Anthony Albanese is unlikely to rethink the “indefensibly high” price of the Aukus security pact on Australia’s sovereignty because the prime minister is “preoccupied” with avoiding being labelled as weak, according to Labor’s longest serving foreign affairs minister.
Gareth Evans, who held the portfolio from 1988 to 1996, stepped up his criticisms of the Aukus deal with the US and the UK, dismissing the Australian government’s argument that it will have full sovereign control of the nuclear-powered submarines as “frankly a joke in bad taste”.
Evans said he was not critical of Labor for quickly offering its support in 2021 when the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, approached it to say he was about to announce the Aukus pact.
Evans said this was a “political imperative” because if the party had equivocated “2022 would have been a khaki election with Albanese depicted as undermining the alliance and undermining US commitment to the region”.
But Evans said Labor should have taken the time after it came to power in 2022 to carry out a “genuinely comprehensive and genuinely objective” review of Aukus. The cost of the submarine plan is expected to be as high as $368bn over 30 years.
“Albo not only has never given much attention to the complexities of defence and foreign policy – very unusual for the Labor left – but he does remain politically deeply risk-averse, preoccupied more than anything else with not being portrayed domestically as weak and vacillating on security,” Evans said in a webinar.
“So all of this really is very depressing for those of us who’ve long nurtured the belief that Australia is a fiercely independent nation – ever more conscious of the need to engage constructively, creatively and sensitively with our own Indo-Pacific neighbourhood.”
Evans made the comments on Monday night during a webinar organised by the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (Ipan) – an organisation of community, faith and peace groups, and trade unions, which strongly opposes Aukus.
Albanese’s office has been contacted for a response but the prime minister has previously defended his support for Aukus, arguing it represented “a step-change in Australia’s defence capability” and was in the national interest.
Albanese has sought to assure countries across the region that his government’s goal “is not to prepare for war but to prevent it, through deterrence and reassurance and building resilience in the region”.
He has also attempted to assure domestic critics of the pact – including Labor rank-and-file members – that Australia will “maintain our sovereignty” and have full control of the submarines.
But Evans said it “defies credibility” to think the US will ever actually sell at least three Virginia-class submarines to Australia in the 2030s without an understanding that Australia would be alongside the US in the event of a war against China.
“The notion that we will retain any kind of sovereign agency in determining how all these assets are actually used should serious tensions erupt is frankly a joke in bad taste,” Evans said.
He said the US was demanding an “extraordinarily high” cost of Australia, including the expansion of Tindal air force base in the Northern Territory to be able to house up to six US B-52 bomber aircraft at a time.
Stirling naval base, in Western Australia, will also be developed to host increased rotational visits of US and UK submarines from 2027, while the US is pursuing other “force posture” initiatives in Australia.
Vince Scappatura, an academic in politics and international relations at Macquarie University and a member of Ipan, told the same webinar the “very significant” developments signalled the “shaping of a new nuclear defence posture for Australia”.
Scappatura, co-author of a recent Nautilus Institute report on the B-52 bomber issue, raised “the possibility of US nuclear combat operations being launched from Australian territory” in the event of war.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, issued a statement on Tuesday to mark the third anniversary of the Aukus pact, saying it had “strengthened the security of our allies in the region as well as our own security here at home”.
In May, a senior US State Department official declined to explicitly guarantee Australia would have full control of the nuclear-powered but conventionally armed submarines, saying he would not get “into some of the minutiae of various questions that are out there”.
The same month, a US military commander said he has “no idea” how the submarines would be used in the Taiwan Strait, despite a top state department official predicting “enormous implications” for “cross-Strait circumstances”.
The defence minister, Richard Marles, said Australia has not given the US any pre-commitment to join a war over Taiwan.
He argued the defence of Australia “doesn’t mean that much unless we have the collective security of our region” and the submarines would put a “question mark in any adversary’s mind”.
