The cost of boom-and-bust Australian shipbuilding

Australia's preference for building major defence equipment at home is about sovereign capacity as well as employment. The difficulty is a small procurement base that alternates between intense construction and long inactivity. Skills, facilities, and supplier knowledge disperse during the gaps, making the next class look exceptionally expensive because it must recreate the industrial system. Buying abroad can lower the immediate price, but it sustains another country's shipbuilding base and leaves Australia with less independent capacity in a crisis. The older imperial pattern shows the other side of that bargain: dominion orders for cruisers sustained British yards and skills while the purchasing government paid the bill.