Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I've long argued that Australia should adopt a more independent foreign and security policy, which is to say not that we shouldn't have allies or be a member of alliances but rather that at all times we should put our national interest first and only team up with other countries if doing so is genuinely in our national interest. To that end, it was arguably not unreasonable for Prime Minister John Howard to invoke ANZUS after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, considering the value for Australia, at the time, of demonstrating our support for the US and bolstering our own security posture. By contrast, it was clearly not in our national interest to stay mired in Afghanistan for decades or to join the United States and the United Kingdom when they invaded Iraq in 2003. Iraq, in particular, was a failure of foreign and security policy of historic proportions, a disaster made all the more appalling by the undeniable fact that the war was based on a litany of lies. Of course, the Howard government would have argued in 2003 that our relationship with the US was so important that Australia had no choice but to go along for the ride, but Canada didn't, and the world didn't open up and swallow it, nor did the US abandon its Five Eyes partner New Zealand when it also refused to join in the invasion. In other words, the Australian government had options in 2003 but chose to put the US's national interest ahead of our own.

What, then, is to be made of the recent diplomatic relationship between Australia, India, Japan and the US, known as the Quad, or, more importantly, of AUKUS, the highly controversial security relationship binding Australia, the UK and the US? In my opinion, they're not inherently bad for Australia insofar as they promise international cooperation among like-minded countries, but, of course, this is a somewhat intellectual take on the situation, and the reality of AUKUS is that there is good reason for many people to be alarmed about the consequences of the agreement.

For a start, AUKUS is mostly about nuclear submarines, and nuclear submarines are the wrong technology for our needs, not least because they are big, relatively noisy and unsuited to the shallow waters of South-East Asia. Sure, nuclear boats are fast, go deep and enjoy remarkable endurance, but all the pumps, steam, turbines and reduction gears normally involved in nuclear propulsion make a racket compared to a conventional boat. Frankly, it would have made much more sense for the US and the UK to continue to focus on nuclear while Australia continued with niche capabilities like improved conventional submarines and autonomous underwater vehicles. Frankly, that would have been in the best interests of all three countries. Such a future would guarantee that Australia maintains a sovereign underwater war-fighting capability, something that will effectively be denied to us if our submarine fleet, hardware, software and crew are all entangled in the US and UK nuclear submarine architecture. To suggest that the US will sell its Virginia class submarines and not be fussed about when and if we operate them is just a fantasy.

Then there's the cost, which, by one estimate, is put at more than a third of a trillion dollars over the next 30 years. This is not just an awful lot of money in its own right; it's also so much money as to gut funding for other capabilities, as the submarines skew capability towards expeditionary coalition operations in far-flung corners of the world. That's assuming, of course, the Royal Australian Navy can find enough crews, which is an heroic assumption seeing as they don't have enough crews for the much smaller Collins class boats in service currently. And all of this has been thrust upon the Australian community with no public consultation and not even a parliamentary debate, despite the enormity of the philosophical shift in the country's position on nuclear energy and all the attendant questions about opportunity cost, safety, waste and so on. This is an appalling failure of governance, made all the worse by the then Labor opposition's obsequious response to the coalition government's shock announcement that Australia is getting a nuclear Navy.

That's where I land on this one: more nuanced than many people, especially those not schooled in strategic matters and Defence capability, but, then again, I did enjoy more than two decades in the military and intelligence establishments.

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