Radio Interview Excerpt, Drive with Oliver Peterson

Subject: AUKUS dry dock at Henderson

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OLIVER PETERSON: 1300-22-1025 this is behind party lines. Matt Keogh and Dean Smith with us this Wednesday afternoon. Coming up after 4:00 today, do you worry that your car is spying on you, that your manufacturer is collecting your data? We're going to look at that in more detail after 4 o'clock. Now you've got an update for us, Matt, on the AUKUS dry dock campaign and design. What can you tell us?

MINISTER KEOGH: So, people will be familiar that a lot of the work in Defence industry, sustainment, build, for our Defence Force, in particular shipping, is happening down at Henderson. And what we have announced today is the organisation will do the planning work, the design for a floating dry dock down there. That will be a significant increase in capability and what we can do in sustaining larger submarines, being able to do the work supporting the submarines that will be coming through here as part of SRF-West, but also the submarines we begin to operate, those Virginia-class and then AUKUS-class submarines. This is part of the overall redevelopment going down at Henderson. The 25 billion dollar development. What it's going to see, firstly with the army landing craft and then with the submarine work and the shipbuilding going on down there, will see defence industry become the second biggest industry in Western Australia. And that's high-end advanced manufacturing. So, that's well paid jobs both in developing the Henderson site and in what will be going on in the shipbuilding and everything else happening down there going forward – intergenerational work. This is a significant announcement as we work towards the increasing of the work that will be happening there at Henderson as a continuous shipbuilding site, which means there'll be continuous work there for generations to come.

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