Air warfare destroyer $600m cost problem not unusual, says Jackman IF sticking to budgets and timelines on major projects was easy Elders would have made a billion dollars, the company's former chief executive Malcolm Jackman said yesterday in defence of the air warfare destroyer project. With suggestions the AWD program is $600 million over budget, Mr Jackman said that amount was "a lot of taxpayers" money" but at 7 per cent of the project's $8.5 billion costings it would not be an unusual outcome. Using the blowout to accuse shipbuilder ASC of being incompetent was "a very unfair cop," said Mr Jackman, now the chief executive of State Government body Defence SA. "It's based on the original baseline of the time and the budget being accurate," he said. I've been a chief executive for 30-odd years and I've never seen a budget that was completely accurate - it's a guess. Budgets had to have large contingencies built into them to accommodate unexpected problems, he told an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Mr Jackman was chief executive of Elders during its major reconstruction and recovery from a path leading towards collapse. He also has headed hire company Coates and recruitment agency Manpower. On Wednesday, Defence Minister David Johnston told Parliament he could not trust ASC to build a canoe because it was making such a mess of building the destroyers at Techport in Osborne. "$600 million sounds like a lot of money and it is a lot of money," Mr Jackman said. "It's taxpayers" money and we need to use it as efficiently as possible. But, at the end of the day, it's within the bounds of common sense. If budgets and forecasts were so accurate, it would have been easy for me to make a billion dollars at Elders. I could have just written a budget for a billion dollars and that would have been it. But that's not the way of the world. Productivity on the AWD program was being unfairly judged on time taken to build the first in a new class of ship. Work always took longer at the start. Newcastle-based Forgacs, which is building component modules for the destroyers, was taking 50 per cent less time on parts for the third ship than it did on the second. Mr Jackman said decisions about the future of shipbuilding were being hijacked by political agendas. The Federal Government has said any decision on where the next generation of submarines are built will be based purely on Defence need not regional or industrial policy. However, Mr Jackman - a former New Zealand naval officer - argued a strong defence manufacturing and sustainment industry was essential for defence capability. While he prayed Australia would not be involved in a war, if the shooting started it would not be possible to send equipment overseas for servicing. The best case was to have an industry where the big international companies had invested in Australian operations.