I briefly wanted to carry on the conversation about the submarines. The government of the day was persuaded by the military that these were absolutely necessary for strategic and surveillance purposes and all the rest of the stuff, and of course the program has been somewhat less than optimal since. Apparently, our country has survived quite nicely, thank you very much, between when we didn't have the submarine capability and now. Here we are 10 years later. We're getting ready to fire our first torpedo. This is a pretty exciting day.
The vice admiral was here. Of course, he put out a pretty stout defence as to why we need these things. Your argument seems to be that it's really questionable whether we needed them when the government bought them in the first place. It's even less arguable that we need them now. There are other “platforms” to find out what we need, where we need it, and how much information we need. It's not likely we're going to get involved in any very serious conflicts with anybody. We're not going to be taking on the Russians, Americans, or the Chinese with respect to our submarines, so really, what's the point?
Therefore, is your advice to the government that this is one of the things they should just drop? This has just been a bad deal, and it's only getting worse, and the likelihood of it actually having any utility through to 2030 is quite minimal.