Speeches

AUKUS Submarine Arrangement involves risks that must be considered

Published on Mon 20 March 2023 at 6:00 pm

While I support the work of the government, I’m not completely convinced that nuclear propelled submarines are the only or best answer to our strategic needs.

Mr Wilson (7:45pm): Last week the Prime Minister announced the key features of our future submarine program under the AUKUS arrangement. It’s another example of the Albanese Labor government acting decisively to resolve and clean up matters that have been left in a mess by the former coalition government. I have concerns about some aspects of the arrangement, but it has to be acknowledged that the work done in a short time to address this core piece of defence procurement and capability has occurred alongside a remarkable surge in both the quality and volume of our diplomatic engagement, and a significant increase of development assistance to the Pacific.


There are some features of the AUKUS announcement that are characteristic of the Labor approach. It’s notable that, in making the announcement, the Prime Minister emphasised our commitment to the cause of peace. It’s notable that both the Minister for Defence and the Minister for Skills and Training have each emphasised the contribution that well-managed defence procurement can make to innovation, skills and industrial capacity. But it should be a statement of the obvious to say that with an undertaking of this scale, complexity, cost and duration there remain considerable risks and uncertainty—that is the plain, hard reality—and if we’re not able to have a mature and sensible conversation about those risks there is very little chance we will manage them effectively.


The key feature of the arrangement involves the purchase of US Virginia class submarines at a time when their own production schedule has been under pressure. The design and construction in Australia of the new proposed SSN AUKUS submarine will require an unprecedented level of sophisticated manufacturing capability. As the representative of one of the two principal defence shipbuilding precincts in Australia, I back our capability. But we know from both the Collins and the French submarine projects that building submarines inevitably takes longer and costs more than you anticipate.


While I support the work of the government, I’m not completely convinced that nuclear propelled submarines are the only or best answer to our strategic needs. I’m not privy to the details of the strategic review, but I find the questions posed by people like Peter Varghese and Allan Gyngell on this topic relevant and substantial. I am concerned about the question of nuclear waste. We haven’t yet managed a storage solution for low-level waste after 40 years and more than $50 million. We haven’t yet commenced a proper process for the storage of intermediate-level waste. Now we are taking on the challenge of safely disposing of high-level waste—a problem no country has solved.


It’s worth noting the UK has 13 out-of-service nuclear submarines that, for decades, have awaited defueling and decommissioning. None have yet been decommissioned. Nuclear waste from US submarines is also currently held in temporary storage, after 30 years and $7 billion, without arriving at a permanent storage solution. And I’m not yet convinced that we can adequately deal with the non-proliferation risks involved in what is a novel arrangement by which a non-nuclear weapons state under the NPT comes to acquire weapons-grade material.


The IAEA safeguard arrangements will be spelt out in due course, but there will be some notification on
inspection challenges inherent in the nature of submarines that move around considerably and, as you’d expect, secretly. There is no particular reason to expect the AUKUS arrangement will be the only one of its kind.


At the end of 2021, I canvassed some of these concerns in the course of the treaties committee in consideration of the high-level ENNPIA agreement that led to the arrangement that has just been announced. For having the temerity to ask legitimate questions about those non-proliferation issues the now opposition leader referred to me in this place as ‘Comrade Wilson’. It’s an irony that the opposition leader, for all his self-styled tough guy patriotism, appears to not the understand the fundamental difference between a liberal democracy and other systems in which asking perfectly reasonable questions is not only forbidden, but has dire consequences.


The quality assurance mechanism in our system of governance and decision-making is contestability. We must always be able to have a rigorous and challenging conversation about defence and security matters. The AUKUS agreement, arrived at with some characteristically questionable secrecy by the former government, and some strange ministerial arrangements, is not a sports team of which we have all suddenly become life members. It is a significant partnership with two of our most important and closest allies, but it will only be effective if we do our job as parliamentarians, which is to look closely and ask questions in order to guard against risk.


I could be proved wrong about some of my concerns. Perhaps they’re ill-founded in a way that I don’t perceive, and I can live with that, but I would be wrong already if I wasn’t prepared to identify and voice those concerns which are based on work I’ve done consistently since I was first elected to this place on some of these issues.