We dont want AUKUS with all its consequences- economic- social- diplomatic- risk of major powers war in our region and the rest!!!
Join others to build a strong movement for peace and independence from the USA www.ipan.org.au
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/aukus-submarines-cover-up/
Is AUKUS the biggest cover-up in Australian history?
Both British and American officials are saying there are huge problems around their submarine construction programs. But Richard Marles refuses to even talk about AUKUS.
Bernard Keane
Dec 12, 20254 min read
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Richard Marles and Penny Wong with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Washington (Image: AP/Mark Schiefelbein)
The government’s attempt to portray the US review of AUKUS as a ringing endorsement of the deal has barely survived a week.
The review itself has not been released, and Labor’s village idiot for defence, Richard Marles, has repeatedly refused to answer questions about its contents, other than to parrot Donald Trump in saying it was “full steam ahead” with AUKUS as he and Foreign Minister Penny Wong headed to Washington for their annual meeting with their US counterparts. Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio were also rather tight-lipped. As Greg Sheridan — in a savage demolition of AUKUS this week — noted, the speed with which Hegseth and Rubio bailed out of the AUSMIN media conference in Washington was startling.
What we do know is that there’s agreement between all three AUKUS partners that “Pillar 2” needs to be narrowed and focused. But Pillar 2, about technological cooperation, was always a page-filler to make AUKUS look like a defence deal, not the submarine deal that is Pillar 1. It’s irrelevant to the main game, fit only for morons like Scott Morrison to say we should have AUKUS In Space.
Fortunately other Americans are less reticent. Continuing the tradition that the best place for Australians to find out what’s happening with AUKUS is to listen to what the Americans and the Brits are saying, former submarine commander, arms industry and now Trump administration adviser William Toti was quoted by Nine newspapers as saying the current level of US shipbuilding was “borderline frightening”.
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The US rate of construction of Virginia-class vessels has received most of the attention in the AUKUS debate here — correctly because that’s the immediate next step in AUKUS: the purported handover of several second-hand Virginia-class vessels to Australia from the early 2030s. But the state of the British nuclear construction industry is also important. Even though Australia will build five SSN-AUKUS submarines here, they will be British-designed and Britain will build 12 of the vessels themselves, with the intention that Australia’s and the UK’s SSN-AUKUS vessels will train and patrol together.
The idea that the British will meet the timeline to begin producing SSN-AUKUS boats by the early 2040s is fanciful, despite some recent investment in additional construction and maintenance capacity by the British government. This week, the former Blair-era First Sea Lord (i.e. top ranking Royal Navy officer) and (importantly) Labor politician and adviser Alan West said that the UK nuclear submarine force was in its worst shape in 60 years, prompting the UK defence minister to acknowledge that Britain faced a major long-term problem with skill shortages in submarine construction and sustainment.
Meanwhile former submarine commander and director of nuclear policy Philip Mathias warned of huge construction and maintenance delays undermining the capacity of the Royal Navy to maintain its nuclear fleet and that “SSN-AUKUS is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale”. He believes the UK should pull out of AUKUS.
The company responsible for the mammoth delays in construction of the UK’s current nuclear submarines, the Astute-class and the new Dreadnought-class, is BAE. Under BAE, construction times for nuclear submarines have averaged over 10 years (yes, a decade). BAE is also the company that will be building the SSN-AUKUS boats not merely in the UK but in Adelaide as well.
The British now claim that the Dreadnought and AUKUS class vessels will be constructed at a rate of one every 18 months. The claim is impossible to take seriously given the dire state of the UK submarine industry and the fact that the UK, like the US, will inevitably prioritise its own defence needs ahead of AUKUS, which gives both of them maximum flexibility to simply walk away from the agreement without even repaying the billions Australia is giving them to expedite their submarine construction programs.
The Albanese government’s approach to AUKUS has always been to keep it shrouded in secrecy and refuse to let any public debate occur. There has been no meaningful parliamentary inquiry into the deal, and a new committee proposed to oversee it will be a major party stitch-up that prevents real scrutiny. Marles has consistently refused to even explain why we need nuclear submarines compared to the far cheaper diesel-electric boats we could have purchased from France, South Korea or other European builders. But his refusal to answer any questions about the US review, at a time when even American and British officials acknowledge serious problems in their submarine construction programs, looks less and less like reticence and more and more like a cover-up. And at a cost of $370 billion, AUKUS will be the biggest cover-up in Australian history.
About the author
Bernard KeanePolitics editor
Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. Got a tip? Contact him securely on Signal at @Bernard_Keane.66.