A Commissioner on the Public Inquiry into AUKUS responds to Waleed Aly’s view that the inquiry will have no impact.

Waleed Aly is spot on in his Sydney Morning Herald article (5 June) when he observes that AUKUS is crystallising into a contest of competing worldviews, with Labor caught between them. However, his ideas about how this debate should be conducted, and who should be included in it, miss the mark.

The suggestion that mechanisms such as a public inquiry would not change outcomes is problematic. It overlooks the role that public scrutiny can play in shaping policy and risks presenting as fact the assumption that governments determine defence policy entirely independent of public sentiment.

In the absence of a parliamentary inquiry to interrogate a policy of this scale, the Public Inquiry into AUKUS provides a platform for all Australians to ask questions, safe in the knowledge that they will be listened to. Every submission will be read; all information synthesised, written up and provided to government. This is what we can do and this is why I decided to serve as a commissioner. There are five commissioners contributing their time to the public inquiry. We all already participate in public policy debates.

Aly describes all the commissioners as ‘fierce critics of AUKUS’. If our only goal was a coordinated attack on AUKUS, there are far simpler and more direct ways for us to achieve this. It’s no surprise that all commissioners........

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