Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Transparency and accountability are among the keys to voter confidence in public policy. If ever there were a textbook example of what not to do it is AUKUS. What we have before us in this legislation, the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023 and related bill, is not the opportunity to decide the principles of AUKUS; it's merely to determine some of its operational contingencies, in particular the management of nuclear waste and arrangements for independent oversight. We have had relatively few opportunities in this parliament to debate AUKUS, so, before I go to the specifics, I will take a little time to discuss the backstory leading to the legislation now before the House.

I want to make it clear that I am not opposed to AUKUS, but I retain serious concerns about the way it was developed and then presented to the people as a fait accompli, as the best and only way, with no discussion. Nothing that's happened since that surprise announcement from Scott Morrison, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson on the morning of 22 September 2021 has alleviated those concerns. It is, after all, the most significant shift in Australian defence policy since the 1980s when we formally ended the doctrine of forward defence whose apotheosis was the involvement in the Vietnam War for the primacy of the defence of Australia. That shift followed recommendations in a review commissioned by the Hawke government and produced by distinguished defence strategist Paul Dibb, followed by a white paper. Before the new doctrine began to take shape, with defence assets and infrastructure moved north and west, there was substantive public discussion and debate. That government sought to bring the public with them. That could hardly be said to be the case with AUKUS, conceived in secrecy and Labor given less than 24 hours to make up its mind. Not surprisingly, the then opposition acquiesced given its awful memories of having been wedged by John Howard over the Tampa saga.

As national security expert James Curran, who has written extensively on AUKUS in the Australian Financial Review, says:

… Treasury and the Department of Foreign Affairs were excluded from the process; and serious risk and feasibility studies were largely sacrificed in the name of securing a politically symbolic deal.

Treasury was kept in the dark about an initiative hinging on the expenditure of at least $368 billion of taxpayers' money. DFAT was kept out of the loop on an initiative with significant geopolitical consequences for our nearest neighbours. It doesn't matter whether China is the reason for this strategic shift. If China perceives that to be the case then Beijing will respond as if AUKUS is a threat. South-East Asian knows what it is to be in the cockpit of big power rivalry, from the millions of deaths and economic suffering resulting from the years of conflict between Japan, Australia and its allies in World War II through to Vietnam.

Given the way AUKUS was dumped on an unsuspecting Australian public, it's not surprising that voters are proving more than a little sceptical, ambivalent at best. We the people were never let in on this discussion, let alone allowed a debate. A recent poll conducted by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney found 42 per cent of those polled thought that the AUKUS submarines are not worth the cost. At the same time, 46 per cent thought AUKUS is good for creating jobs. A poll conducted by the Lowy Institute got a different result but still found that 32 per cent of respondents—a significant number—were opposed to the acquisition of nuclear powered submarines.

Our strategic realignment in the 1980s was an assertion of sovereignty, an assertion that we should be as self-reliant as possible. Almost overnight and with no debate at all, the previous government, with the acquiescence of the Labor Party, agreed to an entirely new approach which, as the distinguished former DFAT chief Peter Varghese points out, reduces our sovereignty and ties us ever closer to the United States. Mr Varghese served both sides of politics in very senior and responsible roles, providing them with frank, fearless and objective advice regardless of which party they came from. He was respected, in short, by all he served and rewarded for his intellect, insights and advice. Here's what he had to say about AUKUS in the Australian Financial Review, and it's worth quoting at some length:

The real test of sovereignty is whether you can defend yourself and credibly deter an attack on your territory.

Is that what the nuclear submarines deliver? Or would it be smarter to design a defence capability, including the best conventional submarines, which may give us less to offer in a war in north-east Asia but which may be more affordable and more effective in the defence of continental Australia?

I do not pretend to know the answers to these questions. But I would have thought that before we took decisions as momentous as the AUKUS submarines that there would be a proper and forensic public discussion about other options and their underlying rationale.

It may be odd to argue that a decision to acquire a capability which will not be fully delivered for three decades, if all goes to plan, has been made with unseemly haste. No one on the inside would think so. They have no doubt crunched the numbers and the policy options.

But decisions of this magnitude can easily emerge in an echo chamber. And the biggest threat to good policy is a failure forensically to test assumptions and weigh options. Much of that can and should be done outside classified discussions.

