The AUKUS Cash Cow: Robbing the Australian Taxpayer
Two British ministers, the UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, paid a recent visit to Australia recently as part of the AUKMIN (Australia-United Kingdom Ministerial Consultations) talks. It showed, yet again, that Australia’s government loves being mugged. Stomped on. Mowed over. Beaten.
It was mugged, from the outset, in its unconditional surrender to the US military industrial complex with the AUKUS security agreement. It was mugged in throwing money (that of the Australian taxpayer) at the US submarine industry, which is lagging in its production schedule for both the Virginia-class boats and new designs such as the Columbia class. British shipyards were hardly going to miss out on this generous distribution of Australian money, largesse ill-deserved for a flagging production line.
A joint statement on the March 22 meeting, conducted with Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was packed with trite observations and lazy reflections about the nature of the “international order”. Ministers “agreed the contemporary [UK-Australian] relationship is responding in an agile and coordinated way to global challenges.” When it comes to matters of submarine finance and construction, agility is that last word that comes to mind.
Boxes were ticked with managerial, inconsequential rigour. Russia, condemned for its “full-scale, illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine.” Encouragement offered for Australia in training Ukrainian personnel through Operation Kudu and joining the Drone Capability Coalition. Exaggerated “concern at the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Praise for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and “respect of navigation.”
The relevant pointers were to be found later in the statement. The UK has been hoping for a greater engagement in the Indo-Pacific (those damn French take all the plaudits from the European power perspective), and the AUKUS bridge has been one excuse for doing so. Accordingly, this signalled a “commitment to a comprehensive and modern defence relationship, underlined by the signing of the updated Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for Defence and Security Cooperation.”
When politicians need to justify opening the public wallet, such tired terms as “unprecedented”, “threat” and “changing” are used. These are the words of foreign minister Wong: “Australia and the United Kingdom are building on our longstanding strategic partnership to address our challenging and rapidly changing world.” Marles preferred the words “an increasingly complex strategic environment.” Shapps followed a similar line of thinking. “Nuclear-powered submarines are not cheap, but we live in a much more dangerous world, where we are seeing a much more assertive region [with] China, a much more dangerous world all around with what is happening in the Middle East and Europe.” Hardly a basis for the submarines, but the fetish is strong and gripping.
With dread, critics of AUKUS would have noted yet another round of promised disgorging. Britain’s submarine industry is even more lagging than that of the United States, and bringing Britannia aboard the subsidy truck is yet another signal that the AUKUS submarines, when and if they ever get off the design page and groan off the shipyards, are guaranteed well deserved obsolescence or glorious unworkability.
A separate statement released by all the partners of the AUKUS agreement glories in the SSN-AUKUS submarine, intended as a joint effort between BAE Systems and the Australian Submarine Corporation (ASC). (BAE Systems, it should be remembered, is behind the troubled Hunter-class frigate program, one plagued by difficulties in unproven capabilities.)
An already challenging series of ingredients is further complicated by the US role as well. “SSN-AUKUS is being trilaterally developed, based on the United Kingdom’s next designs and incorporation technology from all three nations, including cutting edge United States submarine technologies.” This fabled fiction “will be equipped for intelligence, surveillance, undersea warfare and strike missions, and will provide maximum interoperability among AUKUS partners.” The ink on this is clear: the Royal Australian Navy will, as with any of the promised second-hand Virginia-class boats, be a subordinate partner.
In this, a false sense of submarine construction is being conveyed through what is termed the “Optimal Pathway”, ostensibly to “create a stronger, more resilient trilateral submarine industrial base, supporting submarine production and maintenance in all three countries.” In actual fact, the Australian leg of this entire effort is considerably greater in supporting the two partners, be it in terms of upgrading HMAS Stirling in Western Australia to permit UK and US SSNs to dock as part of Submarine Rotational Force West from 2027, and infrastructure upgrades in South Australia. It all has the appearance of garrisoning by foreign powers, a reality all the more startling given various upgrades to land and aerial platforms for the United States in the Northern Territory.
The eye-opener in the AUKMIN chatter is the promise from Canberra to send A$4.6 billion (£2.4 billion) to speed up lethargic construction at the Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor production line. There are already questions that the reactor cores, being built at Derby, will be delayed for the UK’s own Dreadnought nuclear submarine. The amount, it was stated by the Australian government, was deemed “an appropriate and proportionate contribution to expand production and accommodate Australia’s requirements.” Hardly.
Ultimately, this absurd spectacle entails a windfall of cash, ill-deserved funding to two powers with little promise of returns and no guarantees of speedier boat construction. The shipyards of both the UK and the United States can take much joy from this, as can those keen to further proliferate nuclear platforms, leaving the Australian voter with that terrible feeling of being, well, mugged.
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Return to home pageLet’s face it, Rolls Royce needs funds more than Australia’s hungry and homeless.
It was pretty brazen wasn’t it ? Did Lord [unelected] Cameron insist on cash before he hopped back on the plane ?
As Paul Keating stated ,AUKUS is the worst deal ever the only one paying is Australia.
