Subs plan backed ‘without public consent’, Labor elder says
Labor elder Carmen Lawrence says Labor swept aside proper process when it agreed to the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact.
Veteran Labor stateswoman Carmen Lawrence says the party swept aside proper process when it agreed to back the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact, green-lighting a dramatic shift in Australia’s foreign and domestic policy without public consent.
Writing in the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs, the former West Australian premier and Keating government minister says Labor’s snap decision in opposition to support the $368bn agreement made it impossible for the policy’s “profound significance” to be properly assessed.
The critique follows a series of withering attacks on the submarine agreement by senior Labor figures, led by Paul Keating who blasted it as “the worst deal in all of history” and warned Australia was at risk of becoming the “51st state” of America.
Anthony Albanese threw his support behind AUKUS within 24 hours of being briefed on the policy by then-prime minister Scott Morrison.
Dr Lawrence, in a review of journalist Andrew Fowler’s book, Nuked: The Submarine Fiasco that Sank Australia’s Sovereignty, says the secrecy surrounding the plan and Labor’s almost immediate support for it sidelined questions on whether it was in Australia’s best interests, “or even achievable”.
“The way it was developed represents a wholesale abandonment of conventional policymaking processes; most notably citizens were kept in the dark,” she writes.
“A dramatic shift in Australia’s defence and foreign policy was engineered without Australians’ knowledge or consultation, let alone consent.”
Dr Lawrence says Labor, after its “poorly considered decision” in opposition, failed to take stock of the risks of the project even after it was elected in 2022.
“Indeed, most of the public justification has focused on the potential for local job creation, not the likelihood that the AUKUS agreement ‘binds decisively Australia to the United States and Great Britain for generations’, as a US press briefing asserted,” she says.
“Nor have Australian governments of either stripe taken citizens into their confidence about why the agreement was necessary; how we should resolve the contradiction between our stated self-reliance and the fact AUKUS ties Australia more firmly than ever to the US warfighting posture; and why we are so conspicuously signing up to a US project aimed at ‘containing’ China, and thus risking engagement in a war over Taiwan.”
Dr Lawrence says there has been “only silence” from Labor on its decision to abandon the party’s long-held opposition to nuclear power, and past aspirations for a more independent foreign policy.
The Prime Minister has played down AUKUS attacks by Mr Keating and other Labor luminaries, declaring: “The world has changed between 1996 and 2024, and my government is doing what we need to do today.”
Labor’s AUKUS critics include former foreign minister Gareth Evans, who warned Australia would never have full sovereign control of the submarines.
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