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Australian defence attachés will be encouraged to spearhead assistance for defence industry exports, according to recent comments from the Australian Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy.
Minister Conroy made the comments during an episode of the Defence Connect Podcast with host Steve Kuper, published earlier this month.
“Too often in Australia it’s like the industry try and sell their products overseas but if you look at our competitors, they mobilise defence and government to do it,” the Defence industry minister said.
“One thing that I’m working with the Chief of Defence Force on is that one of the key performance indicators for our defence attachés in foreign nations is (that) we’ll be going to local Australian industry in that market and saying, did the defence attaché help make connections? Were they active? Did they help sell? And that will be part of their performance assessment for that year.
“So, I think that’s a really good idea that came through the Defence Industry Council that I’m adopting there and appointing a senior ADF officer to lead this office so that we mobilise them and having industry work hand in hand.
“Having a joint campaign effort so that we can replicate what we did on Boxer (armoured fighting vehicles), like the way CASG (Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group) in particular mobilised for the Boxer deal was remarkable.
“To actually get out there and sell Aussie industry, I want to see that replicated everywhere … We’re a relatively small market (domestically) compared to others. We’ll never have the scale in a lot of platforms unless we sell those platforms overseas as well.
“So, it’s in my interest, beyond just promoting Australian industry and Australian jobs, that it improves the sustainability of programs I have to manage for the Australian taxpayer.
“We’re not going to insist on all the work gets done in Australia. In some of these projects it might be where we build the base platform but then the fit-out occurs in another country that meets their needs. But winning a project where we get 50 or 60 per cent of the content of the new export order is a lot better than winning 100 per cent of no export orders. And so we’ll be pragmatic about that.”
