The $368bn Aukus plan to build nuclear submarines in Adelaide has been labelled “a fairytale” and “pork barrelling” by Alexander Downer, Australia’s longest serving foreign minister.
Downer said on Monday that the central plank of Aukus would “drain the national economy”, joining a number of elder statespersons with concerns about the feasibility or desirability of building nuclear submarines.
Under the Aukus plan, in the early 2030s Australia will acquire US Virginia-class submarines. Australia will upgrade the shipyard at Osborne, South Australia immediately to begin constructing new SSN-Aukus submarines by the end of the decade for delivery in the early 2040s. The entire plan is estimated to cost up to $368bn between now and the mid-2050s.
On Monday, Downer questioned where Australia would get “$360,000 million dollars from”.
“Getting the nuclear submarines is important to national and, more broadly, regional security, so I’m in favour of that, but building them in Australia was way too expensive and it will never happen,” he told Radio National.
“None of the politicians in power today will be in power by [the time the submarines are launched in the 2040s]. They won’t have to deal with the consequences of this; some future government will have to deal with it.”
Developing Australia’s capability to build nuclear submarines is a central plank of the Aukus plan, to overcome concerns in the US Congress that selling Australia “scarce” nuclear submarines will diminish US national security.
On Thursday, the US congressional budget office published a report warning the sale of between three and five Virginia-class boats to Australia in the 2030s “would reduce the number of attack submarines available to the [US] Navy”. The report said US shipyards were already “struggling” to meet existing demand.
Downer served as foreign minister in the Howard government from 1996 to 2007, when Australia commissioned its Collins-class submarines, the first to be built in Australia. Some of these six vessels may now be required to operate until 2050 as stopgap while the nuclear submarine fleet is built.
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Downer said: “A bit of pork barrelling – building a road here, or putting some money into a teaching room and a sports ground there – probably doesn’t matter very much, and it’s more or less acceptable and accepted part of the political process.
“But when you’re talking of, in this particular case, hundreds of billions of dollars, then you have to realise that this sort of pork barrelling is having a pretty negative effect on the national economy.”
“So the Collins-class submarines could have been built in Sweden, it probably would have been better to have built them in Sweden and [we could have] just bought them from the Swedes, but still, I mean, that’s a very long time ago, so that’s been done.”
The Aukus plan has also been criticised by the former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull over concerns Australia won’t be able to operate nuclear submarines without US expertise and former Labor prime minister Paul Keating for being an expensive and unnecessary deterrent against China.
The US president, Joe Biden, told Anthony Albanese after talks at the White House on Wednesday that the passage of legislation allowing for the transfer of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia was a matter of “not if, but when”.