The case for AUKUS rests on treating submarines as essential to Australian sovereignty, while ignoring the broader defence capabilities that already protect Australia’s maritime approaches and raise serious questions about whether new submarines are needed at all.

The debate on submarines currently consuming Australia’s headlines is corrupted by two compounding Ministerial lies by omission. That the truth behind the AUKUS submarine has been so avidly concealed demonstrates that the government knows the electorate will not tolerate it.

The first omission is not addressing what new nuclear submarines would do. We know now that former PM Morrison’s unexplained AUKUS confection with the United States (and UK) is meant to deliver nuclear submarines for high priority underwater operations defending the United States – not for Australia’s defence. And our Prime Minister Albanese has doggedly supported AUKUS, effectively gifting half a trillion dollars from Australian taxpayers to the US, to enhance its homeland protection. The evil of Scott Morrison’s AUKUS wedge is that all major political parties exploit it.

The Australian government’s public stance is so far from the truth that it can only talk of absurdities.

Defence Minister Marles, with withering insight, proclaimed that Australia is a three-ocean nation. Asserting that it’s obvious the vast distances mean the speed of a nuclear submarine is essential for our safety. Somehow a handful of nuclear submarines can just zip around three oceans and keep Australia secure.  Germany had three thousand submarines and still failed to control the Atlantic in the second world war. This patronising garbage is the government’s way of hiding its subservience to America.........

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