The Albanese government wants Australians to believe that AUKUS is an expression of national ambition, industrial renewal and sovereign defence capability. Its conduct suggests something very different.
Labor has embraced the most expensive and consequential defence project in Australian history without first subjecting it to the rigorous parliamentary, strategic or democratic examination that a commitment of this scale demands. Instead of interrogating the assumptions inherited from Scott Morrison, the government has adopted them, enlarged them and wrapped them in the language of inevitability.
The result is a policy that is becoming more expensive, more uncertain and more deeply embedded in American military planning, while the government works increasingly hard to prevent its own members from debating it.
AUKUS was not conceived through an open assessment of Australia’s defence requirements. It emerged from a secretive process conducted by the Morrison government, which abruptly abandoned the French submarine agreement and committed Australia to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines from the United States and Britain. Labor, having criticised Morrison repeatedly for secrecy, poor administration and contempt for proper process, accepted the arrangement after taking office with remarkably little resistance.
That decision now exposes the hollowness of Labor’s claim to represent a more accountable form of government.
Neither the federal parliament nor the major political parties have conducted a comprehensive inquiry into the strategic merits, opportunity costs and practical risks of AUKUS. Labor branches have passed motions questioning or opposing the project. Former Labor leaders and foreign ministers, including Paul Keating, Gareth Evans and Bob Carr, have raised serious objections. Yet the party’s national conference appears unwilling to provide any meaningful forum in which those objections can be tested.
This is not party discipline in any admirable sense. It is intellectual evasion.
A government confident in its case would welcome scrutiny. It would publish the assumptions behind the submarine acquisition, explain the alternatives considered, identify the conditions under which the program might be reconsidered and submit the project to independent review. Instead, Labor treats any serious examination of AUKUS as a threat to be managed.
The contrast with Labor’s own history is particularly stark. The party once prided itself on argument over foreign policy, defence, alliances and Australia’s place in the world. Today, its leadership appears determined to substitute announcements, construction photographs and employment projections for strategic reasoning.
The timing of the government’s latest spending announcement made that substitution especially obvious. As Labor delegates gathered in Adelaide, where rank-and-file unease about AUKUS might otherwise have received attention, the government announced another $4.6 billion for the nuclear-powered submarine construction yard at Osborne. That brings Commonwealth funding announced for the yard to $8.5 billion.
The message was unmistakable: do not debate the policy, admire the expenditure.
Richard Marles declared that the activity at Osborne demonstrated that AUKUS was “on track”. But construction activity proves only that money is being spent and infrastructure is being built. It does not prove that the United States will be able or willing to transfer Virginia-class submarines. It does not prove that Britain and Australia can design, construct and deliver the proposed SSN-AUKUS fleet on schedule. It does not establish that Australia will possess the workforce, regulatory system, nuclear stewardship capacity, industrial depth or strategic independence required to operate it.
Even the government’s own description reveals how far expenditure is running ahead of demonstrated capability. The Osborne construction yard is expected to cost about $30 billion before the submarines themselves are built. The latest funding is for the facility, not for delivering an operational submarine. Marles has confirmed that the project involves dozens of buildings and will unfold across the coming decade.
Labor nevertheless presents every new allocation as proof that the entire enterprise is succeeding. This is circular reasoning elevated into government policy: AUKUS must be viable because billions are being spent on it, and the spending must continue because too much has already been committed to admit that the project may be unviable.
The employment argument is equally inadequate. Thousands of skilled jobs in South Australia would plainly be valuable. But job creation cannot by itself justify any project, regardless of cost, strategic value or risk. Governments can create engineering, manufacturing and research employment through many forms of public investment. The relevant question is whether this particular expenditure is the best way to secure Australia, strengthen its industrial base and preserve its freedom of action.
Labor avoids that question because the answer is far from self-evident.
