Peta Credlin: Australia needs nuclear subs to protect our freedom
Australia’s plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines will be eye-wateringly expensive, but the defence of the nation can’t be done on the cheap, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Finally, 18 months after it was first announced, we now know the broad direction of the Australia-UK-US submarine and technology pact.
Yes, it will be 10 years before we acquire our first nuclear-powered submarines, but let’s not underestimate the significance of what’s happening.
Only six other countries have nuclear-powered subs — the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and India — and the US has previously only shared its nuclear technology with one other country, Britain.
The original AUKUS decision wasn’t just the overdue abandonment of the always flawed Malcolm Turnbull plan, to take an existing French nuclear design and spend 15 years redesigning it and rebuilding it as a conventional sub in Adelaide, only to end up with something far inferior to what existed already.
Abandoning the French sub was not just the right defence decision, but also a sign that Australia had finally decided to be a grown-up country, determined to play a leading role in the struggles of our times.
It was our most important strategic decision since Australia “looked to America” in the 1940s and joined ANZUS in the 1950s, and will be a lasting historical achievement for the former Coalition government.
And, while there’s plenty to criticise in the domestic actions of the Albanese government, it’s to his great credit that the new PM has backed AUKUS from the beginning and is now steering it into being.
No doubt more details will emerge when the PM goes to America this week but, as things now stand, we’ll first build nuclear submarine facilities at HMAS Stirling near Perth and probably, at Jervis Bay south of Wollongong; and will host regular US and probably UK nuclear sub visits from about 2027.
Then, starting in about a decade’s time, we’ll get three, maybe five, nuclear-powered Virginia class subs from the US, most likely from a new production line that Australia will help to finance.
Meanwhile, we’ll be ramping up our recruitment and training of nuclear engineers, plus submariners more generally, and getting them experience on US and UK boats long before any are built here.
Finally, after training a workforce in Britain and America, we’ll start building our own nuclear-powered subs in Adelaide from the mid-2030s.
This new Australian-built sub will be an evolved version of the British Astute class but with a US weapons system; making it a new hybrid sub, common to us and Britain, and possibly the Americans too.
This is a generational project that will span many governments and many PMs, but a transformation of this type was always going to be.
And because it has the strong support of both sides of politics here, in the US, and in the UK too, it should be able to survive the inevitable changes of government in all three countries.
Yes, it will be eye-wateringly expensive, but the defence of the nation can’t be done on the cheap. In the end, the first duty of government is to preserve the freedom and the independence of the Australian nation; and to build-up the freer world that we want our descendants to live in.
Get that right and the other important things will follow. Get it wrong … that’s unthinkable, isn’t it?
In budget terms, even with all the other pressures, we just have to accept defence spending well north of 3 per cent of GDP for the foreseeable future.
Which is why getting welfare spending under control is critical, along with making the NDIS sustainable as well as fair.
And while this is undoubtedly a very good decision; engendering confidence that we can still, as a nation, rise to big challenges, there can be no resting on our laurels.
Indeed, that’s been the problem with all defence procurement lately: We make a decision but there’s no adequate follow-through, because ministers move on, governments change, and too often the new mob replacing the old one wants to junk almost everything and start again; often for no other reason than because they can.
Once operational, by the middle of the next decade our own nuclear subs will give us the strategic deterrent we need; but there’s still the next few dangerous years to get through.
As fast as possible, we need to better arm the offshore patrol vessels we’re already building, get heavily armed corvettes, acquire more planes and a range of armed drones, and urgently build-up our stocks of missiles, shells and ammunition.
And as the late Senator Jim Molan routinely warned, we MUST get 90 days of fuel reserves onshore, not sitting in depots on the other side of the Pacific.
Because, as the Ukraine war shows, crises can build up in a few months and nations have to face them with what they have then, not what they’d like to have.
ANOTHER DAMNING WEEK FOR VICTORIA’S TEFLON PREMIER
It’s almost unheard of for a former senior judge to accuse a state government of corrupting an anti-corruption body, but that’s the sorry state of things in Victoria right now.
Last week saw a succession of scandals: First, a minister facing serious conflict of interest charges; second, proof that the government’s pandemic policy was driven by political polling advice as much as health advice; and then — the big one — a leaked letter from the outgoing head of the state’s anti-corruption commission accusing the government of trying to nobble his work.
This damning letter from the former anti-corruption commission head was sent late last year to the presiding officers of the Victorian parliament.
In it, former Supreme Court judge Robert Redlich KC accuses the Daniel Andrews government of “revenge attacks” on his organisation “in retaliation for a series of probes into its dealings”.
There are currently at least four anti-corruption probes into the Victorian government involving Premier Daniel Andrews: over allegedly corrupt land deals, alleged sweetheart deals between the government and the firefighters’ union, the government’s alleged misuse of political staffers, and the government’s alleged mishandling of union grants.
In his letter, plus five-page attachment, the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission head says that government MPs directed auditors looking into the running of his commission to “find dirt on IBAC”.
Redlich says “what is most concerning is that (the government majority on the parliamentary oversight committee) seemed intent on casting IBAC in a negative light for what we can only assume were political reasons relating to the work undertaken by IBAC”.
He says that IBAC’s experience with this oversight committee, quote, “evidences a lack of fairness, partisanship and leaking of information to the media”.
He goes on: “IBAC has been concerned for some time now that partisan politics has intruded into the workings of (this) … committee on issues of integrity”. It was the Andrews’ government that appointed Redlich, yet his valedictory letter cites possible “extraordinary undermining” of IBAC that may have been, he says, “directed by the Premier’s Private Office”.
This bombshell is just the latest evidence that Daniel Andrews has created a Labor “party-state” here in Victoria. The police, the public service and even the judiciary have been stacked with Labor sympathisers. But this explosive claim from the IBAC commissioner is an extraordinary new insight into just how far the Andrews government has gone in trying to politicise state institutions.
For the past three years, I have written and spoken out about corruption claims inside the Victorian Labor government on more occasions than I care to remember. I know others have too, while business, union and political elites stay silent, happy to accept largesse from the Premier, or too scared to say what they know. It’s a great pity that it is still three and a half years until the next election and that, at the last one, a weak Liberal Party didn’t offer any real alternative.
Even more so, it’s a pity some in Victoria just turned a blind eye to these issues and voted him back in anyway.
Let’s just hope the Opposition muscles up — and Victorian voters open their eyes — in the meantime.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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