French defence manufacturer Thales has thrown the town of Bendigo a $75 million bone.

Thales has announced it will build 43 Bushmaster vehicles for the New Zealand Army at its Australian factory in regional Victoria as part of a $75 million contract to deliver five variants of the armoured vehicle by 2022.

The Bushmaster is built in the regional Victorian city of Bendigo, involving more than 50 Australian businesses.

Thales Bendigo says the trans-Tasman deal will secure 300 jobs at the plant for at least the next two years, and another 200 along the supply chain.

“This order is a tribute to the skills and expertise in Thales' Protected Vehicle Centre of Excellence in Bendigo and in the Australian industry that are our critical partners in manufacturing this world-class vehicle,” a Thales spokesperson said.

The Bushmaster is an 11-tonne, 4x4 armoured vehicle that comes in five variants; troop carrier, command, patrol, support, weapons deployment and ambulance.

Christopher Stoltz is a professor of Practice in Engineering at La Trobe University in Bendigo, and says the Bushmaster has the perfect balance of weight and protection.

“You can make a vehicle stronger to resist the IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) — when they go off, they traditionally blow the vehicle apart,” he said.

“So you can protect a vehicle by making it heavier and heavier as IEDs get big and bigger.

“The Bushmaster is a vehicle where they have been able to balance how much weight, how much metal and how much bulletproof glass can be added to give adequate protection, and still have a vehicle you can move around.

“It's still got good mobility.

“The engineers who designed it 20 years ago got it right.”