This sickened and angered me, for Cameron is a proven dud at everything he did and nobody can remember a positive, including his crawling off to the bushes of anonymity for a few years to cool off for the stinking gong and the Lords. Garbage. Shapps is a predatory type, probably hated by his few “friends”, rather like Gove, Truss, Johnson. Toryism is anachronistic, archaeic, futile filth. As for the sub deal, it is the worst thing the nation has done, thanks to a mad maggoty bowel ejection named Morons-gone. We’ll need caterpillar tracks on them for versatility as they crawl after the missiles that will flatten Australia in the course of annihilating the USA bases here. If China is ever to go due to the rampant USA aggression in war, Russia will be in, and we will be out , permanently out, and fast. Humanity will go, and subs will do nothing, at all. If that is what slow wits, lame brains, uglies, like Trump, Putin, Cameron, Dutton want, we needn’t actually be intelligent and foresee the obvious. Think of the coffins we’ll all save, and the cremation pollution. Oh, hang on…
Cash splash to France for terminated contract, Ukraine defense, UK and US ship yards, and someone has to send arms to Israel (just try protesting this one!).
What do we get for this?
Like the guy who pissed his pants, a nice warm feeling down there. And nothing else.
We are getting to love austerity.though.
Something has been seriously awry with Labor, the last six or twelve months.
The nonsenses involving the latest immigration bill passed today are just the latest example. Consider the robodebt like taxation witch hunt, Gaza, AUKAS, Whistleblowers, and the refusal to rein in gouging on everything from the price of necessities from groceries to power prices ; the swing to the neolib right has been profound.
Telling photo that, at the top…two grinning bastards just sold the most expensive and biggest shitbox in the yard to the wood duck on the left….who already looks like buyers remorse is setting in.Albanese can expect more of the same come the next election.The two party duopoly has well passed it’s use by date.The bullshit being shovelled onto the Australian public keeps getting thicker.
Paul, true, if they rename their party the Fabians they’d be relevant. They’re sell-outs to foreign ideologies not in our interests atm.
This one has me fuming. Australian funds creating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jobs. In Britain. Albo, you’re not just a sell-out, you’re a traitor.
“Something has been seriously awry with Labor, the last six or twelve months.”
Paul, recently heard someone say that they wished Labor had won the last election.
Australia chose NOT to vote for Bill Shorten, thus leaving the field clear for Morrison. If those voters aren’t happy, I have no sympathy for any of them. Morrison ruined our country, & all the “clever” Aussies can do is bitch about the present ALP government. If you stupid twats ever get an intelligent idea, please let the rest of us know, asap? It’d be a nice change…
There’s often a failure to really think deeply about the actual changes well and truly afoot, changes mostly driven by tech and the nature of communications and the development of hegemonies by economic guile.
The biggest issues are no longer the dominion of manpower coupled with agriculture and the bleeding of wealth and wellbeing to religious cranks, but psychological warfare sponsored by despots and the dead-in-the-water fossil-fuel fraternity and death and destruction via climate change.
Prizing ourselves out of thinking in terms of olde worlde political/religious ideological differentiation and prejudice, ballistic warfare and might-is-right is difficult in the face of most electorates being complacent traditionalists. The battleground is now pivoted to saving ourselves from the effects of climate change, envirnomental catastrophe, the recent industrial inertia, and the misinformation / disinformation tweaking old fears and pressing on the democratic project.
The UK government revealed plans on Monday to boost Britain’s nuclear sector, for energy and defense, including massive investments in the future workforce and in its submarine program, which London views as its “vital” at-sea deterrent.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced a package of public and private investment which is expected to cover the needs of Britain’s growing nuclear energy industry and to create 40,000 new jobs by 2030.
The British government plans to partner with defense companies BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Babcock, as well as with French energy giant EDF, to invest more than £763 million ($961 million) by the end of the decade in the relevant skills, jobs and education, it said in a statement.
Last year, the UK unveiled a plan to build eight new reactors and new-type small modular reactors by 2050, in an effort to produce 24 gigawatts of electricity, enough to provide a quarter of the country’s needs.
The government also announced a commitment to invest up to £300 million ($379 million) in the production of the HALEU fuel required for new high-tech reactors, which is currently only commercially produced in Russia.
“Meeting the UK’s ambitious nuclear targets will require a huge ramp up in all parts of the workforce, from engineering to construction,” Tom Greatrex, Chief Executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, said, commenting on the new investment plan.
IAEA rebukes EU over Russian nuclear fuel
The major development initiative comes as the UK authorities work to ensure there will also be enough nuclear-energy-focused workers for the construction and maintenance of its fleet of submarines, which the UK considers vital for its national security, as they are the core of its continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent.
“Safeguarding the future of our nuclear deterrent and nuclear energy industry is a critical national endeavor,” Sunak said, as quoted by Reuters.
Britain is set to expand its submarine industry, boosting its fleet under the AUKUS security pact. AUKUS (Australia, UK and US) was established in 2021. Under the pact’s Pillar 1, the US and UK pledged to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines, while Pillar 2 is a broader technology-sharing agreement.
On Monday, the British Ministry of Defence published the ‘Defence Nuclear Enterprise Command Paper,’ in which it underscores the need to “sustain Britain’s nuclear deterrent “in a period of heightened risk and volatility that is likely to last beyond the 2030s.”
The document also revealed that Britain is developing a new replacement sovereign warhead, while progressing with the new Dreadnought Class submarines, bringing these into service in the early 2030s.
You can share this story on social media: Sucked in again Australia
Roswell, some one belled the cat for on soc media a little while ago that, “Labor never fails to disappoint”.
Yes I know they are still in front of the Keystone Cop opposition, but is that really good enough?
Frank,
The blah blah of info on Britain is relevant to Britain who amongst other things, like most of Europe, will be shitting bricks about the demonstrated madness of Putin, and also its energy security. What they do and how they manage themselves is their business.
To close with the statement “Sucked in again Australia” is a non-sequitur, you have posed no questions or theories supporting it.
Such a shame really, we might all have been enlightened.