The AUKUS pact, comprising Australia, Britain and the United States, will be remembered as one of the most absurd projects in the annals of history.
Australian officials, elected and appointed, seek the imaginary assurance of nuclear-powered submarines while spending public money ($368 billion) to surrender the country’s sovereignty.
Civil society has sprung into action with a crowd-founded AUKUS Public Inquiry, coordinated by the Australian Peace and Security Forum. Peter Garrett, a former federal environment minister and frontman for Midnight Oil, is at its helm.
Former MPs, retired military and naval officers, including Chris Barrie, a former Australian Defence Force chief, an assortment of strategists and academics, human rights lawyers and unions are a part of the AUKUS scrutineering.
The inquiry is pursuing a number of vital questions: Will Australia ever receive the submarines; be they the Virginia-class from the US Navy or the specifically designed SSN-AUKUS model?
Where and how will the toxic high-level nuclear waste be stored, given that Australia has no standing facility for such a function? How many actual jobs will be created and how distorting will this be to the rest of the economy? Why is Australia putting itself in a situation where it will potentially join a foolish war against China — the country’s largest trading partner?
The inquiry’s last two questions consider whether Australia will become a vassal outpost of the US imperium and whether the pact will make Australia a nuclear target.
The first hearings in Naarm/Melbourne on June 11 made compelling viewing. Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans was the first witness. He was blunt: “The AUKUS Pillar I Submarine project was misconceived from the outset, and the passage of time since its announcement in 2021 has served only to make more compelling the conclusion that it is not in Australia’s national interest to continue our commitment to it.”
Evans points to three fatal defects of AUKUS: The doomed prospects of deliverability; the sheer costliness of a project that “outweighs its benefits”; and the limits it would place on “Australia’s independent sovereign agency”. On the deliverability of submarines, he said: “Every piece of evidence available on the public record reinforces the scepticism as to whether any of them [the eight promised AUKUS boats] will be delivered on time, or indeed, at all.”
The Virginia-class boats, scheduled to arrive by 2032, are permanently subject to the “inventory requirements” of the Pentagon, which remain sluggish at an annual production rate of approximately 1.2 platforms.
This is despite Australia contributing US$2 billion to the US shipyards. Delivery of such boats can only be assumed given the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby’s promise to expand the nuclear fleet. The operation will only take place on the proviso that the Australian navy will be an extension of US power.
As for the benefits from such a vast bill? Evans was in no doubt that they were to serve as “supplementary assets, effectively embedded in US military command, for the task of finding, tracking, attacking and destroying Chinese submarines seen as a nuclear threat to the US mainland, as they move into and around West Pacific waters”.
To also permit this capability for reasons of combating China was needless, he said. “There is no reason to assume that, Taiwan apart, China would ever contemplate outright military aggression — Hitler, Tojo or Putin-style — against any of its regional neighbours, let alone the United States.”
The issue of trading sovereignty for boats was also brutally self-evident.
Washington would never part with SSNs, Evans said, “in the absence of an undertaking that we will deploy these boats to join the US in any fight in which it chooses to engage anywhere in our region, particularly over Taiwan”.
Other submissions pointed to troubling implications, including from Joseph Camilleri, Tilman Ruff and Richard Tanter. Dave Sweeney, an anti-nuclear campaigner from the Australian Conservation Foundation, spoke as did John Leslie Lander, Australia’s former head of the China section at the Department of Trade of Foreign Affairs and deputy ambassador to China, and Barbara Jackson as a “concerned citizen”.
The following is a discussion of some of the presentations and submissions. (A full list is available at the AUKUS Public Inquiry site.)
Speaking on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Ruff lamented the exacerbation of regional tensions by AUKUS, which increases “the risks of major power confrontation, including nuclear confrontation, particularly in Northeast Asia”.
The provision of SSNs also offered the grim spectre of nuclear proliferation, given the highly enriched uranium that would be used as reactive fuel. Australia’s anticipated retention of such waste was contrary to US non-proliferation practices that have been in place for decades. Crucially, though, the highly nuclear-enriched waste can itself provide “weapons-usable material”.
Ruff was particularly aghast that Australia had not considered advancing “low-enriched uranium reactive fuel”, an alternative used by other nuclear-powered submarine fleets and he drew the inquiry’s notice to Canberra’s obligations under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
This had legal implications for boats or aircraft carrying nuclear weapons finding themselves on Australian soil for “lengthy visits, visits on a permanent or semi-permanent basis”, “rolling visits” and visits with “the deliberative purpose or intention of permitting a nuclear-armed vessel or aircraft being located for military deployment directly from the location being visited”.
All of these instances would violate, not only the treaty, but Australian laws and make efforts to join the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons problematic if not impossible, Ruff said.
Tanter expressed concerns about “an extraordinary emphasis on interoperability” between Australian and US forces arising from strategic and defence reviews, including “integrated planning documents recently published by the Albanese government”.
Relying on the British submarine industry to pull its weight to provide the SSN-AUKUS was also optimistic, given that it was “very close to dysfunctional”, he said. The Virginia-class boats, which were now only going to be second-hand, were unlikely, if ever, to make it to Australian shores, and fall under the command of the US Navy.
Tanter expressed particular concern with the absence of any “policy or legal impediment to bringing nuclear weapons into Australia, as long as they are labelled transit or visit”. This risked a degree of “nuclear permissiveness that we should not be tolerating”.
Lander offered a picture of China frowned upon by the US-Australian alliance. “The strategic rationale for AUKUS is founded on the patently false premise that China presents a kinetic threat to Australia.” Over eight decades, China had never “evinced the slightest inclination to attack Australia, let alone expressed a policy of hostility towards Australia”.
The fear that China would interdict Australia’s sea lanes — hence the need for a naval deterrent — ignored “the fact that China has an existential interest in keeping those same sea lanes open, because it is the largest trading partner of the vast majority of the world”.
Domestically, Lander said, the Australian government was running roughshod over constitutional arrangements requiring it to justify vast expenditures and surrender its authority to a foreign power.
He said the executive had ignored parliament in “granting a foreign nation operational control of Australian defence or intelligence facilities, or territory, or to committing Commonwealth expenditure in connection with such arrangements”.
Community member Barbara Jackson proposed that Australia had “allowed its defence framework to be shaped substantially by American strategic priorities rather than its own”. This was much like permitting a dominant customer to dictate one’s operations.
She cited the US signals intelligence facility at Pine Gap, located near Mparntwe/Alice Springs, saying: “Australia has almost no control over what it is used for, yet would bear the immediate consequences if conflict erupted.” The northern and western regions of Australia also offered “ideal geography for [US] operational requirements”.
AUKUS and the growing presence of US forces here also seemed at odds with the country’s official doctrine, the Strategy of Denial, Jackson said. According to that defensive doctrine, an adversary is denied the ability to project force against Australian territory. “Pine Gap, Darwin, AUKUS and deep interoperability with the United States forces mean Australia functions as an operating base in American offensive operations.” You could not claim a denial strategy on the one hand and “host infrastructure” implicating you as “a frontline participant in someone else’s strategic competition”.
The inquiry has been at Walyalup /Fremantle (June 29) and heads to Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide (July 16), Adelaide First Nations Yarn (July 17), Gadigal Country/Sydney (August 11), Tharawal/Wollongong (August 12) and Canberra (September 1).
The material marshalled at these gatherings promises to furnish a hefty record of informed dissent.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]