by Peter Yule
felt, had ‘a delightful indifference to government’.1
From the beginning Moore was wary of the advice he was
given by the department and looked for counsel to Sir Malcolm
McIntosh, then chief executive of the CSIRO. A career public
servant, McIntosh had been involved in the submarine project as
a deputy secretary of defence in charge of acquisitions in the late
1980s before achieving fame and a knighthood as head of defence
procurement in the United Kingdom from 1991 to 1996. Moore
found McIntosh ‘was a source of enormous comfort in explaining
complex matters in a way that was easy to understand’.
At the time he became minister there was enormous publicity
about the problems with the submarines and ‘the Americans were
poking their noses in the project and wondering what was hap-
pening’. Malcolm McIntosh told him there was a major problem
with the submarine project and ‘the whole thing is out of con-
trol and needs a broom through it’. Consequently Moore asked
the secretary of the department, Paul Barratt, for a report on the
submarines to explain why they were built, what was wrong with
them, how they were going to be fixed, and how much it would
cost. The report came back but Moore saw it as ‘a complete white-
wash’ so he asked for further reports – one to be signed by Barratt
and Chris Barrie, the chief of the defence force, to confirm that they
both agreed the answers were correct – but in Moore’s view they
were ‘all whitewashes’. Moore showed the reports to Malcolm
McIntosh, who agreed that they skated over the surface of the
problems. Asked what should be done, McIntosh said: ‘Appoint
me to investigate.’
Not surprisingly, Paul Barratt has a different perspective on
these events. Even before the new ministry was announced, it had
been suggested to him that he might like to move from defence,
but he rejected this as he enjoyed defence and saw much that
needed to be done. When Moore was appointed, Barratt and Chris
Barrie asked when they could brief the new minister, but were
told this would not be necessary, and when the new minister met
the departmental executive a few days later he was continually
quoting Malcolm McIntosh on the deficiencies of the department
and how to fix them.
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Melbourne Herald Sun, 28 June 2000 (Courtesy of Jeff Hook.)
As requested, Barratt and Barrie prepared reports on the sub-
marine project setting out the situation as they saw it and the way
forward that had been developed during the first half of 1998.
Barratt recalls that when one of the reports was presented, Moore
said he wanted more on the history of the project and less on the
way forward, saying he was determined to ‘get to the bottom’ of
the Collins story.
Paul Barratt is convinced that John Moore and his chief of
staff, Brian Loughnane, saw the submarine project in largely polit-
ical terms and were determined to use the project’s problems as
a way of embarrassing Kim Beazley. He recalls saying to Lough-
nane that the minister should go on one of the submarines, and
being amazed when Loughnane replied: ‘He’s not going to do that
because someone from the media might take a picture and then
they would become Moore’s submarines rather than Beazley’s.’
To Barratt, the involvement of Malcolm McIntosh as an unof-
ficial adviser to the minister was ‘extraordinarily improper’ and
‘crazy public administration – a recipe for a complete breakdown
of trust and accountability, and ultimately for chaos’. The conse-
quence was that McIntosh was providing the advice, but Barratt
was responsible for the outcome.2
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The chief of the navy, Don Chalmers, held similar views to Paul
Barratt on John Moore’s approach. He says:
My view is that he took a very political stand on the
submarine. This was a Bomber Beazley contract – it wasn’t
working and he was going to get as much political mileage
out of it as he could. He wanted a submarine that worked
but he was going to get as much as he could out of it.
. . . I quite often had difficulty talking with him. I didn’t
get on with his chief of staff so I didn’t get in the door . . . As
we moved ahead talking to the minister about the submarine
became really difficult . . . On one occasion he told me that
he got more information on the Collins class from his
newsagent than he did from navy briefings. It was a prickly
relationship, one might say.
One important factor in the relationship between the navy and the
minister is that John Moore always had a struggle with dyslexia.
He found reading difficult and preferred to get information ver-
bally or in a one-page précis. The lengthy reports sent to him by
the department and the navy went unread, while those with the
gift of succinctness like Malcolm McIntosh gained his attention.
Garry Jones, Eoin Asker, Paul Barratt and the admirals believed
that they understood the problems with the submarine project and
were confident that, with American help, they had developed a
viable plan to overcome them. Their problem was that the minister
did not believe them.
