When we think of AUKUS, most people picture the dangerous $368 billion gamble on a handful of nuclear submarines. The truth is AUKUS is a lot more, and a lot more dangerous, than these submarines.

The broader implications of AUKUS have suddenly come into focus with an Australian weapons system surfacing in Israel, reportedly having travelled there via the US, as a direct result of AUKUS.

Those selling AUKUS have split it up into two parts, or “pillars”. Pillar One is the AUKUS nuclear submarine project, where Australia has signed up to spend $368 billion trying to buy some second-hand submarines from the US and then design and build some more with the UK. This part of AUKUS is in a tailspin right now, with very few informed observers thinking it will ever produce nuclear submarines for Australia.

While the eye-watering cost and public meltdown of Pillar One have taken most of the attention, Pillar Two has been rolling out, mainly across Australia and the US with little public oversight.

Pillar Two is designed to remove export and import controls over weapons, weapons parts and weapons technology between Australia and the US. It is sold as increasing our access to US defence technologies. The reality is very different.

Labor and the Coalition are both paid-up believers of this part of AUKUS. Last year, they pushed through the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Act 2024 as part of a suite of AUKUS-related legislation to bind Australia’s scientific community, industry and military even more firmly to the US. These legal changes were a US precondition for Australia to receive nuclear submarines under AUKUS Pillar One.

The legislation did what was on the box and made it far easier for technology, weapons, and weapons parts to flow back and forth between Australia and the US without formal permits and with far less paperwork. The Greens were the only party to oppose the legislation, seeing it as an attack on Australia’s ability to control and direct Australian defence forces and scientific and defence research and technology.

AUKUS Pillar Two is not a partnership of equals. When you compare Australia’s defence industry and research pool against the US, we are a puddle while they are an ocean. The result will be major US defence companies like Lockheed Martin, General Electric and Raytheon totally dominating Australian industry with the goal of incorporating us into their global weapons production chains. With that, comes a dangerous loss of control over what we produce and where we send it.

We have already seen a pilot version of this deal with Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet program. This US-led weapons program has recruited 15 US allies, including Australia, to build critical parts of the fighter jet to feed into US supply lines. The Australian Government, until very recently, bragged about this, with more than 70 companies feeding more than $4 billion of parts into the supply line. But once it became clear that these parts were being used in Israeli F-35 fighter planes to commit genocide in Gaza, this information was scrubbed from the Department’s website.

AUKUS Pillar Two is the systematic expansion of this, from one weapons program to Australia’s entire defence industry. The idea that we are this loyal arm of the US military industry that cannot act independently is not a bug, it is a feature of AUKUS. As Minister for Defence industry, Pat Conroy, told The New York Times last year when discussing Pillar Two: “We are there to supplement, not supplant, the American industrial base… They [the US] should see this as an opportunity for us to be a second supply line.”

This is how an Australian-made weapon system ended up in Israel earlier this year. In 2021, Australian manufacturer EOS opened a US subsidiary to put together Australian-made parts of their remote weapon systems. When EOS exported a similar weapons system to Ukraine, they were quite clear about this, saying:

“This is Australian technology; these systems were designed and manufactured here in Australia, particularly Queanbeyan and in Canberra. There’ll be delivered from Canberra to the US, and then on to Ukraine."

Think of it like an IKEA table. Australia makes all the parts of the table, the legs, the screws and the table top, then puts it in a box and sends it to the US. In the US, they put it all together with an Allen key and send it off wherever they choose. This is exactly what happened with EOS’ R400 remote firing cannon.

EOS manufactured parts for their R400 weapon system in Australia, then exported them to the US. EOS then put them together in the US and obtained US Government permission to send them to Israel.

When the news of this weapon export to Israel broke, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responded by saying, “… that particular system was not exported from Australia".

This statement uses a narrow truth to hide a great big lie. It is true that the final export to Israel went from the US. It may also very well be true that there was no official permit from Australia to allow that Australian weapon to go to Israel. The undeniable truth is that this is an Australian weapon, and it is in Israel in the hands of the IDF in the middle of a genocide.

This is AUKUS Pillar Two working exactly as planned, to allow Australia to launder what would otherwise be illegal — or at the very least grossly immoral — weapons sales to Israel through the US.

Of course, this does not stand up to domestic or international law, which requires any country that exports weapons to have effective monitoring and end-use controls. International law also makes it very clear that “weapons” include their component parts. These points have been made by organisations like the Australian Centre for International Justice and Amnesty International.

While the Albanese Government misleads and tries to deflect blame, AUKUS is working exactly as intended, providing a pipeline from Australia through the US to some of the worst conflicts in the world with little to no oversight. In January, it was Israel. Next, it might be Sudan or Myanmar.

It is critically important to realise here that there is a total loss of government control over where and when Australian weapons are exported. Like so much of the defence posture of Labor and the Coalition, they are cravenly surrendering our independence to Washington.

This is what the Greens are so concerned about, this is why we have proposed a policy to end AUKUS and disentangle Australia’s defence from US weapons supply lines. We cannot have an independent foreign policy, or be a force for peace, when we have our entire defence industry, and the strategic direction of our defence forces, paid for by Australia and controlled out of Washington.