Mr DONDAS —My question is addressed to the Minister for Defence Industry, Science and Personnel. Minister, what is the government doing to fix the mess it inherited from the previous Labor government with respect to the JORN project, located in my electorate? Minister, will Australia eventually have an operational radar network able to provide surveillance of Australia's northern approaches?

Mrs BISHOP (Defence Industry, Science and Personnel) —I thank the member for the Northern Territory for his question, because the operative word is `mess'—and certainly we were left with a mess from the previous Labor government. To put it very firmly, the report that came out from the Public Accounts Committee yesterday showed that the awarding of the contract in the first place to Telstra was, indeed, the responsibility of the Labor Party government.

There is plenty of evidence now on the record that the original recommendation was to give it to AWA and General Electric as the preferred contractor for Defence, but it was overridden and, indeed, the contract was awarded to Telstra—a billion dollar contract with a company with absolutely no experience in the area.

Furthermore, Telstra was able to give a government funded guarantee about overruns, whereas AWA, as a properly prudent company, wanted to limit that to $50 million. You could hardly say that was a fair competition. Nonetheless, the mess that resulted from that only became worse when the former Labor government changed the benchmarks for the payment of money. Eighty per cent of the money was then paid for 20 per cent of the work, and that is an absolute government scandal by the Labor Party.

Further, it meant that we got so far behind in the performance of the contract that the Labor government allowed a feud to exist between Telstra and GEC-Marconi for two years without intervening at all. The net result is that we acted when it was brought to our attention on 24 May 1996 by Mr Blount, who spoke to the secretary to the department and said they wanted out of the contract.

From that point on we have worked assiduously to put in place a new manager of the contract, RLM Management Pty Ltd, which is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin—which has since taken over GE, the company which was the original partner with AWA—and Tenix. I might point out that, in this report tabled yesterday, apparently they failed to pick up that Transfield Defence Systems changed its name at the end of last year. It is now Tenix, not Transfield.

I might say further that we have worked so that we can be assured in this country that we will see the proper performance of this contract, we will see the capability acquired, and we will see proper management of the contract. The buck for the mess that was left rests squarely with that Labor Party government.