The Australian government’s funding for its Aukus nuclear-powered submarine project will ramp up sharply, with the federal budget earmarking $2.59bn next financial year.
A Department of Defence report released on Tuesday night also shows the government has so far approved spending of $13.6bn on the project to acquire the submarines, although that figure spans many years.
Further approvals will be required for various elements of the Aukus plan, under which Australia plans to acquire at least three Virginia-class submarines from the US in the 2030s before Adelaide-built submarines enter into service from the 2040s.
By 30 June 2024, the government expects to have spent $456m of that amount, but this will rise significantly after that date. The government estimates it will spend $2.59bn on the project in the 2024-25 financial year.
The Aukus project includes a range of measures, including infrastructure works in South Australia (where the new SSN-Aukus submarine will eventually be built) and Western Australia (which is to host increased rotations of US and UK submarines).
The government has attracted some domestic criticism over its decision to send funding to the US and the UK to ease production bottlenecks.
Defence’s portfolio budget statement says the project “includes a fair and proportionate contribution to our Aukus partners’ submarine industrial bases to provide the additional capacity needed to deliver Australia’s conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarines”.
But the document does not break down the Aukus project funding into those categories, nor does it give a yearly amount after 2024-25.
In addition to the project funding, there is $383m for the Australian Submarine Agency, which is overseeing the project on behalf of the Department of Defence.
The agency is expected to have 665 staff in 2024-25, before it hires another 200 staff, bringing the average staffing level to 883 in 2025-26. That will see annual funding for the submarine agency rise to $431m. The government has repeatedly acknowledged that workforce shortages will be one of the key challenges to the Aukus project.
Tuesday night’s budget allocated an extra $102m over seven years for workforce initiatives, including the new Skills and Training Academy in Adelaide and 3,000 scholarships for students studying undergraduate Stem courses relevant to the nuclear-powered submarine plan.
Marcus Strom, the national convenor of the internal ALP advocacy group Labor Against War, said it was “quite telling that the budget papers don’t reveal how much of the $2.59bn earmarked in the next financial year for Aukus is going straight into the pockets of the US military machine to rebuild their shipyards”.
“It’s a travesty of democracy, transparency and accountability that we have to trawl through papers of the US Congress to find out how much of our tax dollars are going to fund the US war machine,” Strom said.
The deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said on Tuesday night that the government was “making the biggest commitment to increasing defence funding over the forward estimates in decades”.
The budget allocates an extra $5.7bn towards defence over the initial four-year budget period, and $50.3bn over the next decade, as announced by Marles last month.
While the funding is going up overall, the government says it is freeing up about $73bn over 10 years by cutting, delaying or changing the scope of some defence projects.
Overall, Australia’s defence funding as a share of economic output is expected to be 2.02% in 2024-25 and will hover around that level before spiking to 2.12% in 2027-28 and eventually topping 2.3% by 2033-34.
The government says the 2033-34 level is “more than 0.2% higher than the spending trajectory set by the former Coalition government”.
But the Coalition has criticised the funding overhaul and has promised that a Peter Dutton-led government would spend more than Labor on defence.
