advantages of coming into the programme at this point is that all of those difficulties have, as I understand it, been resolved and obviously with any programme such as this, there will be all sorts of upgrades in the course of time. That's what happens with all of these platforms.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, given your comments, your opening comments, I gather that these will be used to track asylum seeker boats, should they resume?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, we'll use them for our national purposes, and a very important national purpose is border protection. Now, they certainly won't be the only asset that is deployed for border protection. There are many other assets that will be deployed for border protection. I should also point out that we expect the first one to be in operational service by 2017 and I think the boats will be stopped by then.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, spending $4 billion on these aircraft, which is a lot of money at a time when we've been told the Budget is very tight. Does spending this sort of money become difficult to say no to companies when they are coming to the Government looking for handouts?
PRIME MINISTER:
There’s a world of difference between spending money on the essential purposes of government - and there’s no more essential purpose of government than national security - and giving money to private businesses to sustain them in business because they can’t sustain themselves through their ordinary operations. I just think they’re two completely different things.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, a couple of weeks ago we had a visit to this region by a Chinese flotilla that included a submarine. Does that have anything to do with the timing of this announcement or can you comment on the significance of that foray?
PRIME MINISTER:
This is a long planned acquisition. To use the defence terminology, first pass approval for this was given back in mid-2007. Now second pass approval has only been provided very recently because of the need to ensure that the Poseidon programme is fully functional. But we are absolutely confident that we are now purchasing an absolutely first-class aircraft and we think that this is going to be a very important part of our nation’s defences for decades to come.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, this is part of, I understand, a $7 billion surveillance programme as such. What are the other elements that are coupled with this aircraft purchase?
PRIME MINISTER:
I’ll ask Senator Johnston to add to this, but this is the first big purchase as we reequip ourselves to be a first-class nation when it comes to maritime surveillance and maritime capability. There’s also the Triton unmanned aircraft which we are investigating with a view to purchase, there’s further Poseidons that we expect to purchase subject to the inevitable review of the White Paper process and we’re looking at further unmanned aircraft down the track.
The determination of this Government is to ensure that the nation’s defences are in first-class order. We are a friendly nation. We have nothing but goodwill for the wider world, but it is important that we are able, if needs be, to defend our nation. It’s important, if needs be, that we’re able to work in concert with our friends and allies and this will make it far more possible for us to do that.
DEFENCE MINISTER:
Well, the Prime Minister’s left me very little to add. He’s answered that question very completely. The Global Hawk has had a magnificent recent history from an ISR platform perspective. The vast distances that we have to surveil, as the island nation we are, mean that long enduring, high altitude unmanned aerial vehicles are both a cost effective and strategic capacity that we need. Accordingly, the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance programme of the US Navy is something we are watching closely and we’ll go back into participating in with a view to making a decision into future about the Triton which we see as a very viable option for Australia.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, one of the notes in this release says significant opportunities for industry and jobs creation. I’m just wondering if you can tell us a bit more about what some of those opportunities will be given the warnings we’ve seen from the shipping industry about news of an approaching valley of death, I guess, in that area?
PRIME MINISTER:
It's very important that we ensure that Australian Defence suppliers have an orderly progression of work. The last thing we would want to see is the situation which has built up in previous years of peaks and troughs, the so-called valley of death. Now, it's going to take us some time to sort these issues out, because we're dealing with a succession of orders which we have inherited. We are determined to sort it out. My understanding is that there is up to a billion dollars of work, some of it associated with the aircraft themselves, some of it associated with systems, much of it associated with new construction at RAAF base Edinburgh in South Australia. This is not only good news for our armed forces, this is good news for South Australia, the announcement that we made today.
DEFENCE MINISTER:
I fully endorse that. I mean the global supply chain elements of this platform and other aerospace platforms mean that we must do a lot of work in countries. South Australia is the principle beneficiary of this particular platform coming forward.
PRIME MINISTER:
There are some 3,000 people employed with Boeing Australia. This is Boeing's largest operation outside of the United States, as I understand it, and Boeing, of course, provide us with the air frame and much of the other equipment that will be part of this whole Poseidon project.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, can I ask you on another matter then, you mentioned assistance to companies before. Can you say when you first started the discussions with Cadbury for the pledge to give that company $16 million of taxpayer and was Mr Alastair Furnival involved in either facilitating those discussions or in those discussions at any time?
PRIME MINISTER:
The point I want to make about this whole business is that we could not have been more transparent about this. We made an announcement during the election campaign. It was an announcement that we would spend $16 million essentially on tourism infrastructure that was very important for southern Tasmania. We made that announcement upfront during the election campaign. Some of you might have been there and had the opportunity to ask questions about it at the time. There was some controversy about it at the time, I seem to recall, but we were absolutely utterly upfront about it. We took it to the people and the people spoke, and it's going to go ahead.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, Christine Lagarde has called for action on global poverty and climate change as part of your economic talks over the weekend. What are you doing to address those two things?
PRIME MINISTER:
The G20 is a very important opportunity for Australia, not just to showcase our country, but to provide a measure of leadership to the wider world, and we certainly are taking this chance extremely seriously. It's not often that our country will host such a gathering, and it's not often that our country has the chance to be as close to the heart of global decision making as we will be this year. The best way to address global poverty is to boost economic growth, and that's the focus of the G20 this year. We've got to boost economic growth and that means freer trade, it means less regulation, it means more infrastructure, it means better banking regulation, it means more effective tax systems and that's what the focus is going to be - there are all sorts of other issues, important issues, which Australia has an interest in, which other countries have an interest in - but that's going to be the focus of the G20 year. We do not want to clutter up the G20 agenda with every worthy and important cause because if we do, we will squander the opportunity to make a difference in the vital area of economic growth.
