By Ron Guignard
ADELAIDE — About 150 people, including some from Melbourne, protested at the Adelaide Submarine Corporation's (ASC) launch of its first Collins class submarine at Port Adelaide on Saturday, August 28. The Peace Action Collective had spent two months organising the protest on a shoestring budget.
Two women protesters had wangled official invitations. When the celebratory fireworks (in broad daylight) were fired off, they displayed a peace sign in front of the VIP box until they were thrown out. One man sneaked past the police guard at the gates. He took snapshots of foreign dignitaries until he was discovered and also thrown out.
Most protesters on land couldn't get closer than 150 metres to the submarine. Fifteen protesters braved the port pollution and got close to the submarine during the launch. More might have been in the water, but one of the yachts could not be there, as it grounded on a sand bank the previous night.
The 5000 official guests (by invitation only and enjoying the fruits of an unlimited catering budget) joined Prime Minister Paul Keating and Premier Lynn Arnold in seeing the launch as some kind of triumph. They must have been reading the Adelaide Advertiser. Since the start of the project three years ago, that paper has pulled out all stops in the hype.
Protesters did get close to many of the invited guests on their way in and out. They displayed banners and handed out fake $100 "submarine money" leaflets. These clearly showed the real effect of the submarine program. Much of their content gave the lie to the Advertiser's key areas of fulsome praise for the project — national security, employment, prosperity and technology transfer.
The Collins class submarine is in no sense a purely defensive weapon system. The possibility that six of them could play a major role in protecting our long coastline and our import and export shipping lanes is laughable.
Indeed, the sub is configured as a first strike sneak attack vessel. Targets for its missiles could include ports and some inland cities of our regional neighbours, as well as their commercial shipping. The launch system would need no change if missiles were to be nuclear tipped.
How will our neighbours feel about it? It will be a field day for arms sellers who knock on their doors urging them to catch up with us. The arms race in South-east Asia is already escalating at about 30% a year. And (shades of Pig Iron Bob!) the Australian government is encouraging ASC to sell Collins class submarines to the enemies that will predictably be made as a result of adding these ships to our fleet.
The US is gradually withdrawing its troops and hardware from South-east Asia and leaving Australia more and more to act as its local security service. That is why an estimated extra $1 million per submarine is being spent on detection equipment that is geared only to US needs and systems.
Certainly South Australia needs jobs — 100,000 at least — right now. The submarine project has provided about 1000 jobs to South Australians. This will cost taxpayers about $4.6 billion over the life of the project. Compare this with retail group Coles Myer's recent proposed investment of $4.1bn. They claim it will create 140,000 jobs nationally — a rate of nearly 160 times the number of jobs per dollar invested.
The cost of the first submarine alone $850 million would have been nearly enough to complete the Adelaide-Darwin rail link That project would have employed at least 1000 people for as long as the whole submarine project will. It would also have made a real contribution to Australian security in terms of increased trade and tourism with our neighbours.
The other $3.75 billion, if invested in things like schools and hospitals, would have employed at least 20,000 people into the foreseeable future.
The SA government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure before ASC created a single job. This money was spent on a major power transformer and other aids to the ASC.
The corporation also gets a large kickback from the federal government for every purchase of Australian-made goods incorporated into the project. Also, Kokkums, who own nearly half of ASC, get to take nearly half of the profits after such tax rebates, plus royalties on technology transfer and other backhanders, back to Sweden. So much for the prosperity that the ASC brings to us.
As for technology transfer, the submarine division of Kokkums' parent company in Sweden has gone bankrupt. If the parent company can't sell its marvellous — but until now untried — high technology direct, the only hope we have of selling it at second hand is through escalating the regional arms race. In fact, the technology in use for the project has practically no application for any dollar-earning purpose other than as a means of mass murder.