The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has criticised a proposal for Australia to buy nuclear submarines directly from the US, saying it would “not be acceptable” for his state to miss out on promised submarine manufacturing jobs.
A report in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday suggested the Biden administration was considering a plan with the UK and Australia to fast-track nuclear-powered submarines for Australia by the mid-2030s by producing the first few submarines in the US.
However, given existing production constraints at US shipyards, the deal would depend on Australia making a financial commitment to expand the US’s submarine-production capacity to ensure it could also meet its domestic demands.
Malinauskas told Guardian Australia that while he understood the geopolitical need for the Australian government to expedite the process, Australian workers needed to be involved in any arrangement that included the new subs being manufactured in the US.
“Clearly a South Australian workforce needs to acquire the skills to be able to build nuclear submarines and it makes sense that those skills are acquired working with the overseas partner that is already doing so,” he said.
“We accept that the commonwealth has a substantial challenge, and is responding to what is widely accepted as the most unstable geopolitical climate the nation has found itself in for some time. We accept that is a risk that’s worthy of being addressed, but a degradation of our sovereign shipbuilding capacity is inconsistent with addressing that risk.”
When asked if it would be acceptable for the Australian government to purchase submarines from the US without training an Australian workforce as part of the deal, Malinuaskas was clear.
“No, that would not be acceptable from the state government’s perspective, because that would represent a degradation of what has been promised, and that is that these subs are being built in Australia,” he said.
“It all depends on the pathway, and that detail really matters here – not just for the economic interests of the state, but also from our sovereign submarine-building capacity, which is such a central tenet of de-risking Australia’s security position.”
How Australia intends to fill the capability gap between its existing Collins Class fleet and the new fleet of up to 12 nuclear-powered submarines is the subject of a federal government review that is due to report by March next year.
On Sunday the defence minister, Richard Marles, said the review, being undertaken by former defence minister Stephen Smith and former Australian defence force chief Angus Houston, would consider how best to fill the capability gap that would otherwise see Australia wait until the mid-2040s for new submarines.
“What we’ve sought from the process that’s under way with Aukus right now is not simply to answer the question as to what platform we run with – although that’s clearly critical – but how soon we can get it,” Marles told Sky News.
“To the extent that there is any capability gap, if we can bring the start date forward, what is the solution to plugging that? We obviously need to have a sense of cost, and we need to make sure that what we are doing is completely compliant with our non-proliferation obligations. And we’re confident that the body of work that’s under way now will be able to answer all those questions in the first part of next year.”
Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that he had little sympathy for the view of the South Australian government, and the pendulum was swinging away from the defence budget being used as “a job subsidy scheme”.
“We need to have a very clear-eyed discussion about these issues and not simply say, ‘building, assembling them here is a fantastic thing, that will be wonderful’,” Hellyer said.
“It will cost more, it will take longer, you probably won’t have the industrial benefits that people say, and it will potentially have huge opportunity cost in terms of the human resources that we could be applying to sustaining the submarines.”
“We shouldn’t default to immediately building all boats here regardless of the cost and the schedule impacts of doing that.”
In a joint statement released last week to mark one year of the Aukus pact, the leaders of Australia, the UK and the US said that the group had made significant progress towards Australia acquiring conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to Australia acquiring this capability at the earliest possible date,” the statement said.
