David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

With the election of Donald Trump in the US, Australia must end the attempted acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, estimated to cost over $360 billion, and the AUKUS agreement must be cancelled.

Half of Australians want to scrap AUKUS, and they're saying loud and clear that we need to end this $368 billion nuclear submarine gamble, it turns out, with President Trump and the US. This deal was toxic from day one. Then Prime Minister Morrison introduced it as a political wedge, and Labor just rolled over. It turns out a short-term political sugar hit and fear of the coalition were more important to Labor than Australia's long-term national interests. So now Prime Minister Albanese has a $368 billion nuclear gamble, and the cards have turned up trumps—just the wrong sort of Trump. If you go back two years, when it was all still shiny and unknown, barely 20 per cent of Australians wanted to dump AUKUS, but the closer we look, the closer the parliament looks and the closer they look, the worse it gets. Every week that goes by, more and more people are realising how dangerous and irresponsible the two pro-AUKUS war parties are. This week, we saw 48 per cent of Australians come out and say they want to renegotiate our way out of AUKUS. Not even 20 per cent are in love with this pro-nuclear deal that Labor and the coalition have come up with.

What do we get out of AUKUS? We don't get submarines, I can tell you that much. Every single AUKUS agreement this government has signed has a get-out-of-jail-free card for the United States if they don't like it. Just recently, the head of the US Navy's Virginia class submarine program—they're the submarines Albanese is begging the US to give us a couple of—dropped a truth-bomb on AUKUS by making it clear that the US are making nowhere near enough nuclear submarines for themselves. So why would they give any to us? Let's do some maths. The US is making about 1.1 to 1.2 Virginia class submarines a year. To make enough submarines to give some to Australia, they need to make 2.33. In case those in Labor aren't following along—because your defence minister sure isn't!—making one submarine a year is less than making two. What do you think will happen when President Trump, son-of-President-Trump or whatever the future US president is looks at a US military that has about half the number of submarines it was meant to have? Do you think they'll sign off on giving Australia some? Of course they won't, which is exactly why they've been putting all these escape hatches in the AUKUS clause. If that isn't bad enough, we have no way of getting back the $10 billion we've already forked out to the US and the UK, even if they decide to give us no submarines.

The question isn't, 'Will we get nuclear submarines?' The question the Australian public is asking is, 'How many tens of billions of dollars will Labor and the coalition fork out to the United States and the UK before the US jumps out?' The only thing we will get from AUKUS is a big, fat target on Australia's main cities and tonnes and tonnes of toxic nuclear waste. Last time we were sitting, the war parties teamed up to ram through legislation that will see nuclear waste dumped right next to Adelaide and Perth. Who is Labor doing this for? Why are they making major cities nuclear targets, making toxic waste dumps and forking out public funds to the US? It's not in the national interests of Australia. It's not in our defence interests. In fact, the only people winning and grinning over this are the likes of Donald Trump, who keeps getting bucketloads of Australian dollars shovelled towards him. And that's Trump, who controls multiple US spy bases in Australia. That's Trump, whose commander in chief is in charge of thousands of US marines in Darwin. That's Trump, who is in control of US nuclear-capable bombers sitting there in RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory. It's Trump who has control of nuclear-powered submarines coming through Australia's ports—ports that the Labor government is spending $7 billion to build for US nuclear submarines. In what world does any of this make us safer? It is long past time to scrap AUKUS.