Paul Keating went hard at the National Press Club with his view on the AUKUS submarines deal, slamming the Labor Party for “shunning security in Asia for security in and within the Anglosphere”.
“We have been here before”, he said. “Australia’s international interests subsumed by those of our allies. Defence policy substituting for foreign policy.”
More than the nonsense-number price tag of $368 billion, what has really annoyed Keating is the surrender of independence: “sovereignty suborned to the whim and caprice of a US administration”.
He has a point.
Let’s go back in time, to 1909, and the presentation to the Australian Parliament of the annual budget by the treasurer, Sir John Forrest. Coming to the question of “naval defence”, the treasurer announced to a uniformly delighted House of Representatives that:
To maintain the integrity of the empire and that ‘supremacy of the sea’ upon which its very existence depends, this government was proud to make, on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, a definite offer to the mother country of a Dreadnought battleship, or whatever equivalent was thought to be best to our need. That offer has been most cordially accepted.
The background was the race for naval supremacy that had been raging since Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to challenge Britain’s mastery of the oceans. This had caused a mad rush of shipbuilding, focused particularly on capital ships — battleships, particularly the famed dreadnoughts, and the faster but more lightly armoured battlecruisers.
Britain was determined to stay ahead in the race, and one of the admiralty’s bright ideas was to ask the dominions to chip in. Australia and New Zealand keenly agreed. The idea was that Australia would pay for a naval squadron, led by a capital ship, to be based out this way and provide part of the empire’s global naval protective shield.
The capital ship ended up being a battlecruiser of the “Indomitable” class, ultimately given the name HMAS Australia.
By December 1909, when the principal point of local contention was funding, it had become apparent that the ship we were getting had already been superseded in quality by later models. As the Bendigo Advertiser reported, there was a “new battleship-cruiser, named the Lion, which is to be a larger, faster and more powerful vessel in every way than the Indomitable type … that is a matter upon which ministers, however, are not at present prepared to express any opinion”.
The price tag was to be £3.5 million. In relative terms, it was an enormous sum, equivalent to about one-quarter of the Commonwealth’s entire annual revenue. The Labor opposition felt the money should be raised from taxation, but the government elected to do it with a loan. Either way, it was an extraordinary gamble of the national wherewithal on a single piece of military hardware.
The ship was built in England, launched in 1911 and commissioned as the flagship of the new Royal Australian Navy in 1913. In one respect the promoters of necessity had been right: the war they’d been predicting arrived, in the form of World War I, within a year.
So how did our battlecruiser, the first and only capital ship ever to serve in the Australian Navy, perform?
Well, it didn’t sink. HMAS Australia pottered around near New Guinea for a while, searching for the German East Asia Squadron without success, before being sent to help defend the mother country in the North Sea. The ship spent the rest of the war there, failing to participate in its only major naval battle between capital ships, Jutland, because she was in dock for repairs having collided with HMS New Zealand during exercises. In fact, she only ever fired twice in anger, but didn’t hit anything.
After the war, HMAS Australia returned here and was downgraded to a training ship. In 1924, by now completely obsolete and too expensive to maintain anyway, she was scuttled off to Sydney Heads where she remains, a submerged white elephant.
Of course, the mooted cost of the AUKUS submarines is not equivalent to one-quarter of our annual national revenue. It’s more like three-quarters. Yes, it will be spread out over decades and the subs will supposedly keep us safe well into the 2080s. Gone are the days when you could order a battleship and it’d turn up within a couple of years. It’s hard to see how that’s an improvement.
What is the cautionary tale here? Simply that, whether or not Keating is right about the hardware choices being made today, he is unarguably correct when he says we have been here before.
In the intervening 114 years and six major wars into which we followed Britain and/or America, it appears we have learned something between not much and nothing.
It was a joy to listen to Keating in full fight yesterday – at last the voice of common sense & logic was heard above the media’s nationalistic babble & excited froth. To witness Keating dismissing several journalists as though they were bothersome flies with their sometimes clueless questions lifted one’s spirits. The Emperor is wearing no clothes & Keating is calling it out.
I intend re-watching the interview thereby enjoying two highlights this week.
Aah, the nostalgia of it. I was just about jumping up and down with pure delight to watch Keating do what he does so well!
And with the arrogance often displayed by some MSM journalists, I actually thought they believed they could have their ‘gotcha’ moment with him!! Not bloody likely!!
Yehh it was great.
Almost another “Banana Republic” moment.
It’s a pity the Dessicated Coconut didn’t raise his head over the sub’s issue. Then Keating could have had a go at him as well. What a buzz that would have been; just like old times.
Agree, but something deeper is not discussed (because it doesn’t exist?), what is our defence & security strategy including naval, but also air & land forces?
Purchasing thought bubbles have been going on for years around subs based on personal preference of any given PM &/or lobbyist, that suggests there are no clear purchasing specs nor defence strategy?
The headline numbers look alarming, but over a very long term, and one hopes there is some wriggle room…. by the time anything is actually available it may be modified?
55 up votes?!
Can someone explain why the number of comments per article hasn’t changed much over the last year or so, but the number of up votes to the first commenter has exploded in the last couple of months.
What gives Crikey? Have staff, family and friends been asked to vote for articles?
