What is worse though is that 4 senior defence officials have come out and said that the Super Hornet can take on all known threats ( this btw is highly questionable and ignores some basic facts about modern air combat.)

In any event, where it gets interesting is that since the senior defence officials have stated Super Hornet can handle known threats. There is now… no justification for the Australian taxpayer to hand out 14,… 15… up to $16 billion or more for the unproven and yet to be complete Joint Strike Fighter.

The [US] Navy and Boeing have intensified a propaganda campaign. Unfortunately, the campaign is likely to damage their credibility in the long term, because it focuses on a few basic statements which don’t mean anything like as much as the casual reader is meant to think.

For example: “The airplane meets all its key performance parameters.” This is true. In 1998 — as it became clear that the Super Hornet was slower, and less agile at transonic speeds than the C/D — the Navy issued an “administrative clarification” which declared that speed, acceleration and sustained turn rate were not, and had never been, Key Performance Parameters (KPP) for the Super Hornet. Apparently, some misguided people thought that those were important attributes for a fighter.

– Bill Sweetman, “Just How Super is the F/A-18E/F?”, Interavia Business & Technology, 1 April 2000

I’ll have to see if the Australian review just completed published what the criteria were for rating the aircraft as “excellent”…