By NOEL MURPHY
GEELONG is losing badly in the race for valuable Land 400 defence jobs.
The bid is $100 million behind South Australia’s bid and has been abandoned by the State Government, posting zero incentives to host any of the $10 billion of army contracts up for grabs.
Mayor Darryn Lyons and a key bidder yesterday fired salvos at Spring Street’s refusal to champion Geelong’s campaign.
Cr Lyons said Geelong and Victoria looked like a “laughing stock” compared to South Australia and that hundreds of jobs were being jeopardised by the Andrews Government failure to back Geelong’s bid.
“Geelong’s busted its guts to get this on the agenda but the State Government’s ignoring us and potentially throwing away billions to South Australia — it’s deplorable,” an angry Cr Lyons said.
A source from a team bidding for contracts said South Australia was clearly ahead in the race, with infrastructure and company incentives of $100 million compared to Victoria’s zero.
“We receive very little contact from the Victorian Government, there’s no equivalent package of support currently on offer,” he said.
“As a team, we asked for the Victorian government to provide a couple of things – we’re talking a very small amount, a few hundred thousand dollars — but we’ve yet to receive any formal response.
“It makes it very difficult for us to produce a bid based in Victoria when we have to continuously revisit our decision to potentially look at Victoria ahead of South Australia.”
The criticism follow comments by Corangamite MP Sarah Henderson that with only a short window for international defence companies to submit their bids, it was “absolutely critical” Victoria delivered an incentives package to ensure Geelong region won a “slice of this work”.
Cr Lyons said Geelong had staged delegations to Canberra, held workshops for industry and lobbied for a defence procurement office at Deakin University to bolster the region’s Land 400 prospects.
But these efforts were “basically futile”, he said, if the Andrews Government would not match or better South Australia’s incentives packages.
The bidding team source told the Independent Victoria had a number of “natural advantages” over South Australia but said they were not “currently being leveraged by the Victorian Government to get defence manufacturers to base themselves in Victoria”.
Land 400, also named Project Destrier, after the favoured mediaeval warhorse and knight’s jousting mount, will replace the Army’s old fleets of M113AS4 armoured personnel carriers, ASLAV light armoured vehicles and engineering support vehicles.
The State Government maintains Victoria is well placed to attract Land 400 contracts and that the Geelong Procurement Office was set up to do so. But Ms Henderson said the office was still in the process of hiring staff and “well behind the eight-ball”.