Australia is also committing billions of dollars to assist American and British submarine construction. The estimated contribution to allied shipyards is nearly $10 billion. At the same time, the United States is struggling to build Virginia-class submarines at the rate required for its own navy, let alone at the higher rate necessary to supply Australia without weakening American force levels. The British naval construction system has experienced persistent delays, maintenance pressures and cost escalation.
The government’s response is essentially to transfer Australian public money overseas and hope that it resolves industrial constraints that the United States and Britain have been unable to solve themselves.
That is not sovereign capability. It is subsidised dependency.
Nor does the widely cited figure of $368 billion capture the project’s full financial exposure. The estimate is expressed over several decades and remains vulnerable to inflation, exchange-rate movements, design changes, schedule slippage, infrastructure expansion and workforce shortages. It also does not settle the eventual cost of managing and disposing of radioactive waste from decommissioned submarines and their reactors.
A responsible government would identify these uncertainties plainly. Labor instead repeats the headline estimate as though it were a firm price for a clearly defined and deliverable product.
More fundamentally, the government has failed to demonstrate that eight nuclear-powered submarines will provide the continuous operational presence implied by its rhetoric. Submarines require lengthy maintenance, training and certification cycles. Submarine specialist Peter Briggs has argued that eight boats are “mathematically insufficient to maintain a two-ocean presence”.
The practical availability of the fleet matters more than the ceremonial number ultimately commissioned. An extraordinarily expensive fleet that can place only a small number of boats at sea at any given time may offer much less strategic effect than the government’s promotional language implies.
Labor’s use of the word “sovereign” is therefore increasingly Orwellian. Australia will depend on foreign reactor technology, foreign weapons, foreign design assistance, foreign supply chains, foreign technical support and, during the transitional period, the willingness of the United States to release second-hand Virginia-class submarines from its own constrained fleet.
The boats may carry the Australian flag. That does not make the capability strategically independent.
Gareth Evans has warned that Australian nuclear-powered submarines risk functioning as an extension of the American fleet. That concern goes to the centre of the AUKUS bargain. Nuclear-powered attack submarines are not primarily coastal-defence vessels. Their endurance, speed and weapons systems make them particularly suited to distant operations conducted alongside the United States, including surveillance, sea denial and attacks on enemy naval forces.
Labor has never adequately explained whether an Australian government would, in practice, be able to withhold these submarines from an American-led conflict in Asia after decades of technological integration, joint training, intelligence sharing, weapons dependence and operational planning.
The issue is not whether Australian commanders will formally retain authority over Australian boats. The issue is whether the entire capability will be so structurally intertwined with the United States that refusing American expectations becomes politically, technically and operationally implausible.
This is the sovereignty question Labor does not want debated.
Instead, ministers speak of “interoperability” and “integration” as though these were neutral technical benefits. They are also mechanisms through which Australia’s strategic options may be narrowed. The more dependent the Australian Defence Force becomes on American platforms, software, intelligence, maintenance, munitions and targeting systems, the harder it becomes for an Australian government to pursue an independent policy during a crisis.
AUKUS also deepens the transformation of Western Australia into a major operating location for American and British nuclear-powered submarines. From 2027, Submarine Rotational Force-West is intended to bring a regular allied submarine presence to HMAS Stirling. Former defence minister Linda Reynolds, despite supporting AUKUS, has acknowledged that this could make the base a nuclear target.
That is not an incidental concern. It represents a direct redistribution of strategic risk onto Australian communities.
Residents near future AUKUS facilities and First Nations communities have also raised objections about inadequate consultation. Labor’s failure to engage seriously with those communities is consistent with its broader approach: decisions are announced from above, expenditure is treated as momentum, and objections are characterised as obstacles to implementation rather than evidence that the policy may require reconsideration.
The government’s refusal to participate in Peter Garrett’s community-based AUKUS inquiry is particularly revealing. Invitations were extended to the government and relevant agencies, but no submission or appearance was forthcoming.
The government is not obliged to accept the inquiry’s premises or conclusions. It should, however, be capable of defending its policy in an open forum. Its absence reinforces the impression that Labor’s strategy is not to win the argument but to prevent the argument from taking place.
