“The AUKUS Inquiry reports on 30 October. Its demand is simple. A real parliamentary inquiry. A published threat assessment.” Andrew Brown.
Australians passed a hat around to scrutinise a $368 billion defence deal. The largest procurement in our history, and the only formal examination of it is a crowdfunded citizens’ inquiry chaired by Peter Garrett, denied a committee room and subpoena powers by both major parties.
Yet look who fronted it. A former Liberal prime minister. Two former Labor foreign ministers. A former Chief of the Defence Force, Chris Barrie, on the commission with former WA premier Carmen Lawrence. More than 500 submissions, including from former defence ministers Linda Reynolds and Christopher Pyne.
This is not the peace movement talking to itself.
It is the security establishment, unmuzzled by retirement, saying what serving officials dare not.
Deal first, justifications later
Begin with the threat. It does not exist on paper. The 2016 Defence White Paper prescribed twelve conventionally powered boats. The 2020 Strategic Update repeated the plan. No white paper or review ever recommended AUKUS. The deal came first, the justifications afterwards.
Nor does the threat survive contact with a map.
An invasion of Australia would require an armada carrying three to five hundred thousand troops, sailing for weeks across more than three thousand kilometres of open water, visible to every satellite the whole way.
Any competent air force, navy or land based missile arsenal would shred it long before a soldier waded ashore. It is impractical to the point of impossible, and no serious strategist believes Beijing contemplates it.
The real threat – talking points
Paul Keating told the National Press Club as much. China poses no military threat to this continent, he argued, and AUKUS is “the worst deal in all history”,
its eight submarines amounting to toothpicks hurled at a mountain.
The worst Labor decision, he added, since Billy Hughes tried conscription.
So where does the menace live? In Coalition talking points, on Sky News panels after dark, and across Peter Hartcher’s lurid Red Alert front pages, which in March 2023 gave Australia three years until war.
The deadline expired this March. No war came. No armada sailed.
The ships steaming toward Australia carry iron ore money back to it. Hartcher played Chicken Little across a national masthead, the acorn landed, the sky stayed put, and neither he nor his chorus in the parliament and the press has offered a word of correction.
Keating called the series the shabbiest journalism he had seen in fifty years. We are spending like drunken sailors to repel an enemy we sketched ourselves.
Three fatal defects
The inquiry’s witnesses buried what remained. Gareth Evans, eight years as foreign minister, gave the commissioners three fatal defects. The submarines will probably never arrive. The costs swamp any benefit. The deal strips Australia’s sovereign agency.
Every piece of public evidence, he said, feeds scepticism that any boat arrives on time, or at all.
Malcolm Turnbull took the wrecking ball into NSW Parliament House on Monday. Transfer of Virginia class boats requires an American president to certify the sale will not weaken the US Navy, whose shipyards build 1.2 submarines a year against a requirement above two.
Turnbull asked what political fantasy has a president signing that while his own navy runs short. Washington has been utterly transparent;
we will not be double crossed, merely ignored.
His warning: zero submarine capability as the Collins class ages out, the gravest defence planning failure in our history, still fully funded.
Colossal surrender of sovereignty
Bob Carr told the inquiry the 2022 election gave Albanese a clear opening to walk away, and he walked past it. Carr cites the Congressional Research Service fallback: keep the Virginias in US Navy service and operate them out of Australia. American boats, American crews, our harbour. Carr calls that a colossal surrender of sovereignty.
On the evidence, it is the plan.
Because the base is already being built. Naval Support Activity Stirling has been stood up near Perth, with 2,300 American personnel rotating through to service US submarines. Turnbull needed one sentence. It’s not called a US base, but it is a US base.
Richard Marles concedes the United States, not Australia, will decide how long its submarines remain at Stirling. Even Reynolds acknowledged Fremantle becomes a bigger nuclear target.
The submarines are conjecture. The base, and the bullseye, are concrete.
Khaki wedge
For Labor people this should burn. Forty years of platform went into the fire without a eulogy. The party of Hawke’s South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone has welded weapons grade uranium reactors into the navy and made Australia custodian of their spent fuel forever, with no disposal site and no plan.
We are not just buying the target. We are buying the dump. When Garrett asked why a party proud of debate refuses to seriously interrogate the pact at its own national conference, silence answered.
Ask the Prime Minister the only question that matters. What does Anthony Albanese know that he is not telling us? If a threat justifies all this, table the assessment. If none exists, this is the most expensive act of political cowardice in the country’s history.
Indonesia is deeply concerned, Malaysia warned of an arms race, and ASEAN watches us pin on the deputy sheriff badge Howard once disowned.
Scott Morrison detonated AUKUS as a khaki wedge before the 2022 election, giving Labor a day to submit. It failed to save him and captured his successor. The inquiry reports on 30 October.
Its demand is simple.
A real parliamentary inquiry.
A published threat assessment. And not one more dollar for Connecticut until the Prime Minister names the enemy, or admits there isn’t one.
Dead certain. The ledger showing how Australia fails its women
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist