Staff disgruntlement might be widespread within the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) but on the positive side, it has achieved a new record: the fastest decline in Australian public service history. The agency was only established in July 2023 but is now the subject of a review by former Defence secretary and national security establishment eminence grise Dennis Richardson.
The review comes nearly three months after the ABC’s Andrew Greene revealed serious staff problems within the agency set up to oversee AUKUS, despite assurances from agency head Jonathan Mead that everything was fine. Greene broke the story of the Richardson review yesterday, while the office of Defence Minister Richard Marles was still trying to pretend there was no review.
The ASA is receiving nearly $2 billion from 2023-28 alone, and it has already proven to be a lucrative agency for consultants. Despite being funded for a workforce of 665 this year, rising to nearly 900 by 2026, the ASA has in its short existence spent $70 million on “management support services” and $26 million on “management advisory services”, according to contracts published on AusTender. It has also spent $1.7 million on external providers for recruitment.
The big consulting winner was McKinsey, which scored a $9.5 million contract in August — though the public isn’t permitted to know what for, due to “intellectual property” concerns (indeed, the ASA frequently invokes confidentiality to hide details of its largest contracts). KPMG — despite being notorious for ripping off Defence — has garnered contracts worth a total of $8.6 million.
The turmoil within the agency is only the latest sign that AUKUS is a debacle: it’s already clear that the US does not have the workforce capacity to even maintain its current construction of nuclear submarines. The UK, which has its own workforce problems, has experienced colossal blowouts in its nuclear construction program. The agreement signed by Australia with the UK and US explicitly allows the two larger countries to abandon the agreement the moment it becomes inconvenient for them.
But the ASA is entirely within Australian hands — it is wholly Labor’s creation, and represents an extraordinary vote of confidence in the Defence portfolio, which has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to properly manage even relatively simple major projects, let alone one as complicated as AUKUS. Importantly, Defence’s performance on major projects has actually declined under Labor. The failings of the ASA were, in a sense, inevitable: the agency was born of a department that has serially demonstrated its failings, under a minister who has showcased blithe indifference to the mounting evidence that things are seriously awry in his portfolio.
Sending Dennis Richardson in might give Marles some breathing space and enable him to distance himself from the problem, but it will do nothing to address the fundamental flaws around AUKUS: the submarines are unlikely to be delivered; we won’t have the sailors to crew them if they are; their exact purpose has never been explained. That the actual implementation, after just 18 months, is riddled with problems is both unsurprising and secondary to these more profound issues.
Meanwhile, billions of taxpayer dollars continue to gurgle away, siphoned off by consulting firms and defence contractors. At least AUKUS is bearing fruit for someone. This extravagant and unjustified waste should be a major election issue, but a bipartisan consensus to dud taxpayers will keep the scandal off the radar next year.
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