AUKUS alliance: Subs deal puts us on centre stage

Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Scott Morrison at a trilateral meeting during the G7 summit in Cornwall in June. Picture: Adam Taylor / PMO

The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting in New York and Washington, with progress on nuclear-powered submarines for Australia and surprising climate commitments from Beijing, both wildly unpredictable developments a couple of weeks ago.

The world is gobsmacked by the new Australia-UK-US – AUKUS – agreement and enthralled by the prospect of Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.

This decision to give Australia nuclear submarine technology is, on its face, an astonishing development out of the Biden administration and for the moment has catapulted Australia into the centre of world politics.

Partly as a result, the US and Britain are responding positively to overtures from the Morrison government to get some nuclear-powered submarine under an Australian flag as soon as possible.

As a move towards this, both the US and Britain are considering having their own nuclear-powered submarines in Australia much more frequently, perhaps even basing a submarine here. This would normalise nuclear-powered submarines in Australia and strengthen the allied network of powerful submarines in the Indo-Pacific.

The French tantrum seems, rightly, to amount to nothing of consequence, with Scott Morrison securing a new agreement with Austria as soon as he arrived in the US.

Beijing has made the expected hostile response in slightly muted terms. The prospect of Australia acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine by the late 2030s implausibly outrages Beijing’s sensibilities, even though it produces a major warship every year.

One of the biggest historic changes is Labor supporting nuclear-powered submarines. It has been attacked not so much from the left as from the past, with a sour, graceless and remarkably personalised spray of bile and bad temper from Paul Keating, for whom it is forever 1992 and only his policies of that era, ignoring the way the world has changed, are any good.

But Beijing has itself also made two bold new moves. It has formally applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and promised to end building coal-fired power plants overseas. The vast majority of its coal use is domestic, so this doesn’t help the planet much.

But both moves may reflect a realisation from Beijing that its belligerence has come at a cost, that maybe it needs to work to reintegrate itself into the global rules-based order. It’s far too early to conclude we’ll get a more co-operative and sensible Beijing out of this. But it’s a significant departure from the relentless wolf warrior diplomacy of recent months.

However, the nub of Australia’s concerns right now are nuclear submarines. This is an enormous historic opportunity for Australia. It is a brilliant achievement by the Morrison government. But there are still a million ways Australia could mess it up.

The Labor leadership of Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong deserves enormous credit for the responsible, sober and realistic national interest approach they’ve taken to the issue. They have every right to criticise the conservatives for an utterly shambolic submarine acquisition process over the past eight years. But they have taken military advice about capability seriously. The military now believes you cannot drive a boat as big as we need our subs to be with conventional propulsion and that, because of changes in constant surveillance technology, a sub that has to surface every few days and that cannot go fast for very long is just too vulnerable.

And now nuclear propulsion technology is available to us for the first time. The idea that we have behaved badly towards the French because we could have bought a nuclear Barracuda sub from them is nonsense. The Barracuda’s propulsion technology is radically different from the British and US technology. Halfway through its life you’ve got to rip the Barracuda apart and spend a couple of years retooling its nuclear reactor.

To do that, Australia would have to possess a domestic civilian nuclear capability, which would prevent bipartisan co-operation from Labor, or we would have to agree to getting this work done in France. This would give Paris an effective operational veto over our main combat capability. It also would be completely unworkable for Washington, on a sub filled with US combat systems and weapons.

By contrast, both the American Virginia-class subs and the British Astute-class subs have reactors that don’t need refuelling for the entire life of the sub, up to 35 years. Keating’s argument that for Australia to possess such technology breaches our sovereignty and makes us completely subservient to the Americans is illogical and nonsensical.

Once we possess a sub that doesn’t need servicing midlife by the Americans, we are no more bound to American strategic policy than we are by possessing any other American technology. The F-35s, the Super Hornets, the Growlers (electronic warfare aircraft), which Stephen Smith bought when Kevin Rudd was prime minister, these are all sophisticated US systems we could not possibly produce ourselves. Possessing them does not make our participation in any US military operation mandatory. We judge any deployment on its merits. The subs would be no different in this to the Growlers.

Keating’s intervention here is on a level with his claim during the 2019 election campaign that our security agency chiefs were “nutters” who had “gone berko”. This was such a bizarre intervention that, in the interests of making Labor electable, Keating had to go on ABC radio and disown his own comments. Contemporary Keating would be a disastrous guide for Labor.

But the challenge to Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton to get this nuclear opportunity right remains huge. They must stay personally involved and not let the project sink into the fathomless depths of Defence Department delay and obfuscation.

The Virginia is the best choice, but we must choose the Virginia or the Astute and there must be no alterations. If we choose the Astute, that means giving up the US combat system and US weapons. Otherwise we are again designing a new sub.

The British may offer us a good price because they are coming to the end of their production run. But the Virginia is much the better choice.

It will be some years before our ports are upgraded to the levels of security and safety to home base a nuclear-powered sub. We must urgently recruit and train a lot of people for nuclear subs. Some of our submariners have served on US boats, just as Americans have served on Australian boats.

It may be that within five or six years we could lease a Virginia sub, or one of the Los Angeles-class boats heading for retirement. We would need a hybrid US-Australian crew and probably a US commander on secondment to the Australian navy.

But this program is not safe politically and in the end doesn’t mean anything until, by hook or by crook, we have a nuclear sub with an Australian flag.