by Peter Yule
they were surprised at how many Australian companies could do
the work, although most had no previous experience of defence
work.
Another central issue for the project team was quality assur-
ance. Sheltered behind high tariffs, Australian manufacturing had
never had to compete on quality, and standards were variable at
best and appalling at worst. Attempts to implement international
standards in Australia were first made in the late 1970s, for the
Oberon refits. The new submarine project became the catalyst
for the much wider diffusion of quality control systems. Defence
work, and submarine construction in particular, demands higher
quality than normal, and in the early 1980s only 35 Australian
companies were certified. To achieve the building (rather than
just assembly) of submarines in Australia, companies across a
broad range of industries had to be able to meet the required
standards. The South Australian task force gave enormous sup-
port in this area, calculating that emphasis on quality would
favour a new site rather than the archaic dockyards in the eastern
states.
The project team spread the word about quality assurance
and quality control. They had to persuade companies to invest
in gaining quality assurance accreditation. This was hard to jus-
tify just for six submarines, so they emphasised the broader view
that the step would bring wider benefits, particularly in open-
ing export markets. The campaign was highly successful and by
1998 more than 1500 companies were certified for defence work,
T H E A C T S O F T H E A P O S T L E S
49
with quality assurance and quality control systems accepted in
Australian industry.7
Graham White and Rod Fayle, along with many others
involved in the new submarine project, had seen the construc-
tion of the Oberons in Scotland. Here they saw at first hand the
methods vividly described in this account of a fictional Oberon,
HMS Seahorse:
[During a tour of Seahorse a scientist asked the engineer:]
‘How do you figure out all these pipe systems? They don’t
seem to lead anywhere.’
‘Actually, these systems are better than most, [the
engineer] said. ‘They’ve been planned on a mock-up first,
before they were ever put into a submarine. Most submarine
systems look as though they were designed by Salvador Dali.
Of course, they were put in under the old Olympic System.’
‘The Olympic System?’
‘The fastest dockyard matie won, sir. Every morning
while the submarine was building the men from the various
dockyard departments lined up on the dockside holding their
bits of pipe. Then when the whistle blew they all doubled on
board and the man who got there first had a straight run. The
others had to bend their pipes round his. The beauty of the
system was that it didn’t matter what size the pipes were. If
the electrician was particularly agile he could put his bit of
quarter-inch electric cable in first and watch the boiler-maker
bend his length of eight-inch diameter special steel piping
round it.’8
The consequence of this haphazard building method was that
every Oberon was different and needed its own dedicated set of
drawings.
Scott’s at Greenock – like Vickers at Barrow, Electric Boat at
Groton in Connecticut, and the traditional shipyards in Australia –
was a massive industrial site, with hundreds or even thousands of
workers, who needed a continual stream of work. The process of
building a submarine at these shipyards was vividly described by
Patrick Tyler in his classic account of the chaotic building pro-
gram for the Los Angeles class submarines at Electric Boat in
Connecticut:
50
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
Climbing into a nuclear submarine under construction was
like descending into a dark desert mine, an intricate steel
honeycomb with layered decks and cramped, mazelike
passageways. The heat was the first thing to hit you. The
unlit cylinder was more than 30 feet from top to bottom, but
there was no feeling of space because the volume was filled
up with pipes, decks and machinery. What space was left was
choked with men and their cables and their shrieking power
tools. The noise, which had nowhere to go, was ear-splitting.
Sometimes the smoke and dust in the steel cave were so thick
you couldn’t see, and men ten feet away disappeared in the
dirty cloud . . .
The arc welders and gougers gave the scene a
thunderstorm effect as the lightning from their electric
torches struck the steel, raining fire and molten slag down
from scaffolding onto other men . . .
When the air got too bad, men put on their respirators
until the ventilation system caught up. It wasn’t unusual for a
welder to pass out [and] it was the watch crew’s job to drag
him out and wrestle his dead weight up the ladder and down
the stairs for the ambulance ride to the shipyard hospital. No
day passed without its siren being heard.9
Visitors from Australia observed these scenes with interest, but
they became more interested in what they saw at Malm ö, in south-
ern Sweden. This was the home of the Kockums shipyard and
from the early 1980s it saw a steady stream of Australian visitors,
including Graham White, Hans Ohff, John White, Jim Duncan
and John Bannon. What they saw was starkly different to the
Dickensian chaos of Electric Boat. Kockums built submarines in
modules, with the hull being made in six sections. Parts were made
in yards and factories around Sweden and then brought to Malm ö
where they were inserted into the appropriate section of the sub-
marine, in a process rather like sliding in a drawer. This made for a
clean working environment, with easy access until the submarine
was closed up by welding the sections together.
