“The AUKUS nuclear submarine project will bleed the Australian Defence Force white”, on top of the billions in annual Defence spending waste

Costly failure after failure

Defence procurement is a shambles and national expenditure disgrace. Project after project blows out in cost and schedule, with some projects being cancelled all together.

Every year the Auditor-General releases a Major Projects Report into Defence’s major projects. The most recent report covered 21 projects worth $58 billion dollars. Across those 21 projects, there had been $18.5 billion in cost increases – that’s 18,500 million dollars for those that can’t easily grapple with the large amounts of money with which Defence plays.

Across those 21 projects the schedule slippage was 405 months – 34 years. A number of projects, excluding the future submarine project for the moment, have either been binned or did not meet capability requirements. They are:

• The Multiple-Role Helicopter program – $3.8 billion wasted.
• The Sky Guardian medium altitude long endurance attack drone program – $1.3 billion
  wasted.
• The Army’s Battle Management system – a billion wasted.
• The Spartan battlefield airlift aircraft – $1.4 billion wasted.
• The Tiger helicopter program – another billion wasted.

That’s eight and a half billion dollars of taxpayers’ money just thrown away. That’s eight billion dollars of new capability our brave front-line Defence Force members don’t have.

Source: Dumb Ways to Buy: Defence “shambles” unveiled – former submariner and senator Rex Patrick – Michael West