QUESTION:
What about climate change? She says that every country has to have a decent policy on that which link into their economic management as well?
PRIME MINISTER:
I was lucky enough to have a bit of time to talk to Christine Lagarde myself yesterday; a very, very impressive person with one of the most important jobs in the world. We had a very good discussion, including about climate change and I was able to assure her that we are confident here in Australia of meeting our five per cent emissions reduction targets by 2020. But we’re going to do it through incentives, not penalties. The last thing we want to do is shackle our economy with a carbon tax. While I'm on that subject, we are all mourning the closedown of the Alcoa plant at Point Henry near Geelong. I regret to say that's the carbon tax doing its job. It's not the only factor in the closure of Point Henry, don't get me wrong, but the whole point of the carbon tax is to stop operations like that, and under the former government's own modeling, there was going to be a 60 per cent plus reduction in aluminum manufacturing here in Australia. So, if you’re serious about protecting jobs in manufacturing, let's get rid of the carbon tax, let's do it now and I call on Bill Shorten to stop standing in the way of the manufacturing industries of our country and allow this Government to implement its mandate of repealing the carbon tax.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, just on the Western Australian Senate vote, is the Liberal Party confident that it will hold that third spot in the Senate ballot? And also are you going to be spending much time in Western Australia as part of this new campaign?
PRIME MINISTER:
I expect to spend plenty of time in Western Australia. I’d be quite frequently in Western Australia anyway, but obviously it's going to be more important than ever to be in Western Australia in the next couple of months. If the public want to see the carbon tax gone, the mining tax gone - people have got to vote for candidates who support the repeal of the carbon tax and the mining tax. The only candidates that you can rely on to repeal the carbon tax and repeal the mining tax are the Coalition’s candidates, are Liberal National candidates. These are anti-Western Australian taxes, let's be absolutely crystal clear - the carbon tax and mining tax are anti-Western Australian taxes. We support Western Australia and we best support Western Australia by getting rid of these taxes and that means voting for Coalition candidates.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, are workers' penalty rates in the firing line of this Productivity Commission review?
PRIME MINISTER:
The Productivity Commission review was a commitment that we took to the election. It certainly wasn’t the only commitment that we took to the election, and it was simply a commitment to have a review in the course of this term, so I wouldn't want people to get over excited about any particular commitment.
We will keep all of our commitments, including that one, but no one should anticipate that this is going to be rushed through in the next few months. We will do it in an orderly and timely fashion and our priority at the moment when it comes to improving our workplaces is to ensure that we've got honest unions and honest union officials, and what we've seen over the last few months, over the last couple of years, is an accumulating mountain of evidence of mismanagement and at times corruption inside unions.
We've just announced a Royal Commission that will shine a great big spotlight into these dark corners of our community because we’re on the side of honest workers and honest unions and unionists against the dishonest officials who have so ripped people off and so dishonoured the Labor movement. In the light of the latest evidence, I've got to ask again, whose side is Bill Shorten on? Whose side is Bill Shorten on? For too long the Labor Party in the Parliament has been running a protection racket for a protection racket. If Bill Shorten wants to really show that he’s turned his back on the Rudd-Gillard era; he will support the Royal Commission, he will support re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and he will indicate that as far as he is concerned, the kind of dishonour associated with people like Craig Thomson, who he defended for a long time, has been put well and truly in the past.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, on Manus Island what have you done to reassure yourself that the detainees there are being treated fairly and that the PNG police didn’t act violently against them?
PRIME MINISTER:
Three points to make. The first point is that General Campbell, the head of Operation Sovereign Borders, is in Manus now and I’m confident that General Campbell and his team will get to the bottom of exactly what happened.
The second point is that we are working very well and constructively with PNG. I am grateful – very, very grateful – to PNG and the PNG government, from Prime Minister O’Neill down, for the assistance that they have offered Australia in its time of need. It was a tremendous show of support – of fraternal support – of regional mateship that we’ve seen from the PNG government, both to Australia under the former government and now to Australia at this time.
Third point I make is that we will keep control of these centres and if people are in riotous assembly, they will be dealt with at all times fairly, but if necessary, firmly. The Australian Government is not going to be deterred from the course of border protection that we are embarked upon. We will protect our borders, we will stop the boats and we will make it absolutely crystal clear: if you come to this country illegally by boat, you will never stay here.
QUESTION:
You said no health or education cuts before the election, are you prepared to restate that commitment now?
PRIME MINISTER:
We will absolutely keep our commitments. Does that mean that every single bit of existing spending will remain in perpetuity? Of course not, because if we find a more efficient way of spending money, if we find a more effective way of deploying taxpayers’ resources to help the Australian community, we’d be crazy not to adopt it and plainly there are efficiencies that are possible in health and in a whole host of areas. For instance, we don’t need anything like the half a dozen bureaucracies that the former government established as part of its hospital changes, so we absolutely reserve the right to spend money more effectively than our predecessors.
As a former health minister who declared regularly, meant it and delivered upon it, that I wanted to be the best friend that Medicare had ever had - I can say that again as a Prime Minister - I want this Government to be the best friend that Medicare has ever had. This Government’s very strong purpose is to protect and improve our great Medicare system and we will rightly be judged on how we deliver on that commitment.
[ends]