Modular construction required better design management than
the traditional reliance on the skills of the tradesmen, with highly
detailed designs allowing parts to be built at many different
locations in a completely repeatable way. This led Kockums to
T H E A C T S O F T H E A P O S T L E S
51
become pioneers of computer-aided design and inventory control,
in which they were far ahead of any submarine builder by the
early 1980s.
Modular construction and computer-aided design resonated
closely with those Australians who saw industrial regeneration
and the development of high technology industries as central to
the new submarine project. In particular for Jim Duncan and the
South Australian team, these processes provided strong arguments
against building submarines in a traditional shipyard. Modular
design meant that the building process could be spread across
numerous companies in all parts of Australia (and even around
the world), with the assembly site being relatively small c
ompared
to the old shipyards.
A major advantage of building the submarines on a new site
was the opportunity to escape from the disastrous industrial
relations culture of Cockatoo Island and Williamstown, crip-
pled by strikes and entrenched demarcation rules and riddled
with semi-criminal gangs. Bob Hawke told the story of chair-
ing a union meeting at Williamstown in about 1974. He asked
each union representative to give his perspective. When his turn
came, the secretary of the Painters and Dockers Union said:
‘Yes, Comrade chair, I want to tell you that we have had real
problems down at the dockyards. Fourteen of our blokes have
disappeared.’10
As a deliberate demonstration, Jim Duncan and the subma-
rine task force worked closely with Eglo Engineering to intro-
duce new methods of design and construction at its Osborne
yards and supported its efforts to introduce more efficient work
practices. In 1985 Eglo received a contract from South Australia
for a large ferry without going to tender. The ferry, the Island
Seaway, was built with computer-aided design and modular
engineering techniques. The state government then supported
Eglo’s exclusion of the Painters & Dockers Union from the yard
and worked closely with the Metal Workers Union to intro-
duce flexible demarcation arrangements between shipwrights and
boilermakers.
South Australia used the key issues of new technologies,
management practices and approaches to industrial relations to
demolish the case of the existing dockyards. In February 1985
Jim Duncan argued:
52
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
Submarine building in Australia will push the extremes of
technical and commercial risk – tight production schedules,
high costs, high quality standards and demanding the best
possible project management.
Submarines are more akin to spacecraft than surface
ships. Consequently, there is no appropriate established skill
base or suitable existing infrastructure in major Australian
shipyards. In addition, and most importantly, entrenched
attitudinal problems in these yards make the introduction of
essential state-of-the-art technology and management
practices unthinkable to attempt . . . [as this would produce]
a morass of industrial problems that would sabotage a
complex project . . .
The only real option with a chance of success is to . . .
isolate submarines from shipbuilding.11
A seminal event in the campaign to build submarines in Australia
was a seminar held on 28 September 1984 by the Institute of
Engineers at the Academy of Science in Canberra. Overcoming
some initial reluctance from the engineers, Graham White and
John White put together an impressive panel of speakers, and
attracted people from all the relevant areas – industry, politics, the
unions and the navy. Peter Horobin, who was working with Terry
Roach at the directorate of submarine policy, recalled the huge
turn-up as marking the time that ‘the pendulum went through the
centre and we said, “Yes, we can build submarines in Australia”’.
One of the most influential speakers was John Halfpenny,
the powerful, left-wing national secretary of the Metal Workers
Union. He had initially hesitated when asked to speak, but John
White persuaded him and he gave a thoughtful and articulate pre-
sentation on the importance to Australian workers and industry
of building the submarines in Australia. Reflecting on that era,
Halfpenny said:
Even though one of my main missions in life is to be a peace
activist, I also felt that we needed a good defence capability
to defend our economic interests as well as territory. I had a
view at the time, and still do, that the threat wasn’t from the
Cold War, but from Indonesia, and given that we should have
a defence industry, it should serve two purposes: it should
T H E A C T S O F T H E A P O S T L E S
53
defend the nation’s interests, but just as importantly it should
foster and develop a strong manufacturing capability.12
John Halfpenny had great influence with the Labor govern-
ment and the union movement and was able to ‘press many of the
right buttons for the project’.
