Tony Abbott has claimed the Labor opposition wants Russia or North Korea to build Australia’s next fleet of submarines and that it objects to Japanese involvement because of “antediluvian xenophobia” dating to the second world war.



The prime minister’s outburst during parliamentary question time on Wednesday followed days of confusion about the process the Coalition government would follow to decide on the submarine acquisition.

Abbott said the government would not pursue an open tender because that would allow anyone – including Russia or North Korea – to bid to be involved in the project.

“They don’t understand the difference between an open tender and an evaluation process – a competitive evaluation process,” he said in response to a question from the opposition leader, Bill Shorten.

“Do you know about an open tender? Anyone can compete. What the leader of the opposition wants – he wants anyone to be able to compete to provide Australia’s next generation of submarines. He might want the Russians to compete; the Putin-class subs is what we will get from the leader of the opposition.

“First of all, he attacks the Japanese in some bout of antediluvian xenophobia; he says that we can’t possibly have Japanese involvement in the submarine contract because of what happened in Sydney Harbour. Now he says you’ve got to have an open tender. We could have Kim Jong-il submarines, Vladimir Putin submarines.

“You cannot the trust the defence of this country with members opposite but you can with this government.”

The reference to “what happened in Sydney Harbour” appears to mean the 1942 midget submarine attack during the second world war.

Shorten had asked whether the prime minister had promised the Liberal senator Sean Edwards a “full and open tender” – as Edwards claimed in the media on Sunday – in order to secure support in the leadership spill vote.

Labor’s defence spokesman, Stephen Conroy, dismissed Abbott’s response as a “ridiculous accusation by an increasingly desperate prime minister who has been caught out trading submarines for votes to secure his leadership”.

It was not the first time Abbott had accused Shorten of xenophobia over the potential involvement of Japan in the next submarine fleet.

In September last year, Shorten visited government-owned shipbuilder ASC in Adelaide and said the issue was “all about Australian jobs, and it’s about keeping your word”.

“Torpedo Tony has torpedoed the Australian shipbuilding industry and Labor’s never going to stand for that,” Shorten said at the time.

Shorten delivered a stump speech to ASC workers in which he accused the government of “fighting for jobs in foreign countries, not our own” and jeopardising “our security as an island”.

“This is a government with a short memory,” Shorten said at the time. “In the second world war, 366 merchant ships were sunk off Australia, and the government in the 1930s said ‘we don’t need Australian ships, we’ll privatise them’. This is a government who forgets everything and learns nothing.”

On Wednesday, Abbott moved to defend the assurances he had given his South Australian colleagues last weekend before the Liberal leadership vote.

He said there was “a clarification of the government’s intention” in response to “some anxiety that ASC might in some way be cut out of the process”, but he had used the term “competitive evaluation process” rather than open tender.

Labor’s assistant defence spokesman, David Feeney, asked Abbott on Wednesday to clarify whether he had any agreement with the Japanese government or prime minister, Shinzo Abe, concerning the submarine project.

Abbott replied that the government was “exploring the potential for defence cooperation with Japan” and had “agreements for defence cooperation with Japan”.

“We are certainly talking to the Japanese about a whole range of defence cooperation, a whole range of defence procurement, but we are not just talking to the Japanese,” he said.

“We are talking to the French, we are talking to the Germans and we are talking to the Australian Submarine Corporation. That is what sensible governments do.”

Conroy rejected Abbott’s characterisation of Labor’s position on the submarine project.

Labor said it had made clear in November last year that it was calling for “a proper competitive tender process involving a funded project definition study”.

In a speech to the Submarine Institute of Australia, Conroy said the process Labor supported would include the government “inviting the big submarine design houses from around the world – the Germans, French, Swedes and Japanese – to participate”.