The AUKUS pact, comprising Australia, Britain and the United States, will be remembered as one of the most absurd projects in the annals of history.

Australian officials, elected and appointed, seek the imaginary assurance of nuclear-powered submarines while spending public money ($368 billion) to surrender the country’s sovereignty.

Civil society has sprung into action with a crowd-founded AUKUS Public Inquiry, coordinated by the Australian Peace and Security Forum. Peter Garrett, a former federal environment minister and frontman for Midnight Oil, is at its helm.

Former MPs, retired military and naval officers, including Chris Barrie, a former Australian Defence Force chief, an assortment of strategists and academics, human rights lawyers and unions are a part of the AUKUS scrutineering.

The inquiry is pursuing a number of vital questions: Will Australia ever receive the submarines; be they the Virginia-class from the US Navy or the specifically designed SSN-AUKUS model?

Where and how will the toxic high-level nuclear waste be stored, given that Australia has no standing facility for such a function? How many actual jobs will be created and how distorting will this be to the rest of the economy? Why is Australia putting itself in a situation where it will potentially join a foolish war against China — the country’s largest trading partner?

The inquiry’s last two questions consider whether Australia will become a vassal outpost of the US imperium and whether the pact will make Australia a nuclear target.

The first hearings in Naarm/Melbourne on June 11 made compelling viewing. Former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans was the first witness. He was blunt: “The AUKUS Pillar I Submarine project was misconceived from the outset, and the passage of time since its announcement in 2021 has served only to make more compelling the conclusion that it is not in Australia’s national interest to continue our commitment to it.”

Evans points to three fatal defects of AUKUS: The doomed prospects of deliverability; the sheer costliness of a project that “outweighs its benefits”; and the limits it would place on “Australia’s independent sovereign agency”. On the deliverability of submarines, he said: “Every piece of evidence available on the public record reinforces the scepticism as to whether any of them [the eight promised AUKUS boats] will be delivered on time, or indeed, at all.”

The........

© Green Left Weekly