After the seminar Graham White became good friends with
Halfpenny and they spent many hours discussing the project.
White was amused that Halfpenny had previously had nothing
to do with naval officers and had thought that they were all aris-
tocratic militarists.
John Halfpenny and the Metal Workers Union were involved
in several ways in the campaign to build the new submarines in
Australia. Rod Fayle recalls that:
The rest of the navy was anti-submarine and there were big
problems keeping support for the project in the navy. A
critical element of this was to keep the price down – they had
to convince the government that it would not be too
expensive building in Australia, and a central part of this was
the development of an appropriate industrial environment.
This led the project team into negotiations with the
ACTU and especially the leaders of the Metal Workers Union
such as John Halfpenny. These blokes, who I wouldn’t have
given two bob for before, understood exactly what they
wanted and understood the need to reform industrial
practices so that shipbuilding could be kept in Australia. The
project team wanted a greenfields site with just one union
operating in order to avoid the demarcation disputes which
crippled Williamstown and Cockatoo. The project team
talked to the ACTU to minimise the industrial risk and also
to develop something like workplace agreements. The
submarine project office did not get officially involved in
these negotiations as they felt it would not look good for
uniformed officers to be talking to union officials. But in the
informal talks they got the unions to agree to the basic needs
of the project and this was central to the good industrial
relations throughout the project.13
In 1985 Kim Beazley, as Minister for Defence, set up a ministerial
liaison committee with representatives from industry, the unions,
54
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
government departments, members of parliament, the navy and
other interested groups to discuss issues concerning the new sub-
marine project. Over the previous 20 years no major defence
project had had an Australian content of more than 20 per cent,
but at one of the committee’s meetings John Halfpenny threw out
the challenge to aim for 60 per cent Australian content. Andy
Millar thinks that Halfpenny might have been joking, but the
meeting took the challenge seriously and it did much to inspire
the eventual contract target of 70 per cent.14
The election of the Labor government in March 1983 did not
have an immediate im
pact on the new submarine project, but in
the long term it was of critical importance. Labor’s defence policy
favoured submarines, and dismissed the option of a new aircraft
carrier.15 However, of greater importance was the role of three
ministers: Kim Beazley, John Button and Brian Howe.
Brian Howe was a surprising source of early support for the
submarine project within the Hawke government. Howe was from
the pacifist left wing of the ALP and he thinks that Bob Hawke
appointed him to the Ministry of Defence Support either as a
joke or in the hope that he would refuse. Howe had no back-
ground or great interest in defence, but he saw the ministry as an
opportunity to have an impact in two areas that he was interested
in, industrial relations and industry policy. A major issue for the
Labor government in its early years was the fate of the govern-
ment defence factories (including the Williamstown Dockyard),
for which Brian Howe was responsible in his new portfolio.
Most of these factories had been set up during the Second
World War and were maintained afterwards for defence and indus-
try policy reasons. By the 1980s they were undercapitalised, inef-
ficient and surviving on massive subsidies. It was ALP policy to
maintain these factories, so Brian Howe felt that he had to make
them work by reforming industrial relations, involving the work-
ers, increasing training and obtaining more work. Building the
new submarines would provide a shining example of how defence
work could be done – it would be a symbol of the new paradigm
in industry, a high-tech project with wide benefits (including for
the government defence factories). Since the early 1960s almost all
major purchases of military equipment had been from the United
States, and to Brian Howe and the Labor left building submarines
in Australia would be a strong statement of the party’s policy of
defence self-reliance.16
T H E A C T S O F T H E A P O S T L E S
55
Following the December 1984 election, Howe moved on to
the Ministry of Social Security and defence minister Gordon
Scholes retired. The new defence minister was Kim Beazley, at 36
Australia’s youngest defence minister and, in the view of most
sailors – and especially submariners – the best. Brian Howe recalls
that Beazley was ‘passionate about defence; it is the one thing he
