AUKUS servility just one facet of poor governance
Jul 31, 2024
Richard Marles has the Navy out in force firing torpedoes at AUKUS critics.
On Friday last, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead claimed the critics need to produce evidence of any challenges to AUKUS being realised, then on Saturday, Vice Admiral Hammond, Chief of Navy, raised his periscope claiming the AUKUS debate was being ‘hijacked’ by people with ‘specific agendas’ without indicating what these agendas might be or who was likely making them.
The fact is, what clearly is being ‘hijacked’ is national accountability – accountability for the most wayward strategic and financial decision any government has taken since Federation.
Despite AUKUS’s half trillion of budgetary cost and its dangerous strategic implications there has not been one Ministerial Statement explaining its rationale, its strategic policy objective or defending its hugely distorting impact on government expenditures.
Not a coherent or persuasive word has come from the Minister for Defence or for that matter, the Prime Minister, let alone from a parliamentary debate on what is significantly a seminal turn in the country’s strategic and defence policy settings.
Vice Admiral Hammond, ignoring Australia’s geography – its residence among populous and prosperous Asian states, fell back on the old Anglo glee-club adage ‘three developed nations who have over 100 years of shared history, heritage, values and sense of purpose.’
The likelihood is that Australia will not come into possession of nuclear submarines of its own making, but what it will certainly become is landlord and host to American nuclear submarines as the United States appropriates Australian real estate in its attempts, against all odds, to maintain strategic primacy in Asia. Odds that carry the likelihood of Australia being dragged into military skirmishes with China, or indeed, worse.
So irresponsible, secretive and smug has the government been in making its decision, that no amount of ‘hijacking’ by anyone else is likely to disrupt Australia from its current path of effectively falling into American hands, or at least, being abjectly at America’s beck and call.
Republished from Australian Financial Review, July 30, 2024
Paul Keating was the prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996.
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