Anyone who’s spent time around politics gets to know the lightbulb moment and such was the case on August 22, 2013 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd toured the Williamstown dockyard where BAE Systems was fitting out the first of the navy’s new Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) ships.

A Special Correspondent | Canberra

Rudd had inspected the vast warship without TV cameras and BAE execs had clearly had a word in his ear. Surrounded by workers on the dockside, he declared a re-elected Labor government would prioritise action to deal with the looming “valley of death” in the naval shipbuilding sector.

A week later he officially promised Labor would bring forward plans to replace the navy’s supply ship HMA Ships Success and tanker Sirius. As a minimum there would be a hybrid build - hull constructed overseas but fitted out in Australia like the two LHDs - with work to start 2015-16.

Considering how the polls were running, Rudd maybe figured this would be someone else’s problem and so it turned out. Labor was comprehensively booted at the election on September 7.

For the last two years in opposition, Labor has energetically flogged the government each time one of the defence companies has had to lay off shipyard workers, declaring that when it was in government it had a plan to deal with the valley of death.

That plan was what Kevin Rudd announced in the second last week of his government.

Neither Labor or the coalition are without blame on this one.

Had the new coalition government acted soon after election and opted for an Australian build of Success and Sirius replacements, work could be starting around now, just as layoffs in Adelaide, Melbourne and Newcastle get into full swing.

"Yet through all the debate on warships and new submarines, the government has hardly covered itself in glory."

That was never a serious prospect. New governments like to do their own thing and the coalition was disinclined to reward local shipbuilders considering the emerging mess in the Air Warfare Destroyer project.

In June 2014, the government announced a limited tender between Navantia of Spain and Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering of South Korea.

Then Defence Minister David Johnston told reporters: “No responsible government could consider providing further work to an industry that is performing so poorly.”

For defence and government insiders, that was scarcely a revelation but it was inevitably spun as a ban on involvement of fine Australian companies because they and their workers were so crap.

Just under three weeks after that decision, Labor and crossbenchers in the Senate launched a committee inquiry into the future of Australia’s naval shipbuilding industry. Government members are in a minority on this committee, so reports were always going to be unfavourable.

The committee speedily set down to business an report number one called for the government to reopen tenders so local shipbuilders could bid to construct the two new navy supply ships. During hearings, shipbuilders, unions, the South Australian government and industry peak bodies all told the committee that Australian shipyards could build the ships.

Even if the government was minded to follow that path, it was most unlikely a tender process could have been conducted, a design chosen and the first metal cut much under three years, which wouldn’t have done much for the valley of death.

Neither would it have given the Navy the new replenishment ships it needs any time soon, considering replacing Success was first proposed five years earlier.

Labor’s 2009 Defence White Paper said Success, launched in 1984, would be replaced, with its replacement entering service around 2020. Labor’s next Defence White Paper, released on May 3, 2013, said both Success and Sirius would be replaced “at the first possible opportunity” through either a local, hybrid or overseas build.

So why didn’t Labor act? Shadow defence minister Stephen Conroy said it was because the yards were at capacity through Labor’s term, building the AWDs and LHDs. They certainly were but anyone with some knowledge of the sector and a calendar could see a time when those projects would end and the yards would run out of work.

“If the valley of death ... was to be avoided, then certain decisions needed to have been taken two years ago.”

With much glee, Defence Minister Kevin Andrews has repeatedly pointed out that Labor hasn’t commissioned construction of a major warship in an Australian yard since the Anzac frigate project in 1989. That’s not strictly correct – Labor did commission six Huon-class minehunters, built at Newcastle between 1994 and 2003.

The only warship acquired during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years was HMAS Choules, bought second hand from the UK.

In 2014, Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson said it was simply too late to completely bridge the valley of death.

“If the valley of death ... was to be avoided, then certain decisions needed to have been taken two years ago,” he said. That means by Labor.

Yet through all the debate on warships and new submarines, the government has hardly covered itself in glory, managing to turn what should have been a negative for Labor into a negative for itself.

At the lowest point, polling suggested the Liberals in South Australia could lose three of six House of Representatives seats. Even that held by frontbencher Christopher Pyne with a seemingly unassailable margin of 10 per cent appeared in peril.

If that wasn’t sufficiently worrying, Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, a vocal champion of everything South Australian, plans to field candidates in all 11 SA seats at the 2016 federal election. Depending on how he directs preferences, he could further hurt Liberal fortunes. And it gets worse still, for Xenophon, regarded as the nation’s most popular politician, polled 24.9 per cent of the Senate vote at the 2013 election, just short of two quotas.

Putting that in perspective, Labor in SA polled 22.66 per cent and Liberals 27.45 per cent. A few more votes for Xenophon might have cost the Liberals their sixth Senate spot.

Xenophon isn’t standing in 2016 but his 2013 running mate Stirling Griff likely will with good prospects that he’ll end up in the Senate. That would not ease the government’s difficulties in negotiating with an already fractious Senate crossbench.

The government’s woes are widespread but especially apparent in South Australia and that all stemmed from the coalition’s hedging on where new subs will be built.

The six Collins boats were built in Adelaide and everyone assumed so too would be the next lot. In its election defence policy, the coalition said work on Collins replacements would centre around the South Australian shipyards.

But come April, 2014, Johnston was saying only that it was “desirable” that the new subs be built in Australia, adding that he knew much about the subs project that he didn’t know in opposition.

Under Labor, sub options had been refined from four to two – an all-new design or an evolution of Collins, which was emerging as preferred option. A new design was regarded as way too expensive and beyond Australian capabilities.

But then new designs emerged which could meet Australia’s needs – Japan’s Soryu, the Type-216 from TKMS of Germany and the Shortfin Barracuda from DCNS of France.

Of those, only the Soryu actually exists in a form close to what Australia requires but it hadn’t been a contender because Japan’s post-WWII avowedly pacifist constitution barred defence exports.

Not any more thanks to Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s reinterpretation which allows Japan’s capable defence forces to play a more active role in global affairs. Abe visited Australia in July 2014 and got on well with Tony Abbott, so well that Labor alleged a dirty deal was afoot to build the new subs in Japan at the cost of Australian workers.

With Holden set to end production at Elizabeth, Adelaide, by the end of 2017, this produced incandescent rage across SA. Assertions that no matter where the subs were built, there would be plenty of work for SA workers didn’t help.

Neither it seems has the very significant announcement of a rolling build of new offshore patrol vessels from 2018 and future frigates from 2020, both two years earlier than planned and both in Adelaide.

Should Japan lose the subs deal, maybe we could console them by buying some of their ShinMaywa US-2 seaplanes. Japan is tipped to sell some of these to India, the first export of a military platform under the country’s relaxed export laws.

This modern four-engined seaplane is a direct descendant of the Kawanishi seaplanes of WWII and for Australia they could be most useful for maritime patrol and search and rescue.