Have you checked the order of the comments? Crikey has changed the default setting so the most voted comment is at the top. So you are right. The first coment has the most votes. Automatically. Duh. Unless you switch the order to newst first, or oldest first.
The irony is that we have sold the farm to purchase used subs that the US would have deployed themselves anyway to counter China. This is like a very dodgy unequal franchise deal that we often read about in the news. They supply used subs, we pay top dollar for everything, we take all the risks and responsibilities but they profit. Down the track we are also left with the burden of expensive future de-commissioning and nuclear waste disposal.
Further the Virginia subs we receive will likely be around 20+ years old, already degrading due to the elements and entering a cycle of high maintenance and refit to keep them serviceable. We will not receive their shiny new versions. This will end up to like the HMAS Kanimbla/Manoora rust bucket lemons we were sold by the US and had be scrapped due to deficiencies despite a fortune being spent in an attempt to keep them serviceable.
Among other motivations for the US and (“gormless”) Brits are (1) a foot in the door of OUR nuclear waste disposal site for THEIR nuclear waste, and (2) refurbishment, maintenance, crew change-over for their subs at a base built at our expense.
Keating was right to point out that there were three blokes there in San Diego and only one was paying.
Spot on. Americans would call this a boondoggle. Australians, we hope, will call it a wank.
Absolutely agree. we’ve been conned big time by the yanks
Fool us once, shame on you – fool us …how many times is this? … shame on us.
Spot-on, SGT. We are simply providing the money for more US submarines, no matter the composition of the crews or the flag they sail under. The notion that some will be built in Australia is a pipe dream; in fact the whole basis of ‘AUKUS’ is a sham, right down to putting the ‘A’ at the beginning of the acronym. None of the mooted submarines – not the existing versions nor the ones not even on the drawing board yet – will materialise. So there’s at least that to look forward to and be grateful for. It’s just a question of how much money will have been wasted before the air escapes from the white elephant balloon.
‘USUKA’ is the best one I’ve heard.
Given who is paying, should the acronym be pronounced U-SUKA?
Can you imagine the furore if Albo and co had announced $400 billion to combat climate change – arguably a much greater security threat to the nation?
That would take imagination, courage, judgement, and conviction. The Labor Party has developed robust processes to filter these qualities out from potential leadership contenders.
I get the impression that this whole thing is nuts. Billions of dollars spent on subs that could be taken out by a torpedo, missile or depth charge, or however the hell you destroy subs currently. (That’s ‘currently’. In ten years time, there may be other weapons as yet undreamt of that can do the job). At a time when people are paying through the nose for the basics of life or ending up homeless. And the subs won’t get here for years or decades, by which time they’ll be obsolete. Where’s the money coming from? What the hell are the priorities?
On that topic you might want to glance at The Conversation‘s article ‘Progress in detection tech could render submarines useless by the 2050s. What does it mean for the AUKUS pact?’
Crikey could not print what I think it means for AUKUS.
Umm.. dead in the water?
You make a great point, re: spending priorities.
Richard Denniss hit the nail on the head with a tweet asking that we never, ever hear the “Where’s the money going to come from?” response to climate change action.
Imagine what we could do with $386bn over a couple of decades + another $11bn p.a. in removed fossil fuel subsidies that has been put toward climate change action.
There’s more of a mandate from the public for climate action than there is for submarines.
I know. That’s going round in my head like an ABBA earworm. Agree completely with your last line.
Neither do we hear ‘Where are the details?’. If only that question could sink the submarine boondoggle as handily as it might the Voice. The whole thing seems like a horrible thought-bubble until one begins to tease out the likely ulterior motives of the USA. Labor looks like it’s being led by the nose.
“If only that question could sink the submarine boondoggle as handily as it might the Voice.”
Bullseye!
Saving the planet is far too expensive.
AND sets us up for a disaster with trying to deal with the high level radioactive waste.
The priorities? Not getting offside with News Corp or, to a lesser degree, Nine. In another decade both of these publishing organs may be minnows so it will be irrelevant. They will always despise Labor governments, Albanese need to be reminded of that classic Beatles’ truism ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Not even with $368 Billion of our taxes.
Wot about Yellow Submarine, then?
More like Octopussy Garden.
The priorities? Not getting offside with you-know who or, to a lesser degree, Nine. In another decade both of these publishing organs may be minnows so it will be irrelevant. They will always despise Labor governments, Albanese need to be reminded of that classic Beatles’ truism ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Not even with $368 Billion of our taxes.
Nuts it is. And not only because the subs will be obsolete before they fail to materialise. What could be more ‘nuts’ than rattling our flimsy sabres at the Chinese and talking of war, while at the same time trying to establish a more friendly rhetoric to mollify our biggest market? We’re preparing for war with our biggest customer????
Thanks Michael – so many different ways to look at this fiasco, but none of them show Albo, Marles and Wong in a good light.
The meme going around now: “AUKUS will FUKUS” is about as good as it gets.
The only good news is that the careful and patient Chinese are way too smart to take the infantile US bait. They will just continue to play the long game and watch with grim satisfaction as US hegemony goes up in smoke, and not just in the Asia Pacific.
Just unfortunate that so much of our wealth will go up in smoke with it.