Adelaide's Defence Industry: The AUKUS Submarine Hub

Adelaide's defence industry, centred on the Osborne Naval Shipyard north of the city where the Hobart-class destroyers and the Hunter-class frigates are being built and where the AUKUS nuclear submarine program will construct the eight nuclear-powered submarines that Australia will build under the landmark security partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom, has become the most significant industrial investment story in South Australia's history and the economic transformation that the federal government's defence capability commitments and the AUKUS partnership have created for a city and state that has been seeking the manufacturing base to replace the automotive industry since the Holden closure in 2017. The scale of the naval shipbuilding program, encompassing the surface vessel construction at Osborne and the submarine program that the Osborne Naval Infrastructure expansion will house, creates the generational industrial employment and the supply chain demand that the South Australian economy will be shaped by for decades.

The Hunter-class frigate program, the $45 billion contract to design and build nine anti-submarine warfare frigates for the Royal Australian Navy that BAE Systems Australia is delivering through the Osborne shipyard, represents the largest defence contract in Australian history and the foundation of the South Australian naval shipbuilding industry that the AUKUS submarine program will build upon. The frigate program's employment of the shipbuilders, the engineers, the project managers, and the supply chain workers that the build program requires creates the naval shipbuilding workforce that the submarine program will draw upon when the frigate build transitions to the submarine construction in the 2030s.

The TAFE SA and the Federation University's defence industry training programs, responding to the workforce demand that the naval shipbuilding expansion creates for the welders, the electricians, the nuclear engineers, and the precision manufacturing tradespeople that the most complex engineering program in Australian history requires, are building the training capacity and the curriculum that the defence industry workforce development strategy requires. The training investment's alignment with the Osborne shipyard's workforce requirements ensures that the skills being developed match the specific technical demands that the naval platform construction and the nuclear submarine safety management create.

The supply chain development for the naval shipbuilding program, including the South Australian companies that are qualifying for the defence supplier roles that the Australian Industry Capability requirements mandate for the local content of the defence contract, creates the economic multiplier that the shipyard employment alone does not capture. The precision machining, the electronics, and the specialist materials companies that are developing the defence supplier capability for the Osborne shipyard program create the defence industry ecosystem that the sustainable naval shipbuilding industry requires and that the concentrated investment of the AUKUS program is building in Adelaide.

This article was compiled by AI from the sources linked above and screened before publishing. See our editorial standards.