Why we must strive for the most sovereign defence position we can

We are living in a very uncertain world with greater instability in the region than in years gone by.  

We have a situation where our major Defence partner is at odds with our major trading partner - and that creates an environment that Australia has not managed before.  

We’ve seen disruption in supply chains and that disruption of supply chains has also disrupted the free movement of people.  

We've seen a lack of travel because of measures associated with COVID and very, very low immigration levels for the last three years in Australia, which has affected workforce and gives us an extremely tight labor market.  

In conjunction, Australia has seen a rise in nationalist sentiment and a desire for self-reliance because of these factors and at the same time, we’re seeing significant increases in our defence budget.  

The policies that Australia has designed, that the Department has decided on are what’s known as Sovereign Industrial Capability Priorities (SICPs) for Australia.  

These SICPs weren’t decided by industry. They were decided by Government and the Parliament.  

In terms of sovereignty, I will please and offend people in equal measure when I say this – sovereign means control. It’s really simple - look it up in the dictionary.  

It doesn't mean privileged access and it doesn't mean blame our friends – it means control. Australian control and Australian companies controlling the decision making. 

We’ve got to accept that we can’t have that very high-level control of everything across these SICPs. These are the priorities. These are the things that four years ago the Government said are our most pressing sovereign industrial priorities.  

Let’s take a look at the first SICP, which is our continuous shipbuilding program, including submarine acquisition. Australia has virtually no control over it, it’s almost exclusively controlled by the United States and the United Kingdom.  

As for the other SICPs, from advanced signals processing in electronic warfare to aerospace platform deeper maintenance to land combat and protected vehicles technology upgrades to combat clothing – all of these are done almost exclusively by companies and/or primes from overseas including the UK, US and Europe.  

While Australia delivers hands on submarine maintenance and upgrades to the Collins Class submarines, the systems that we are monitoring, the systems that we are operating, the export controls, the access to technology is almost exclusively from the United States and France.  

Of course, they are great allies of Australia but nonetheless this doesn’t pass the top sovereign test.  

Maybe it’s the best we can get and maybe it’s good enough. But for me, we shouldn’t settle for good enough.  

Now we get to the last SICP – Test and Evaluation, Certification and Systems Assurance. It’s the last remaining SICP which is yet to be ceded to foreign control.  

If we look at the evolution of Test and Evaluation (T&E), we still see a very stove-piped, project by project approach to test and evaluation by the Department and by industry.  

T&E is an area where we’ve got technological advancements as things move out of these stovepipes into joint warfare, into allied warfare, particularly now that we’re looking at an entirely different potential enemy.  

There is a very, very poor use of the workforce because of those stovepipes and very tight labor market.   

So, the question remains. Why shouldn’t we try and make T&E as sovereign as we can?  

One reason is purely that we can do it because we have not yet given up the preeminent position as we have done in most of the other SICPs.  

Having been the Chief Executive of BAE for a long, long time, I come from a history of vertical primes and hold myself entirely guilty for the last of the Australia defence companies when we bought Tenix in 2008.  

What we have in T&ECSA is what I call a horizontal prime. This is a position which is ubiquitous, so it runs through every environment, and it runs through the whole lifecycle from requirements to disposal.  

Why wouldn’t we take this opportunity to make this SICP truly sovereign to give us a preeminent sovereign position in Australia, with Australian business control?  

If you take a look at the motorcar industry here in Australia, we thought we had control. We were a sovereign automobile making country.  

We could design them, we could build them, we could sustain them, we could sell them, we could export them.  

And one day a couple of people in Detroit and a couple of people in Tokyo decided that we weren’t going to have a car industry anymore and we didn’t have one – because we lost industrial control. We fooled ourselves that we had sovereignty – and we didn’t.  

But, there is a place for everybody.

There needs to be some element of real Australian sovereignty and I would argue Test and Evaluation, Certification and Systems Assurance is that opportunity.  

Finally, in order to support this, Nova Systems is really excited to announce we will be establishing an Australian-first Test Evaluation Centre of Excellence to assist in the creation of truly sovereign capabilities.  

We are bringing together defence, industry and academia to work together deliver integrated joint-force test and evaluation and capability assurance.  

This is a national initiative that will support the delivery of sovereign – Australian owned and controlled - T&E. It will support the acceleration of emerging technologies, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the Australian T&E workforce.