Premier Will Hodgman says Tasmania has taken great strides in demonstrating its defence procurement capability, despite the failure of a bid to build defence vehicles on the North-West.
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Mr Hodgman said the Defence department’s decision not to down-select Team Sentinel’s bid to build 225 armoured defence vehicles as “regrettable”.
He said the government had invested a lot in the “very powerful” Land 400 bid.
The consortium’s bid for the $10 billion Australian Defence Force contract would have created 170 Tasmanian jobs for a five-year period.
“It’s the decision of a robust tender process and it’s a decision we are disappointed with, but we believe, and Elphinstone Group have confirmed they believe, there will still be opportunities to leverage off these programs in the future,” Mr Hodgman said.
“What all this work has done is confirm… not only here locally but at a national level that Tasmania is increasingly becoming capable of being an active and very much serious contender for this sort of defence procurement work.”
Mr Hodgman said the government would use feedback about why the bid failed.
Independent Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie said the bid’s failure would be top of the agenda for her meeting with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday.
She said she would also seek briefings from the Defence department and the Elphinstone Group to understand why the bid hadn’t progressed.
Senator Lambie said everything she had seen indicated Team Sentinel’s vehicle was “one of the best fighting vehicles in the world”.
State Opposition Leader Bryan Green called on the state government to up its efforts to following two failed attempts to win defence contracts inside 12 months.
““It took [State Growth Minister] Matthew Groom two years to release his strategy to attract more defence spending and when he did it was a flimsy, glossy brochure with no substance or funding to back it,” Mr Green said.
A spokeswoman for Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne said opportunities for Tasmania’s defence industry’s had not been limited.