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Former foreign minister Gareth Evans hits back at critics, saying AUKUS will be a historic disaster for the country

Gareth Evans has slammed the AUKUS submarine deal, saying it will cede sovereignty to the US and saddle the nation with exorbitant costs for dubious ­benefit.

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Picture: AAP
Former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Picture: AAP

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans has slammed the AUKUS submarine deal as one of the worst decisions in Australia’s history, saying it will cede sovereignty to the US and saddle the nation with exorbitant costs for dubious ­benefit.

In a hard-hitting rebuttal to the country’s most influential defence experts who took aim at the anti-AUKUS views of himself, Paul Keating and Bob Carr in the Weekend Australian, Mr Evans claimed those who supported AUKUS were undermining the nation’s independence and pride.

“Paul Keating, Bob Carr and I seem to have jangled a few security establishment nerves with our critique of the AUKUS submarine deal as having profound negative implications for Australia’s security and sovereignty,” Mr Evans writes in The Australian today.

“Our former colleagues and advisers, Kim Beazley, Paul Dibb, Mike Pezzullo and the US Studies Centre’s Peter Dean, were in full war-cry mode in The Weekend Australian.”

These four defence experts – the key architects of Australian defence policy for the past 40 years – dismissed claims by Mr Evans, Mr Keating and Mr Carr that AUKUS would undermine Australia’s sovereign ability to deploy its nuclear submarine force independently of the US.

Professor Dean accused Mr Evans, Mr Keating and Mr Carr of engaging in an ‘‘elaborate conspiracy theory’’ to ‘‘delude’; the public into believing that the current Labor government was lying about its sovereign control over the future nuclear submarine fleet.

Mr Evans said such an allegation was ‘‘risible”, saying: “Of course our government will insist that it retains control as to how these assets are used, as will always be the case on paper. But the reality, should serious tensions erupt, will be very different.’’

Former defence minister Mr Beazley said there were ‘‘no negatives’’ about either AUKUS or about America increasingly using Australia as a base to station its forces against China, while defence strategist professor Dibb described AUKUS as an ‘‘essential’’ response to a rising China. Former 2009 Defence white paper author Mike Pezzullo said AUKUS and the growing US military presence in Australia should be seen as a ‘’pooling of sovereignty’’ rather than a loss of sovereignty in the face of a belligerent China.

But Mr Evans said: “Those who accept the reality of our loss of sovereign agency, but actually applaud it as a price worth paying for our protection – such as Beazley, Dibb and Pezzullo – seem to have lost not only any sense of national pride, but of Australia’s national interest.

“This is not just depressing but sickening for all those Australians who have long nurtured the belief that we are a fiercely independent nation, ever more conscious of the need to engage constructively, creatively and sensitively with our own Indo-Pacific neighbourhood. And a country that had put behind us the ‘fear of abandonment’, which had been so central to our defence and diplomacy for so much of the last century.’’

Mr Evans claimed AUKUS was unlikely to deliver on any of its key promises, saying the cost of the nuclear submarines was ‘‘exorbitant’’ and ‘‘eye-watering”. He said there would not be enough of the new submarines to form a credible deterrent and that they would not arrive in time to avoid a capability gap. He also claimed AUKUS would make Perth a nuclear target.

“The conversion of Stirling into a major base for a US Indian Ocean fleet will mean Perth now joining Pine Gap and the North West Cape, and probably the B-52 base Tindal, as a potential nuclear target,’’ Mr Evans said.

“For all practical purposes, our AUKUS commitment may well now be irreversible. But so too is likely to be the judgment that this will prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions Australia has ever made.”

Read related topics:AUKUS
Cameron Stewart
Cameron StewartChief International Correspondent

Cameron Stewart is the Chief International Correspondent at The Australian, combining investigative reporting on foreign affairs, defence and national security with feature writing for the Weekend Australian Magazine. He was previously the paper's Washington Correspondent covering North America from 2017 until early 2021. He was also the New York correspondent during the late 1990s. Cameron is a former winner of the Graham Perkin Award for Australian Journalist of the Year.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/defence/former-foreign-minister-gareth-evans-hits-back-at-critics-saying-aukus-will-be-a-historic-disaster-for-the-country/news-story/fc2abc5d01c1d42b2ab48ebe615da4fb