A secret government report leaked to Greens MP Abigail Boyd reveals that the Port of Newcastle, along with Port Kembla on the New South Wales South Coast, is still under consideration as a nuclear submarine facility, as envisaged under the AUKUS treaty with the United States and Britain.
According to a May 25 report in the Newcastle Herald, the leaked documents were prepared by the NSW Cabinet Office and the Premier’s Department to assess the suitability of the two ports as a future East Coast base for a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS deal.
While Port Kembla on the South Coast is the secret assessment’s preferred site, Muloobinba/Newcastle remains under consideration.
This would be a disaster for Muloobinba, as it would be for Port Kembla.
Newcastle was officially declared by our city council in 1982 as a nuclear-free zone and reaffirmed each year around Hiroshima Day. This is an important gain that we need to defend.
Labor’s plan to making this city a port would seek to turn around decades of peace activism in Newcastle. We have a strong tradition as a city of peace and a city that stands in solidarity with oppressed peoples around the world.
A nuclear submarine base would also be a disaster because it would undermine the opportunity for the port to become critical to the export of renewables as we transitions away from coal exports.
If offensive military facilities are placed in our port, it makes Muloobinba a potential nuclear target because. The leaked assessment admitted as such, saying in the event of a military conflict, an East Coast nuclear submarine base “could be a target for Australian military adversaries”.
For these reasons, the assessment added, local residents “may perceive” the base “as a source of environmental disaster risk”.
It also estimated that house prices within a 15-kilometre radius of the base would be expected to drop by 2.5%.
We already have dangerous ammonium nitrate on Kooragang Island. Up to 12,000 tonnes of the chemical is stored there to supply mines in the Hunter region with explosives. When a similar plant exploded in Beirut in 2023, the Newcastle community was reminded of the huge risk it posed.
Combining a nuclear submarine port with an ammonium nitrate plant is a disaster in waiting for the whole region.
Labor knows that the dangerous plan is deeply unpopular and that is why it tried to keep it secret.
Muloobinba needs a future based on productive and ecologically sustainable development, not development based on an arms industry and dangerous support for US military aggression around the world.
[Steve O’Brien is the Socialist Alliance candidate for Newcastle in the March 2027 New South Wales election.]