These ships make me want to cry.
They were offered to Australia as replacement for the three Perth Class DDG (CFA class) for stuff all, needed none of the mods required by the Adelaide Class FFGs to remain capability and were rejected as the buy would have required the retirement of the oldest pair of Adelaides, as well as the DDGs for manning reasons. Instead the DDGs were retired without immediate replacement and the FFGUP required to cover the gap until new DDGs could be acquired was so expensive and so late that two FFGs were dropped from the program and now the remaining four FFGs are being replaced by the three DDG replacements, a total of nine ships replaced by three. To cover this short fall the ANZAC class patrol frigates have had to be upgraded into defacto FFGs and their replacement has had to be brought forward. At the same time the cheap patrol boats, bought because the corvettes planned were too expensive in the light of the increased costs of the major combatant upgrades, have suffered major structural and sustainment issues requiring their early replacement with OPVs.
I can't help but wonder if it would have been cheaper to acquire the Kidds to replace the DDGs and first pair of FFGs (four for five hulls rather than three for nine). The AWD program continue as is to replace the remaining four FFGs, which wouldn't need major upgrades because the Kidds covered the requirement for SM-2 (four for three, still not bad and the money saved could even have bought the originally planned fourth hull), while that ANZAC ASMD upgrade could scaled back as there would have been no shortage in major combatant numbers or capabilities . Concurrently the money saved at this point could have been rolled over into building the planned corvettes instead of the useless patrol boats, which due to being steel instead of aluminium foil construction, wouldn't have needed early replacement. (possibly with another three batch II ships to replace the Kidds).
At this point, there not having been a ship building black hole betrween the ANZACs, corvettes and AWDs, the Australian shipbuilding industry would have been better placed to build the LHDs locally and follow them with two or three new tankers, as well as the now defered replacement heavy landing craft/ships, hydrographic ships and MCMVs. A second batch of three or four AWDs could be ordered to replace the now aging Kidds and planning begin for a new class of frigates to replace the ANZACs. Manning would not be an issue because the massive down sizing that occured in the RAN when it hit block obsolescence in the late 90s early 2000s would not have occured and the personnel number would not have had to be reduced so severely (in a false, very shory term, economy messure that had to be addressed only a couple years later by massive and expensive retention bonuses).
Sorry for the rant but those ships are the bleedingly obvious example of how stupid and wasteful Australias governments of the 90s and 2000s were and how we are now having to fork out much more tax payers money to rebuild the industry we built in the 80s and get back to the planned fleet structure we knew we needed then and still need now. The dumb thing is, during the time of false economy Australia was in the middle of the biggest economic boom in its history, a boom that virtually killed local manufacturing and engineering due to the distortion of our currency by an unusual period of commodity exports and no plan to protect affected industries. just following the original plan of the 80s would have prevented a lot of the damage and been highly affordable.