Life on the West Island - A conspiracy of silence

In light of the increasingly deranged behaviour of America and its malevolent President, at least two former West Island Prime Ministers and scores of journalists and academics are calling for an urgent rethink of our nation’s defence and security ties with the USA. Trump is cosying up with dictators in authoritarian regimes including Russia and North Korea and turning his back on long-term allies and trading partners. His erratic and vindictive behaviour has already shaken up the democratic world, including a crash in share markets and realignment of alliances in Europe. His policies now threaten to lunge the US into high inflation and recession, possibly dragging the world with it.

For the West Island, the turnaround in American foreign and defence policy puts in doubt our commitment to massive purchases of strike fighter jets and the AUKUS nuclear submarine purchase, scheduled to cost around $380 billion. That’s the staggering sum of $38,000,000,000!

Defence analysts now say that it is unlikely that the US will build enough Virginia Class submarines to be able to sell some second-hand models to the West Island. And with its current manufacturing output, it is unlikely to produce any submarines in return for our massive cost. At best, we might get access to American owned, crewed and controlled nuclear submarines in about 25 years – but no access to the nuclear technology which drives them. We will, however, have to safely store their deadly nuclear waste at enormous cost for at least 20,000 years. How’s that for a groundbreaking national security deal?

It seems that everyone is talking about scrapping, replacing or winding back the ludicrous AUKUS arrangement – that is, with two major exceptions – the Liberal and Labor parties. Bernard Keane of Crikey explains:

There’s a bipartisan conspiracy of silence on AUKUS — and it flies in the face of democracy. Australian voters have never been allowed to vote on — or hear a proper debate about — the disastrous AUKUS pact. Australians have never had the chance to properly vote on AUKUS. The major parties haven’t allowed them.

It was foisted on the public in 2021 by a desperate Scott Morrison with the intention of wedging his opponents. But Labor — a timid shadow of a once-proud party — signed up to it, basically sight unseen, within hours. As a result, both major parties went to the 2022 election on the same platform — one that we would only later be told would cost well north of $300 billion and mean Australia wouldn’t be able to replace its submarine fleet for decades. We’ve had to rely for accountability and transparency on the project on the Greens and the crossbenches.

Now we face a second election without being offered a choice or any sort of debate over AUKUS. The problem is, in the intervening three years, it’s become ever more apparent that AUKUS is a fantasy that will never deliver any submarines.

Even before the election of Donald Trump transformed the United States from an ally into something between an enemy and an absentee landlord demanding rack-rents, the implausibility of AUKUS was routinely demonstrated. It’s a matter of record that US submarine production is well below levels necessary to sustain the American fleet, let alone produce enough submarines to enable three to be handed to Australia. The abandonment of AUKUS in favour of the US keeping extra submarines and operating them from Australia has already been modelled for the US Congress. Scarily, US submarine production appears to be slowing, not increasing as AUKUS requires — despite Labor throwing taxpayer money at the Americans.

The UK submarine construction program — which we’re also helping fund — is in significantly worse shape and some wildly optimistic timelines have been mooted for the construction of new vessels for Australia.

It’s also become clearer that our navy can’t even crew our existing vessels, let alone meet the dramatically increased crewing requirements of much bigger nuclear submarines. Calls from defence experts like Peter Briggs and Chris Barrie for a plan B — usually involving approaching the French to step into the breach — continue to mount.

And Australia’s own AUKUS arrangements have proven shambolic. The Australian Submarine Agency was barely established before it was placed under review.

In fact, the steady accumulation of evidence AUKUS is going to be a spectacular failure has never elicited much response from the government — Marles churns out a steady stream of Pollyannaish media releases about how wonderfully the whole thing is going and how the benefits are already flowing to Australia.

Rarely has there been a major program — the biggest defence program in Australian history — more destined for failure than AUKUS and rarely has there been a more studied silence not merely from the government presiding over it but the opposition ostensibly holding it to account.

Malcolm Turnbull — whose fundamental critique of AUKUS as damaging to Australian sovereignty has never been refuted — calls it “bipartisan gaslighting”. It’s also anti-democratic, with voters deprived of the opportunity to assess the merits of a program that might cost over $300 billion and never deliver anything, leaving a major gap in Australia’s defences.

A political system that fails to deliver proper debate over or scrutiny of the biggest strategic issues a country can face is a deeply dysfunctional one. AUKUS should be front and centre in the coming election, not hidden in a conspiracy of silence by the major parties. It’s yet further evidence that the sooner Labor and the Coalition are pushed into minority government, the better for Australia.

Former Prime Ministers Keating and Turnbull have long called for the scrapping of AUKUS, and now there are signs of unrest within the major parties. ABC reports that a Labor party grassroots campaign to scrap the AUKUS submarine project is gathering pace, while some Coalition backbenchers are reported to have concerns in light of Trump’s behaviour. But officially, the major parties’ conspiracy of silence continues.