Convinced he was not being told the full story by the navy and
the Defence Department, in March 1999 John Moore decided to
follow Malcolm McIntosh’s advice and appointed him to inves-
tigate. As McIntosh was already terminally ill, Moore appointed
John Prescott, formerly managing director of BHP, to work with
him on the report.
Paul Greenfield was selected to support the investigation and
provide technical submarine knowledge. After several years work-
ing on the submarine project based in Adelaide, he had recently
been appointed to command HMAS Cerberus at Flinders, but he
had not been there two months when he was told he had been cho-
sen to help McIntosh and Prescott. He went very much against his
will as he felt it would be a disastrous career move – he recalls a
navy colleague telling him, ‘I see you’re part of the Tainted Team’!
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However, it turned out to be a highly educational experience that
‘recalibrated’ his views on the submarine project.
Greenfield is convinced that McIntosh and Prescott were not
party to any ‘Get Beazley’ plot. He recalls Prescott saying, ‘I’m
going to be honest and tell it as it is – I don’t have any barrows to
push’ and McIntosh agreeing, saying: ‘I’ve had a good career, I’m
dying of cancer and I’m going to lay it on the line.’
The report was due by 30 June 1999 so, allowing time for writ-
ing and printing, the actual investigation had to be completed in
about 10 weeks. The report lists 53 interviewees from the navy,
from ASC and other military related industries, Kockums and
> its parent company Celsius, from defence science and the defence
bureaucracy. The only significant gaps appeared to be that neither
Paul Barratt nor Chris Barrie (the chief of the defence force) was
interviewed3 and Eoin Asker was the sole interviewee from the
project team. John Prescott recalls that they found general agree-
ment on the facts and even on the fixes needed but there were few
ideas on how to make them happen.
By coincidence or otherwise, an extraordinary flurry of adverse
stories appeared in the press and on television in the weeks before
the release of the McIntosh-Prescott report. The most damaging of
these was a report on Four corners on ABC television on 24 May
1999. The tone of this report was established in the first sentence,
which talked of ‘the scandalous state of the navy’s new Collins
class submarines’, and it mounted a scathing attack on almost
every aspect of the project from the selection of Kockums to the
submarines’ noise and combat system problems. Many of the most
sensational claims were made by the recently-retired Commodore
Mick Dunne, whose appearance startled many of his former col-
leagues, most of whom were unaware how anti-Collins his views
were. While the program made use of brief sound bites carefully
edited to make defenders of the project look foolish, Dunne’s tes-
timony taken as a whole was damning for the submarine project:
I had access to performance information on the Collins class
submarine specifically in my last job as the Director of Naval
Plans and Policy in Canberra. And I spent the last three
months I was in the Navy producing a document for the
Chief of the Navy as to what might be done to recover some
of the situation . . .
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279
The Collins class submarine is a superb piece of
engineering and it’s a great submarine if you just want to roar
around the ocean, but as far as having the operational
capabilities that are much more important, this submarine
falls down in that area.
All you’ve got to do is look at the bulges and shape of the
exterior of the boat to realise that at any sort of speed, you
are going to get turbulence and eddies and noise that both
affect your ability to hear your opposition or your targets,
and give away your own position . . .
The man with the fastest draw – or the submarine with the
fastest computer solution – is going to win the showdown,
and unfortunately the chances of the system in the Collins
coping with that fast moving situation is not very good.
It’s going to be very difficult to deploy this submarine
operationally until substantial work is done to fix the
acoustic problem.
Interviewer: How long do you think that’ll take?
Dunne: Well, other nations have tried to retrospectively fix
acoustic signatures without success. My worst fear for the
Collins is that we’ll lose one, because of the shortcomings
that the submarine has got in its sensor and processing
capabilities.
Interviewer: When you say, ‘we’ll lose one’, what do you
mean?
Dunne: I mean that one will have an accident if we haven’t
done something seriously about reducing their noise
signature and increasing their ability to use their own
sonar systems, we’ll have an accident.
Interviewer: What kind of accident could you foresee
happening?
Dunne: Oh, running into a surface ship as the submarine
comes from deep up to periscope depth, when it has to use
speed to come up through layers of water, when by using
that speed, it can’t hear a frigate that is making very, very
little noise.