There is a grim political calculation behind this. Once enough money has been spent, contracts signed, facilities built and jobs attached to particular electorates, withdrawal becomes politically difficult regardless of the project’s underlying merits. Each new commitment increases the cost of reconsideration. The government can then claim that reversing course would waste the very expenditure it chose to make before the policy was properly tested.
This is how a questionable policy is converted into an irreversible one.
Labor inherited AUKUS from Scott Morrison, but it can no longer blame Morrison for what AUKUS has become. The Albanese government has had years to examine, revise or reject the arrangement. Instead, it has made itself the pact’s most enthusiastic domestic custodian.
It has accepted the strategic assumptions of the Coalition, embraced the priorities of the United States, committed immense public resources and disciplined its own party against serious dissent. It now calls that submission “sovereignty”.
The immediate scandal is not merely that AUKUS may cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It is that the government is attempting to commit several generations of Australians to a military, nuclear and foreign-policy structure without demonstrating that the submarines will arrive as promised, that they will meet Australia’s actual defence needs, or that they can be operated without surrendering a substantial measure of national independence.
A Labor government worthy of the party’s democratic traditions would demand an independent parliamentary inquiry, publish the project’s strategic assumptions, disclose its full lifecycle risks and allow its national conference to debate the policy openly.
Instead, the Albanese government offers stage-managed announcements, inflated claims of sovereignty and another multibillion-dollar invoice.
There is also a powerful commercial constituency ensuring that Australia’s military expansion is presented as permanent, urgent and beyond serious political challenge. Global weapons manufacturers, domestic contractors, consultants and lobbyists now operate within a defence-policy ecosystem in which government strategy and corporate growth increasingly reinforce each other. Defence itself describes close industry partnership as central to AUKUS and has opened Australian military supply chains more deeply to companies such as BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rheinmetall, Saab and Thales. Labor has continued directing major contracts and public support into this network, including a $120 million missile-components contract with Lockheed Martin Australia and extensive AUKUS-related opportunities for large multinational contractors.
It would be too simplistic to claim that an individual donation or private meeting directly purchased Labor’s support for AUKUS. The more serious problem is structural. Former ministers, political advisers, senior officials and military figures move into defence companies, advisory boards and lobbying firms, carrying with them relationships and an intimate knowledge of government decision-making. Former Labor minister Brendan O’Connor joined the advisory board of arms and ammunition company NIOA, while former Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon became special counsel to CMAX Advisory, whose reported clients include BAE Systems, Raytheon, Navantia, Saab and Elbit Systems. Such appointments demonstrate how narrow the distance has become between those who formulate defence policy and those who profit from it.
This revolving door helps create a political climate in which weapons expenditure is routinely equated with national security, industrial policy and regional employment, while restraint is portrayed as weakness and scrutiny as obstruction. Every new factory, consultancy, research partnership and subcontract creates another organisation with a financial interest in the continuation and expansion of AUKUS. Labor therefore faces pressure not merely from Washington and the defence bureaucracy, but from an increasingly entrenched industry whose revenues, employment promises and political access depend on governments continuing to order more complex and expensive military systems.
The industry’s influence is often exercised less through an explicit instruction than through control of the policy environment. Contractors supply technical expertise, lobbyists maintain access to ministers and officials, former insiders explain how to navigate government, and defence-funded institutions help shape the boundaries of respectable strategic debate. Policy choices that deliver decades of corporate revenue are described as unavoidable responses to a dangerous world, while alternatives that would generate fewer contracts struggle to receive comparable institutional support. Labor has not challenged this system. It has placed itself at its centre, presenting the commercial ambitions of the weapons industry as though they were indistinguishable from Australia’s national interest.
AUKUS may or may not ultimately deliver submarines. It has already delivered something else: a federal Labor government increasingly unwilling to question Washington, unwilling to confront its own contradictions and unwilling to trust Australians with an honest debate about the country’s future.
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