With the historic AUKUS agreement, Australia has gone back to one of our greatest national accomplishments. We are world-class at announcing submarine deals.
We are also world-class at failing to deliver them.
Hopefully, this deal, involving nuclear submarines for the first time, marks a change.
Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton deserve great credit for the military diplomacy, complex technological negotiations and bureaucratic energy that went into producing this historic agreement.
At first blush, its symbolism looks greater than its substance.
The US President, Joe Biden, and the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, have made a big commitment to Australian security, among other things.
They both gave the greatest vote of confidence in Australia as a mature security partner by being willing to share their nuclear submarine technology with us. The US has only done that before for Britain.
So the Biden administration is expressing its deep confidence and trust in the Morrison government and Australia generally, as well as committing its military, scientific and technical capability to joint exploitation by Australia, as well as declaring to the world that it cares deeply about Australian security.
It still leaves us with this vexing question: what on earth are we going to do for submarines, apart from our antique Collins boats, and broader military capability for the next 20 years?
The reaction of Anthony Albanese was sensible, measured and responsible. Labor supports AUKUS and the nuclear subs, so long as they don’t require a civil nuclear energy capability, don’t breach nuclear non-proliferation treaties and don’t imply the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Those conditions are already included in the deal.
However, the Opposition Leader will be attacked for this. He will have to contend with the pro-China nihilism, and sour national defeatism, of Paul Keating, and the instinctively untutored pro-Beijing commercial and transactional instincts of state Labor premiers. He will also be relentlessly attacked from his left by the Greens. This is a moment of truth for Labor, which should rally around Albanese and his consistently sensible approach to national security.
Nuclear subs are infinitely more capable than conventional subs, so the deal looks a tremendous step forward for Australia.
But in no field of Australian endeavour has delivery less often matched announcement than defence projects in general, and submarines in particular.
At his press conference the Prime Minister said Defence would now take 18 months to determine what we needed in and for a nuclear sub and how our American and British friends might help us get it. He hoped we could start construction of a sub before this decade’s end and take delivery of the first before next decade’s end.
Given that no submarine project in history has ever gone more quickly than the timeframe at its first announcement, and that the government is committed to building the nuclear subs in Adelaide, we presumably don’t get our first new sub until 2040.
Good as these subs will eventually be, they have no military bearing on the strategic decade we now face.
China won’t like it.
The deal promises not only nuclear submarines but an even more intimate involvement of the US, and Britain, in regional security and in our security.
The US has agreed to share its nuclear submarine technology and upgraded its commitment to our security. In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, this is a good development in itself.
Yet as with everything in defence, the proof is in the pudding.
Morrison hopes we will get the subs before the end of 2040. That is a very, very, very long time away. Our security challenges, in contrast, are very, very, very close. This is just the first step.
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