Simon Birmingham a voice of sense amid Labor’s AUKUS mire

Coalition senator Simon Birmingham. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

It was left to opposition senator Simon Birmingham to talk some sense on AUKUS this week – something Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles seem unwilling or unable to do.

Asked on Tuesday about a newly revealed provision allowing the US or UK to terminate the nuclear submarine deal with just a year’s notice, the opposition’s foreign affairs spokesman was at his plain-speaking best.

“Nothing that any country seeks to do with another country can be guaranteed in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years’ time,” Birmingham told Sky News.

But he said Australians “should have absolute confidence” in AUKUS because of the strength of the nation’s ties to both the US and Britain.

Birmingham was in the somewhat bizarre position of having to clean up after the government’s failure to properly manage the public release of new AUKUS treaty documents that should have been a good news story.

But whether it’s running scared of Paul Keating or the Greens, Labor has become so timid in its AUKUS advocacy that it’s in danger of undermining the social licence that will be essential for the program’s success.

It was caught flat-footed last Thursday when Joe Biden informed the US congress that a new AUKUS agreement had been struck, along with “additional related political commitments”.

The announcement, and the absence of further details, opened a potent line of attack for AUKUS’s critics, who made hay over the “secret” political side deal.

The Australian Conservation Foundation suggested Australia had agreed to store high-level radioactive waste for the US and UK, while the Greens claimed the government had pledged to use its nuclear submarines in a future US war with China.

“Make no mistake, the US will not provide nuclear submarines to Australia unless they have ­assurances they will be used when and where Washington demands,” Greens defence spokesman David Shoebridge said.

Marles and Penny Wong were in the US at the time, after AUSMIN talks, but neither stepped in to fill the hours-long information void until a statement was issued by the Defence Minister at 10 o’clock that night.

Marles’s comments did nothing to address the raging speculation over the mystery “political commitments”, while the Prime Minister added to the confusion the following day.

“There aren’t extra political commitments. I’m not sure what you mean,” Albanese told reporters.

He must have missed the memo, and was probably feeling a bit ginger on the whole AUKUS debate after receiving a shellacking from the 80-year-old Keating on the ABC’s 7.30 program.

Keating was incensed at an agreement, reached at AUSMIN, that more US bombers, fighter jets and spy planes would operate from Australia, accusing the government of turning the country “into the 51st state of the US”.

Fast-forward to Monday and there was yet more difficult news on AUKUS, but little proactive management by the government of how it would all land.

An escape clause buried in the new treaty documents would allow the US or Britain to walk away from the deal if they decide it undermines their own submarine programs.

It’s a remote prospect, to be sure, but one the Greens happily talked up.

Yet Marles made no attempt to address the issue. Instead, he used a Dorothy Dixer reply in parliament to attack the opposition, arguing AUKUS was little more than a “thought bubble” under the former Morrison government.

As the US Studies Centre’s Peter Deal tells The Australian, “AUKUS has become a lightning rod for a whole bunch of issues”.

In this highly contested environment, “the government needs to be very careful about its messaging in every next step in the process, setting the groundwork for it, and providing as much clarity as possible to the community”, he said. It’s sound advice.

Rather than picking fights with the opposition – its domestic AUKUS ally – the government would do well to work with the Coalition to send a clear, unified message on the program.