Australians have never had the chance to properly vote on AUKUS. The major parties haven’t allowed them.
It was foisted on the public in 2021 by a desperate Scott Morrison with the intention of wedging his opponents. But Labor — a timid shadow of a once-proud party — signed up to it, basically sight unseen, within hours. As a result, both major parties went to the 2022 election on the same platform — one that we would only later be told would cost well north of $300 billion and mean Australia wouldn’t be able to replace its submarine fleet for decades. We’ve had to rely for accountability and transparency on the project on the Greens and the crossbenches.
Now we face a second election without being offered a choice or any sort of debate over AUKUS. The problem is, in the intervening three years, it’s become ever more apparent that AUKUS is a fantasy that will never deliver any submarines.
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Even before the election of Donald Trump transformed the United States from an ally into something between an enemy and an absentee landlord demanding rack-rents, the implausibility of AUKUS was routinely demonstrated. It’s a matter of record that US submarine production is well below levels necessary to sustain the American fleet, let alone produce enough submarines to enable three to be handed to Australia. The abandonment of AUKUS in favour of the US keeping extra submarines and operating them from Australia has already been modelled for the US Congress. Scarily, US submarine production appears to be slowing, not increasing as AUKUS requires — despite Labor throwing taxpayer money at the Americans.
The UK submarine construction program — which we’re also helping fund — is in significantly worse shape and some wildly optimistic timelines have been mooted for the construction of new vessels for Australia.
It’s also become clearer that our navy can’t even crew our existing vessels, let alone meet the dramatically increased crewing requirements of much bigger nuclear submarines. Calls from defence experts like Peter Briggs and Chris Barrie for a plan B — usually involving approaching the French to step into the breach — continue to mount.
And Australia’s own AUKUS arrangements have proven shambolic. The Australian Submarine Agency was barely established before it was placed under review amid claims of poor morale and staff turnover. That’s the review that Defence Minister Richard Marles initially tried to insist wasn’t happening.
Indeed, the steady accumulation of evidence AUKUS is going to be a spectacular failure has never elicited much response from the government — Marles churns out a steady stream of Pollyannaish media releases about how wonderfully the whole thing is going and how the benefits are already flowing to Australia.
Rarely has there been a major program — the biggest defence program in Australian history — more destined for failure than AUKUS, and rarely has there been a more studied silence not merely from the government presiding over it but the opposition ostensibly holding it to account.
Malcolm Turnbull — whose fundamental critique of AUKUS as damaging to Australian sovereignty has never been refuted — calls it “bipartisan gaslighting”. It’s also anti-democratic, with voters deprived of the opportunity to assess the merits of a program that might cost over $300 billion and never deliver anything, leaving a major gap in Australia’s defences.
A political system that fails to deliver proper debate over or scrutiny of the biggest strategic issues a country can face is a deeply dysfunctional one. AUKUS should be front and centre in the coming election, not hidden in a conspiracy of silence by the major parties. It’s yet further evidence that the sooner Labor and the Coalition are pushed into minority government, the better for Australia.
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