AUKUS Submarines

Wednesday March 22, 2023

Mr BELL (Mount Gambier) (14:33): My question is to the Premier. How can South Australia's regions prepare for and benefit from the recent AUKUS partnership announcement?

 

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:33): I thank the member for Mount Gambier for his question because I think the member for Mount Gambier and myself, although coming from different political philosophies in terms of background, are in furious agreement about the virtue of work and the dignity of work and the opportunity it provides to so many people, so I appreciate the context of his question.

What I can say to the member for Mount Gambier is that we have every reason to believe that the size and the scale of the AUKUS opportunity doesn't just mean that there will be opportunities for people in regional communities, including around the Limestone Coast, but more than that, necessarily for us to be able to realise the ambitions that we have in front of us we will have to draw on the population and the skills that exist in regional South Australia, not just in the Limestone Coast but also in other critical areas such as the Upper Spencer Gulf.

We know in the Limestone Coast that there is industry and a demonstration of procuring skills that will be called upon during the course of the AUKUS agreement. That is why our investments in technical colleges aren't just orientated to metropolitan Adelaide but also orientated to regional South Australia, including in the member for Mount Gambier's electorate. As to the investment that we are making in Mount Gambier with the technical college, we of course have announced a greater degree of detail about how we are going to operate that in practice.

On the back of the member for Mount Gambier's advocacy, the government elected to no longer build the technical college attached to the high school but rather build it at TAFE, and we are now actively contemplating whether or not the government's expansion of TAFE, which is a substantial commitment to the tune of millions of dollars—I am trying to call the figure off the top of my head; I think it is $5 million—can then be collaborated with the technical college along with the Forestry Centre for Excellence all in one single effort to try to maximise the uplift of that opportunity. But at the core of that is the development of skills, and not just skills orientated towards the forestry industry, although that is central to it, but skills that will equip young people to be able to participate in the supply chain that contributes to the AUKUS proposition.

The second element, I would say, is that all of the attention, quite understandably, around AUKUS has been around pillar 1 of the AUKUS proposition. There is also a second pillar as well which speaks to other industries such as high-tech industries, cyber and the like, which of course don't have the same requisite requirements about physical locality that the building of the submarines at the Osborne shipyards does, which will translate to yet more opportunity.

Understanding that AUKUS is more than just building submarines is a very, very important element of ensuring that we capitalise on the economic opportunity through defence and cyber industries in particular. So the core thing that state government can do to make sure that particularly young people in the Limestone Coast can get access to the AUKUS benefits is to make sure we are investing in their education, training and skills. We have a policy to do that, not just through TAFE, not just through the technical college, but the combination of the two.

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