If you ask the internet how to kill a zombie, the website Zombiepedia advises that “nearly all zombie survivalists are in agreement that the destruction of the brain is the only surefire way… (though a few rare types of zombies require complete dismemberment).”
Australia has a zombie rampaging through Canberra, diverting well-meaning politicians and officials from useful activity and gobbling up increasing amounts of tax dollars. This is the AUKUS nuclear submarine project.
That it was hatched by two of the world’s most discredited politicians of recent times, Australia’s Scott Morrison and Britain’s Boris Johnson, and sprung on a senescent US president, Joe Biden, testifies to its swamp-like origins. But Labor’s Anthony Albanese accepted it in 2021, fearful of a defence wedge, and his deputy and defence minister Richard Marles threw in the necessary sacrifices to sustain it.
With Albanese now re-elected with a strong majority, can we expect a reappraisal of this zombie worship? Does AUKUS show signs of collapse?
A concerted attack on its brain from outside the government must be having some effect. In the absence of a formal explanation of its purpose to parliament and public, critics have been beating it on the head. Labor seniors like Paul Keating and Bob Carr identify the likely reduction in Australian sovereign power; naval experts point to the technical demands of operating nuclear submarines, let alone building them in Adelaide; other observers highlight the limited availability of US submarines for transfer.
The latest attack on AUKUS comes from the economist Stephen Grenville, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, whose particular concern is the goal of building a British–Australian design submarine in Adelaide after taking delivery of some US-built submarines for initial capability and practice.
“Why reopen the case for domestic construction of nuclear submarines?” Grenville asks. “The totally inadequate initial decision process would be reason enough. Detailed evaluation since then has taken the initial framework as set-in-stone and focused on implementation — the ‘optimal path’ for achieving what was initially decided.”
The case for this approach is “feeble,” he says. The 20,000 promised “good jobs” would simply transfer skilled workers from elsewhere in a full-employment economy. There is no existing industrial base in this sector, and nor do any export prospects give economies of scale.
As for the “sovereignty” argument: if Australia were ever cut off, could it build more submarines without foreign assistance — any more than it could F-35 fighters, for instance? “We don’t build our defence aircraft here, so why are submarines different?” asks Grenville. “If we are talking about vital supply threats, then there are many competing concerns — computer chips and medicines come to mind.”
Questions also hover over the British submarine builder as a partner for the still-to-be-designed AUKUS submarine of the future. In a letter to the London Financial Times in early March, former senior British Treasury official Phillip Oppenheim noted that “Britain has form on going over-budget on the wrong programmes, which are delivered late,” and cited the Royal Navy’s two aircraft-carriers, 50 per cent over budget and lacking aircraft launch catapults.
As for the proposed AUKUS hunter-killer submarines: “The government has no idea of the cost — not even an estimate — or how many the UK or the Australians will order.” Oppenheim also took a swipe at the “brave talk” of a British pivot to the Indo-Pacific, and the likelihood Britain would send its existing submarines to help defend an Australia that’s richer than Britain, spends proportionately less on defence and “cheerily poaches our doctors and nurses.”
Since this letter, Trump’s call on Europe to defend itself and Keir Starmer’s commitment to helping Ukraine will have turned London’s attention to its rundown army and air defences. The Royal Navy will have tougher competition for defence budgeting.
Still, the zombie has its defenders, and the People’s Liberation Army’s naval division pitched in with its pre-election circumnavigation of Australia by a warship flotilla which then conducted an unannounced live-firing exercise in the Tasman Sea.
Jennifer Parker, a former navy officer now linked to the Australian Defence Force Academy and the ANU’s National Security College, applauds AUKUS as a recognition that “our economy could be crippled without an enemy boot stepping foot on Australian soil.” Defending vital interests requires Australia to project its maritime power far from its shores, she says, and that goal is best met by the speed and range of nuclear submarines.
Parker invokes the late-nineteenth-century strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American “naval Bismarck,” who laid down that “wars are won by the economic strangulation of the enemy from the sea.” But there is no sign the Chinese navy has adopted his strategy. The Mahan doctrine is the ideology of the US navy, intent on being about to bottle-up China by operations close to its coastline. If anyone is going to strangle Australia’s trade with its largest counterpart, it will be the United States, with the Royal Australian Navy expected to assist.
The AUKUS zombie has already consumed about $800 million — the funds thrown into US shipbuilding by Marles on a Washington visit soon after Trump’s inauguration. Greens senator David Shoebridge calculates from budget documents that spending will total A$18 billion over five years.
Marcus Hellyer, of the consultancy Strategic Analysis Australia, found that “submarines clearly exercise a strange hold over our collective imaginations” and that the AUKUS program, including personnel and sustainment, could eventually become a “fourth service” rivalling the navy, air force and army.
Is there an off-ramp for our politicians? A graceful way out might be to tell the Americans that we won’t press for the transfer of three to five Virginia-class submarines due in the 2030s given the US Navy’s reduced fleet and the uncertainties about ramped-up new submarine construction.
Already some AUKUS supporters are conceding that even if the Virginia-class submarines are not handed over, the operation of US Navy submarines out of Australian bases will afford a defence capability pending the introduction of RAN nuclear submarines. As it is, a US Navy submarine seems to have quietly set off to tail the Chinese flotilla as it rounded the Great Australian Bight.
But the decision could be made as soon as a reporter asks Donald Trump: “What do you think of Joe Biden’s idea to hand over some of the US Navy’s much-needed submarines to the Australians, without any promise they’ll join us if war breaks out with China?”
That would force our defence planners to focus on sustaining and perhaps augmenting the existing conventional submarines, along with other defence capabilities, and to introduce some competitive ideas about an eventual nuclear submarine fleet — such as bringing the French back into the picture.
Its brain battered, the Morrison–Johnson zombie might then quietly expire. •