Interviewer: Why can’t it hear?
Dunne: It can’t hear it because by using speed itself to move
through the water the turbulence around the hull reduces
the capability of your own passive sonars to hear. It’s like
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trying to use your ears to hear a faint noise while
somebody is ringing a bell next to your nose. They’re the
sorts of things that could and can happen.4
Mick Dunne is adamant that he did not say anything on television
that he had not told the navy, and that while in the navy he had
never leaked anything to the newspapers. He admits he has a slant
on the Collins story and a view that may have been misinterpreted,
but he holds his views strongly. He believes that the project had
acquired a life of its own and that many people had become depen-
dent on it, so attacking the project was attacking their livelihoods –
their careers and their pensions were threatened.
One of Dunne’s motives for speaking out publicly on the
Collins project was to put pressure on McIntosh and Prescott ‘to
get it right’. In this he need not have been overly concerned, as
the views of the investigators seemed to be developing along the
same lines as his own. McIntosh himself said on Four corners that
the submarines could barely go to sea safely ‘and you certainly
couldn’t possibly go to war in [them]’.
While few, if any, people with knowledge of the project shared
all of Dunne’s concerns, many of his misgivings were widely held
in the navy. Further, the interviews on Four corners emphasised
the differences between the navy and ASC on the noise signatures
of the submarines and cast doubt on the credibility of the defend-
ers of the project. Most importantly, the public airing of Dunne’s
views on national television and their apparent credibility rein-
forced John Moore’s determination to take firm control of the
submarine project while greatly weakening the project’s defend-
ers. The overwhelming public view was that the submarines were
seriously flawed and the kudos for a politician lay in fixing them
rather than defending them.
It was in this atmosphere that the McIntosh-Prescott report
was released on 1 July 1999. The authors stated that their task
was not to probe into the past or ascribe responsibility for any
failures, but to examine the problems and put forward ways to
solve them. They emphasised that:
Notwithstanding the well-publicised technical problems,
much good work has been done. In fact almost everyone we
met was totally committed to the project and doing what
they believed would bring maximum benefit – at least within
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281
their terms of reference and responsibilities. Rather the
difficulties we will describe stem from a lack of overarching
capacity to deal with the scale and complexity involved,
given the changes in mission and technology that should have
been recognised as inevitable in a project of this ambition
and duration.5
The report concluded that ‘the essential and visible problem with
the Collins Class submarines is that they cann
ot perform at the lev-
els required for military operations’. It acknowledged that in some
high-risk areas such as the high tensile steel, the Australian weld-
ing and the ship control and management system, the submarines
‘exceeded expectations’ and that some serious defects such as the
propeller shaft seals had been fixed. The authors also accepted
that some technical deficiencies were inevitable ‘in a new class of
equipment as complex as a submarine’, but they were ‘astonished
at how many there still are some 6 years after the first boat was
launched, the range and extent of them, the seriousness of some
of them, the areas in which they have occurred, and how slowly
they are being remedied’.
The report identified the most serious remaining defects as
the diesel engines, noise, propellers, periscopes and masts, and
the combat system. While accepting that on some issues such as
noise there were significant differences between ‘the contracted
requirements and the Navy’s current operational requirements’,
McIntosh and Prescott concluded that there were serious defi-
ciencies in the design and manufacture of the submarines. The
authors also accepted that in some areas, such as the propellers
and periscopes, problems were due in part at least to inappropriate
requirements, notably the use of Sonoston for the propellers.
McIntosh and Prescott emphasised that the combat system was
the central problem:
Basically the system does not work, the quality of
information from individual sensors has been compromised
and their display on screen is inferior to that of the signals
actually processed. Relatively routine interrogation of targets
causes failures in the displays and inordinate delays occur in
bringing multiple sets of information together in the manner
planned. The number of targets that can be dealt with at one
time is far less than specified or required. In fact the tracking,
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classification and display of sonar targets is less effective than
on the Oberon class. No overall satisfactory solution is yet
committed.
They argued that these problems arose from the unique military
specifications and the decision to include the combat system with
the platform in the single prime contract, with the subsequent
refusal to change course or modify the contract. In contrast,
