AUKUS under scrutiny at its first ever public inquiry   

July 8, 2026
Green left weekly
Sydney Anti-AUKUS Coalition out on the streets against AUKUS in Gadigal Country/Sydney on July 7.
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.

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AUKUS under scrutiny from a public inquiry
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 Virginia-class boats, scheduled to arrive by 2032, are permanently subject to the “inventory requirements” of the Pentagon, which remain sluggish at an annual production rate of approximately 1.2 platforms.

This is despite Australia contributing US$2 billion to the US shipyards. Delivery of such boats can only be assumed given the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby’s promise to expand the nuclear fleet. The operation will only take place on the proviso that the Australian navy will be an extension of US power.

As for the benefits from such a vast bill? Evans was in no doubt that they were to serve as “supplementary assets, effectively embedded in US military command, for the task of finding, tracking, attacking and destroying Chinese submarines seen as a nuclear threat to the US mainland, as they move into and around West Pacific waters”.

To also permit this capability for reasons of combating China was needless, he said. “There is no reason to assume that, Taiwan apart, China would ever contemplate outright military aggression — Hitler, Tojo or Putin-style — against any of its regional neighbours, let alone the United States.”

The issue of trading sovereignty for boats was also brutally self-evident.

Washington would never part with SSNs, Evans said, “in the absence of an undertaking that we will deploy these boats to join the US in any fight in which it chooses to engage anywhere in our region, particularly over Taiwan”.

Other submissions pointed to troubling implications, including from Joseph Camilleri, Tilman Ruff and Richard Tanter. Dave Sweeney, an anti-nuclear campaigner from the Australian Conservation Foundation, spoke as did John Leslie Lander, Australia’s former head of the China section at the Department of Trade of Foreign Affairs and deputy ambassador to China, and Barbara Jackson as a “concerned citizen”.

The following is a discussion of some of the presentations and submissions. (A full list is available at the AUKUS Public Inquiry site.)

Speaking on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Ruff lamented the exacerbation of regional tensions by AUKUS, which increases “the risks of major power confrontation, including nuclear confrontation, particularly in Northeast Asia”.

The provision of SSNs also offered the grim spectre of nuclear proliferation, given the highly enriched uranium that would be used as reactive fuel. Australia’s anticipated retention of such waste was contrary to US non-proliferation practices that have been in place for decades. 

I do hope that they will tell us just how the submarines are nuclear powered, all that I can find out indicates that they will be steam powered and that the boiling of the water ia by product of the reactor.
Maybe they’ll give a definition of nuclear power?