The AUKUS fire sale fallout will haunt the Labor party into minority

The half-life of AUKUS is being realised quite rapidly by the Australian main.

Labor is launching AUKUS in Western Australia along with a bunch of announcements (Source: Twitter).

Anthony Albanese has been talking up all things Western Australia this week, adding to his WA-heavy Prime Ministership that has seen him visit the state more than any first term PM. He recently announced that his government would be fully funding West Australian public schools, adding to the $16 million boost to mobile coverage for regional Western Australians, and the spate of WA-specific goodies his government was promising the West. But the fluffy offerings and over-active praise for the people of WA sat on the rim of a deep and poisoned chalice, barely masking the consequentially enormous AUKUS elephant in the room.

All the engineered fanfare and strained official visits in the Western Australian sphere of political interest, and the fawning ministerial patronage, extra-smiley announcements and private dinners have really been about one thing: the implementation of the first stages (the “not-yet-owning submarines” part) of AUKUS. Submarine Rotational Force – West (SRF-W) is so far about $8 billion dollars of investment in infrastructure to house and sustain the presence of a nuclear submarine presence at HMAS Stirling, only a short distance from Perth. 

Albanese announced 200 places in the “Jobs for subs program”, proudly mentioning it as part of the tens-of-thousands of AUKUS jobs being created for the people of Western Australia. If things go to plan, by as early as 2027, WA will see one UK and four US nuclear submarines rotating out of HMAS Stirling, over 700 American military staff based in the state, and a proposed radioactive storage facility in a yet-to-be-disclosed location. The major party bipartisan blob seems to barge ahead with no clear objective, mashing a strange mix of hyper-muscularity with strategic acquiescence to drown out the concerns, but the added presence of these submarines automatically makes Australia a prime target in a potential war with China, and not one of the boats will be flying an Australian flag for quite some time, if ever.

Defence Minister Richard Marles, who has taken the AUKUS baton from Peter Dutton with the nervous enthusiasm that you come to expect from the “perfumed warlord”, returned from another AUSMIN meeting with additional “Unspecified political commitments” and further “revamped AUKUS agreements”, bringing yet more unending caveats to the already haemorrhaging endeavour. Since its inception under the Morrison government and its eager officiation under Albanese in May last year, AUKUS has been a set of moving goalposts around procurement, preparation, and perhaps most importantly, purpose. $368 billion morphs effortlessly beyond half a trillion, and the logistical mountains swallow up the preparational matchsticks as disingenuous thinktankers gloss over the fact we lack an entire advanced nuclear industry. It is a clear ideological aspirationalism that propels AUKUS blindly forward, instead of the objective pragmatism that should be front and centre for such a monumental consideration.

The abrogation of this pragmatism and the ideological zeal is on display with the clear tussle between the major parties, who posit and jostle like a bunch of performative showponies, vie to be the partner of choice to the foreign policy class in Washington, and ultimately compete to see who can be the most eager to drain our taxpayer base into the US military industrial complex. On the other side of the overzealous and embarrassingly sycophantic diplomatic approach by the Albanese government, one that leaves no wiggle room for sovereign independent thought, awaits a Peter Dutton led Coalition with its own sense of ownership over this ludicrously expensive strategic straitjacket.

The previous Morrison government hung AUKUS up like papier-mâché, kept Labor completely in the dark on the details, and the Albanese government still attempted to knock it down blindfolded anyway. And now the lights are back on and the enormity realised, it’s clear the whole room has been trashed, and still no one knows what is in the piñata. Peter Dutton was Minister of Defence when Scomo bought AUKUS home from one of his many trips abroad. It was Dutton who pretended to understand what the deal was actually about, and his party, along with the Andrew Hasties and James Pattersons, have a sense of ownership over this half trillion dollar strategic firesale. The Coalition are keen to return the helm to drive AUKUS, with all the money, kickbacks, plum postings, plunder and treasure that awaits.

The ideological drones swarming around the defence-sector hivemind will speak to the “vibe” of AUKUS, that it is so much more than a couple of incredibly difficult to obtain and manage nuclear assets with no industry, training, knowledge or disposal capability in our country, that it is the joining of “great values” between great allies. But they ultimately skip over the objective pitfalls the agreement is riddled with, and seem unable to pinpoint a genuine independent benefit to the sovereign interest of Australia.

The average Australian doesn’t place the same importance on the merits of AUKUS, and increasingly the merits of Washington, nor does it care so much about appeasing US war aims in our region. As the media and political class cautiously prepare for the possibility of another Trump occupied White House and all the precarity that could bring to this endeavour, Richard Marles juggles half a trillion dollars worth of procurement vacuums, low congressional and DOD morale in Washington, vague timelines, domestic nuclear knowledge blind spots, while one in six children live in poverty amidst a housing and economic crisis. The only thing this is certain is the profit motivation of former Canberra politicians and disingenuous retired US military ‘consultants’ who ladle off helpings of one of the biggest pots of money available in the transnational private military industrial sphere, urging our naive politicians to push this jalopy uphill, when all the signs are pointing to the possibility that the “AUKUS ‘moonshot’ may be a tragically expensive failure”.

Before AUKUS descended on us like a gigantic square peg jamming into a round hole, the ASPI led armchair-masters-of-war didn’t talk much about nuclear submarines, nor so much suggest we obtain them. When Scomo came back from overseas waving his unintelligible AUKUS napkin, neither himself, nor Euan Graham, Dr Malcolm Davis, Rory Medcalf, or even Greg Sheridan in all their combined toy-soldier wisdom, had any idea what AUKUS was really going to be about. And the Albanese led Labor party, playing a small target opposition transitioning into a smaller-target government, certainly hadn’t a grasp of AUKUS when it hurriedly codified it into existence last year, and most certainly wasn’t prepared to rock the boat with any prudent attempt to interrogate it.

There are geostrategic advantages to the US in launching newly housed nuclear flotillas from WA for a future war with China. There may be operational advantages for our AUKUS partners disposing nuclear waste somewhere on our lands, but with no new SSN submarines coming anytime soon, and no convincing explanation coming out of Canberra, the Australian people will be left to determine if becoming a nuclear service-station for foreign nuclear powered and armed weapons of mass destruction is in the national interest. People are now suspicious about complementary policies and AUKUS-adjacent announcements, and suspicious of the Labor government as they shoehorn their agenda to prepare the ground, and this will dog the government all the way up to the election, into their increaslingly likely minority status beyond.

Nuclear half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of a radioactive isotope to decay. And while the theoretical and poorly-thought-out nuclear disposal sites may hold the toxic waste of Uranium-235 (HL: 700 million years) and Uranium-238 (HL: 4.47 billion years) that have half-lives as old as the earth itself, we come to realise that policies and ideas have half-lives too. The half-life of AUKUS is being realised quite rapidly by the Australian main over the last two years, leaching into the strategic thyroids of a militarised political class, and no amount of iodised table salt is going to purge it. As a consequence, we now also entertain the housing of undisclosed nuclear weapons, our national debate is wasted on nonviable nuclear power plants, and in a short time under a gutless Labor government who conducted inadequate due diligence before signing this harrowing reality, Australia has gone from a proud nuclear free country with an independent voice in the region, to one of the prongs on a foreign-owned nuclear trident that has handed away its sovereign agency.