Stephens, David: Keating sinks AUKUS – and it’s not all about the subs and the nuclear waste

David Stephens*

‘Keating sinks AUKUS – and it’s not all about the subs and the nuclear waste’, Honest History, 12 August 2024

Update 14 August 2024: Scathing analysis of Keating-Albanese-Keating by Paddy Gourley

Update 13 August 2024: SBS summary of documents tabled in Parliament.

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Former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, was vehement on ABC 7.30 last week on the inadvisability, to put it mildly, of the AUKUS arrangement with our traditional, Northern Hemisphere, White allies.

Keating said:

What’s wrong is that we completely lose our strategic autonomy: the right of Australia, Australian governments, and the Australian people to determine where and how they respond in the world is taken away, if we let the United States and that military displace our military and our foreign policy prerogatives.

There was more from Keating, after Prime Minister Albanese contested Keating’s view:

The fact is [Keating said], the Albanese government is returning to the Anglosphere to garner Australia’s security … In defence and security terms, the Albanese government is dealing exclusively with Anglosphere states, principally the United States, and now, substantially with Britain and with a Britain that failed us in 1942, and which walked away from us in 1971 as part of its East of Suez policy.

Keating had been provoked by Defence Minister, Richard Marles, reporting in from the AUSMIN talks at Washington HQ. Marles had disclosed certain commitments to the US in relation to AUKUS – allegedly, he had not disclosed others – but not including the disposal of nuclear waste here.

Laura Tingle of the ABC followed up:

The AUKUS submarine saga moves on with not much scrutiny in Australia, let alone apparently much input from Australia, given its cost and its huge strategic investment in one particular idea.

Tingle quoted US Congressional Research Service work which is much more multi-layered than what most Australian analysts have managed so far. Some of this research implies, Tingle says, that

we don’t get any submarines, the Americans (and Brits) just run theirs out of here. Along with an expansion of bomber visits, personnel and troop rotations.

When AUKUS first lurched into view in 2021, Honest History was sceptical that the submarines were the real point and we said so:

Today, we suggest that commentators – and the people to whom they address their comments – are dills (‘fools’, ‘idiots’ – see various dictionaries; this bit of slang seems to be Australian in origin) if they think the big story recently has been all about whether we stick with the French submarines or go with the US and the UK, and whether or not we do it with nuclear power in submarines which will be available and serviceable at some date in the future (assuming other developments, particularly in drone technology, do not make them redundant first).

More in 2023. Lots of links to other 2021-23 commentary included in both posts.

Paul Keating said something similar this week:

The Albanese government’s principal Anglosphere partner is, of course, the United States. And reliance by the government on the United States is now taking the form, rather than simply building nuclear submarines, of facilitating expansive military base-building by the United States on Australian soil with ever-rising US troop movements through Australian bases. (Emphasis added)

Keating went on:

The strength and scale of the United States’s basing in Australia will eclipse Australia’s own military capability such that Australia will be viewed in the United States as a continental extension of American power akin to that which it enjoys in Hawaii, Alaska and more limitedly in places like Guam.

Such an outcome is likely to turn the Australian government, in defence and security terms, into simply the national administrator of what would be broadly viewed in Asia as a US protectorate.

The key points of AUKUS are its complexity, its shifting goalposts and its secret bits. All that palaver since 2021 about types of subs and merits of different propulsion systems has been so much … well, waste material. Similarly, much of the Mainstream Media’s focus today is on whether or not there will be disposal of nuclear waste here. That’s an issue, of course, but, like the submarines, it is by no means the full story.

Paul Keating’s scatological vision of Australia as a pair of boots hanging out the arse of Uncle Sam rings true to me. If that’s too fruity for you, though, there’s always the famous Hop cartoon below from the Bulletin of 1885: ‘The Little Boy from Manly’. We’ve used it many times before but it never loses its relevance. Most Australians have a simple view of foreign policy: there are still lots of Little Boys and Little Girls looking for a Washington or London lap to sit on.

A Story for the Marines or The Little Boy from Manly (Bulletin 26 September 1885/Livingston Hopkins/Lindsay Foyle)

*David Stephens is editor of the Honest History website and Treasurer of Defending Country Memorial Project Inc. Defending Country argues that the Australian War Memorial must properly recognise and commemorate the Australian Frontier Wars as an essential part of Truth-telling and as a first step to reframing Australian national commemoration.

See also …

this piece by arms industry researcher Michelle Fahy: ‘Buck-passing inside the murky arms trade‘. It’s mostly about Australian government dissembling on our role in the supply chain of the F-35 fighter jet, but it commences with this quote from a 2001 paper by the Australian Parliamentary Library: ‘It is almost literally true that Australia cannot go to war without the consent and support of the US’.