05/06/2026
Pete Hegseth’s nice words can’t disguise Labor’s AUKUS mess
(full unlocked article)
Given the record of the Albanese government, and our defence establishment, Americans would have to be nuts to entrust anything as complex as a nuclear sub to the Australian defence establishment.
The declaration that the US has already varied the AUKUS plan and now won’t supply a new Virginia-class submarine to Australia but will notionally sell us three second-hand subs is the latest sign the AUKUS program is in quite a lot of trouble. This is despite Defence Minister Richard Marles’s bland and often fatuous reassurances.
One thing it demonstrates beyond doubt is that the US’s submarine building program is so far behind schedule, and so much even further behind a schedule that would allow it to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, that it cannot possibly sell the best, brand new subs to us.
The Albanese government is providing billions of dollars to both the US and British nuclear submarine building programs.
It’s also, sensibly, providing greater basing, visitation and force rotation facilities to the US military across northern and western Australia.
This is certainly enough to keep US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, saying nice things about Australia. Give a guy a few billion dollars and some nice real estate and you’ll generally get at least a good online review, maybe even four stars.
Yet none of this can really disguise what a spectacular mess Australian defence policy, and especially the submarine program, really is.
Hegseth told the Shangri-La Dialogue that the world was now in an era where the rules-based order was a fiction and what counted was hard power and national interest.
Under the terms of the AUKUS deal, an American president, at the time Australia is supposed to buy its first boat, can only confirm the sale if he can assure congress that this will not compromise the US’s own capabilities.
One way to do this is to provide Australia with what would essentially be a training boat near the very end of its scheduled life. We could potter around with it for a few years, possibly many years, beyond its useful life.
Given the record of the Albanese government, and the Australian defence establishment, the Americans would frankly have to be nuts to entrust anything as complex as a nuclear submarine to the existing Australian defence establishment.
If you doubt this, just read the astonishing report by the Australian National Audit Office into the now abandoned program to provide a Life of Type Extension to our six Collins-class diesel subs, a program the government has now cancelled in its original form
The LOTE was designed among other things to make the Collins subs more compatible with the French submarines we were buying. But when we decided not to buy the French submarines after all, we didn’t redesign the LOTE. That is just astonishing. Instead, we own hundreds of millions of dollars of French-compatible equipment we will never use, adding to the billions of dollars of catastrophically wasted money our chronically hopeless defence processes produce.
When Marles announced the abandonment of the LOTE, he, of course, blamed everything on the Liberals, yet they have not been in office for four years. The ANAO report makes it clear LOTE was impossible from the earliest days. It was so elaborate and involved such massive re-engineering, including new power generation and propulsion systems for the Collins, that it was akin to designing a new submarine.
Yet every statement, from Defence and government, until last week, assured us that everything was tickety-boo. We must now treat the government’s equally bland reassurances about AUKUS with the greatest scepticism.
The Albanese government goes to enormous lengths to conceal information about what a mess Defence is, and what a mess it’s made of Defence.
If you think this is exaggerated, ask yourself this simple question: if a nation claims its submarines are its most lethal and important defence asset; it’s held and operated these submarines for decades; and yet it cannot manage an upgrade to them that it’s worked on for years, what possible basis is there for thinking it could build its own nuclear submarines?
The Albanese government has had a report by former US Navy official Gloria Valdez telling it what a colossal mess the LOTE program was, since May 2024, two full years. Yet we heard nothing about this from the government until the eve of the release of the ANAO report.
The Albanese government has had four years to fix the problem and has done little about it. And we, the poor mug taxpayers, even more poor mug citizens of this country hoping that our defence force might contribute to our security, have been intentionally kept in the dark.
The Albanese government has moved to restrict information on major defence projects from going to the auditor’s office. Yet the ANAO reports, along with the odd bit of accidentally released truth in Senates estimates, is almost the only level of accountability the whole defence program faces in Australia. The increasing inability of the ANAO to get defence information ought to be a national scandal.
Nor are hi-tech submarine operations the only area where Australia just doesn’t measure up. A previous ANAO report made it clear the navy can’t even run the infinitely simpler Landing Helicopter Dock ships proficiently.
The real purpose of the Albanese government’s massive expenditure on the AUKUS subs projects – $5.4bn this year alone – is to secure good comments from the American administration, which it equates with securing the alliance.
And secondly to convince a naturally confused Australian population that it is actually doing something on defence.
But next year the defence budget is set to decline. It will account for just 2.02 per cent of GDP (measured in the way defence expenditure has always been measured in the past), almost exactly the same as the level the Albanese government inherited when it came to office.
Even if all the Albanese defence fantasies were in some miraculous way to come true, Australia will not have the (still quite small) Defence Force it’s working towards before 2050. We can take only the consolation offered by John Maynard Keynes – in the long run, we’re all dead.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1425265949638267&set=a.628571989307671
Opinion: Given the record of the Albanese government, and our defence establishment, Americans would have to be nuts to entrust anything as complex as a nuclear sub to the Australian defence establishment. Read more: https://bit.ly/4aeIstN