'Unseemly haste' and 'echo chamber'—this is not the Greens talking. This is one of the most senior and esteemed public servants Australia has produced. Varghese wrote:

What defence capabilities are we not getting because we have set aside some $360 billion for nuclear submarines?

Varghese was not alone in his concerns about Australian sovereignty. Allan Gyngell was an equally distinguished public servant, concluding his career as Director-General of the Office of National Assessments. Here's part of what he wrote, also in the AFR, about AUKUS in 2021, a year and a half before his untimely death.

Nuclear submarines offer Australia strategic and operational benefits. They go further and faster and stay longer at sea than their conventional counterparts.

But they have one large strike against them. We cannot operate them alone. The capability they provide is only available to us if we cede a degree—quite a high degree in this case—of Australian sovereignty.

Our capacity to operate the nation's most expensive and powerful defence asset will always be subject to American veto and the program will lead inevitably to deeper operational integration with the United States.

This is more than just a theoretical issue. China insists that it will absorb Taiwan one way or the other, and the US is adamant that it will not allow that to happen. This government has repeatedly denied that AUKUS would commit Australia and its new subs to support the US in military conflict with China over Taiwan. But, as recently as April this year, US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell belled that cat. What he told a think tank in Washington was cloaked in diplomatic verbiage, but its message about American expectations of Australia was clear:

… what we're confronting now are challenges that require a much deeper engagement with allies and partners. I think the idea over time … will be in a number of potential areas of conflict and in a number of scenarios …

He goes on:

I think those practical circumstances in which AUKUS has the potential to have submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordinance from long distances. Those have enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances …

'Cross-strait circumstances'—well, I'll assume it's the waters between Taiwan and China that he's talking about. As for 'delivering conventional ordinance from long distances', that's what the US expects to be the role of our AUKUS submarines in the case of war between the US and China over Taiwan. That's what Washington thinks we've signed up for. Apart from informed scepticism expressed by experts in publications read almost exclusively by other experts, the question of the implications for Australian sovereignty rarely breaks the surface in broader discussion about Australia's relations with its most important ally.

For all that, I do thank the Deputy Prime Minister and his stuff for the in-depth briefings offered to me and other members of the crossbench on the various aspects of AUKUS Pillar II, as well as Pillar I, and for the attention he and his staff have paid to my specific interests in some of the detail of this bill. My most significant concern has been the question of storage of nuclear waste, an inevitable consequence of the acquisition of nuclear submarines and the rotation of US and UK subs through Fleet Base West. The original legislative proposal would have left open the possibility that high-level nuclear waste from American and British submarines, as well as our own subs, could have been left to linger on Australian soil. Low-level waste, gloves, hazmat clothing and the like are one thing; high-level waste is quite another, especially given that the UK, for example, has yet to find a way of disposing of the waste from its many decommissioned nuclear submarines, long after they've left operational service. I'm really pleased to see that the minister has listened to these concerns and those of others which emerged during consideration of this legislation by the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee. The government appears to have taken both my concerns and those of the committee at face value, and for that I thank the minister.

I'm pleased, too, that the government is proposing additional amendments designed to ensure accountability, transparency and independence of oversight of the safety provisions relating to nuclear waste. On the face of it, they mirror arrangements for the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, ARPANSA, to protect the community in relation to civilian nuclear waste. There will be an independent regulator to sit within the defence department, as occurs in the UK, rather than the arrangement in the US, where it sits within the Department of Energy for legacy reasons going back as far as World War II and the Manhattan Project. There will also be an expert advisory committee, because there needs to be a second line of accountability. Again, this would report to the defence minister and be appointed by the minister. I'm concerned that there do not appear to be provisions for the expert advisory committee to report publicly, and I would far prefer an independent appointment process.

As I said at the start of my remarks about AUKUS more broadly, transparency and accountability are among the keys to public confidence in policy. These concerns will not end with the passage of this legislation or, indeed, any future arrival of AUKUS submarines. They will remain key for the lifetime of this ambitious and fraught project, and it is incumbent on this parliament to keep its eyes open and on these matters for the lifetime of this exercise.

Sitting suspended from 13:03 to 16:00

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