This deal is getting worse all the time.
Courtesy of the latest details of the AUKUS agreement tabled yesterday in Parliament, we now know that the moment it becomes inconvenient for the Americans or the Brits, there’ll be no submarines for Australia:
Cooperation under the agreement is to be carried out in such a manner as to not adversely affect the ability of the United States and the United Kingdom to meet their respective military requirements and to not degrade their respective naval nuclear propulsion programs.
Those programs, as even ardent defenders of the program admit, are already pretty degraded. The Americans have shifted from building two Virginia-class boats a year to one this year, and delayed the construction of the next generation of nuclear submarines by five years to 2040. The new generation Dreadnought-class boats under construction in the UK have suffered serious delays and astonishing cost blowouts.
Somehow, with around $10 billion of Australian cash, both programs will come good, to the point they can build boats for the US and UK, and for Australia, and help Australia build its own. It’s normal for defence policy to double as heavy manufacturing policy, and Australia has a rich history of wasting billions making things here that we could have bought far cheaper from other countries. Where AUKUS is unusual is that Australia will be using its defence policy as heavy manufacturing policy for the US and UK as well.
All this for a program that we still don’t have a strategic rationale for, either from the government or from spruikers for AUKUS like Ross Babbage, whose flimsy pamphlet defending the program Crikey dissected a fortnight ago. Indeed, the most coherent explanation for the strategic rationale for AUKUS has come from Paul Keating.
On Friday, Keating issued an extended rejoinder to the prime minister’s dismissal of Keating’s observations about AUKUS, our relationship with China and our integration within the US military. Keating agreed that things had changed since he was prime minister, but “the relevant issue is that our geography has not changed. And geography is the primary factor in geo-strategic settings. The fact is, the Albanese government is returning to the Anglosphere to garner Australia’s security.”
This leads to a central theme in Keating’s public life, perhaps the theme — one that drove his foreign policy as prime minister: “the Albanese government is doing the very thing that all my life, I had trenchantly opposed, and in the postwar years, Labor had opposed. And that is, finding our security from Asia rather than our security in Asia.”
Relying on the Brits, who failed us in WWII and who withdrew from this part of the world in the postwar years, is a bad idea (another favourite Keating theme). But, “the Albanese government’s principal Anglosphere partner is, of course, the United States. And reliance by the government on the United States is now taking the form, rather than simply building nuclear submarines, of facilitating expansive military base-building by the United States on Australian soil with ever-rising US troop movements through Australian bases.”
What Keating calls the transformation of Australia into “a continental extension of American power akin to that which it enjoys in Hawaii, Alaska and more limitedly in places like Guam … the national administrator of what would be broadly viewed in Asia as a US protectorate” actually began under Julia Gillard and the Obama administration, but has accelerated dramatically under Albanese and Richard Marles, Labor’s gormless defence minister. Last year, Marles enthusiastically announced that US officers would be integrated into Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation — which perfectly fits Keating’s description of Australia as a mere extension of American power.
AUKUS similarly locks Australia into the role of administering the projection of US power into the western Pacific via US boats, US-built boats and Australian boats built with US assistance.
This is the only coherent explanation of the rationale for AUKUS beyond the mere assertion that nuclear submarines are better than diesel-electric submarines. And it’s a damning one for anyone with any regard for Australian sovereignty. You don’t have to share Keating’s benign view of the vile Beijing regime to get that Labor under Albanese has returned to a Menzian foreign and defence policy that strategically locates Australia not in the Asia-Pacific but as an “Atlantic supplicant”. And that’s a supplicant to powers that will struggle to meet their own naval construction needs, let alone ours.
Is Australia at risk of becoming little more than a US protectorate? Are there any upsides to the AUKUS deal? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
