Too Late to Stop AUKUS?

By Leo O’Hagan for The Swan

When Anthony Albanese sits down with Donald Trump in Washington, he will no doubt speak in the familiar language of diplomacy — reassurance, partnership, continuity — all the polite synonyms for dependence. Cameras will capture the handshake, the smiles, the sense of history being managed rather than made. Yet behind that choreography lies a quieter, heavier truth: Australia has already signed away the very freedom of movement that made such meetings optional in the first place. The transaction was called AUKUS. The cost was sovereignty.

AUKUS was sold as the pact that would guarantee security for generations, the foundation of a new “sovereign industrial base,” the emblem of alliance in an age of anxiety. What it has really done is lock Australia into a permanent junior-partner role inside another nation’s grand strategy. It has taken a country capable of defending its own continent and turned it into an appendage of Washington’s Pacific command structure. The submarines are only the symbol. The substance is obedience.

Paul Keating’s return to the National Press Club could not have been timed better, or worse. The former prime minister, once the architect of Australia’s modern engagement with Asia, arrived in Canberra to restate what has now become almost heresy: that Australia has nothing to fear from China, and everything to fear from its own cowardice. His delivery was pure Keating — unfiltered, deliberate, contemptuous of cant — but his argument was as lucid as ever. “China has not threatened us,” he said, “has not implied that it would threaten us, and has never expressed any intent to do so.” To treat it as an existential menace, he added, was “a distortion and untrue.”

He then skewered the military logic that underpins the AUKUS romance. “The only way the Chinese could threaten Australia or attack it,” he said, “is on land. They’d need an armada of troop ships with a massive army to occupy us. They’d have to steam for thirteen days, eight thousand kilometres, between Beijing and Brisbane. We’d just sink them all.” The point was not bravado but geometry. Great wars are fought on land, and China has no capacity — nor reason — to stage a land invasion across an ocean. For Keating, the entire “China threat” narrative is an industrial illusion sustained by defence contractors, think-tankers and what he calls “spook shopkeepers,” forever selling fear to justify their existence.

That illusion is now worth more than three hundred and sixty billion dollars, the official price tag of the submarines. For that sum, Keating said, we could have forty or fifty new-generation Collins-class boats — smaller, quieter, and built in Australia for Australia. “No navy has ever done better than having a third of its boats at sea at any one time,” he reminded the audience. “So with forty-five, we’d have fifteen at sea. Fifteen against three nuclear boats. And the nuclear boats, at eight thousand tons, are too big for our coastal waters, too visible from space. They’ll be found.” His verdict was clinical: “We are spending hundreds of billions to get fewer boats that do less, later, and only with someone else’s permission.”

The permission is American. Under AUKUS, the reactors will be American, the control systems American, the maintenance cycles American. The hulls may one day be assembled in Adelaide, but the operational sovereignty will live in Virginia. “Albanese thinks if he drops the word ‘sovereignty’ into every second sentence it’ll actually happen,” Keating sneered. “But sovereignty isn’t a word — it’s a condition. And ours is being peeled away by all this.”

It wasn’t only the technical incoherence that enraged him; it was the symbolism. “Here we are,” he said, “two hundred and thirty years after leaving Britain, returning to Cornwall to find our security in Asia. How deeply pathetic is that?” In San Diego, when the deal was announced, the three leaders stood shoulder to shoulder, only one of them paying. “The band played Happy Days Are Here Again, the American president could barely string three coherent sentences together, Rishi Sunak couldn’t believe his luck, and the Australian prime minister handed over the money.”

For Keating, it was the final shackle in a chain forged to contain China. “Albanese screwed into place the last link,” he said, “the link that makes us part of the American containment strategy in East Asia.” Containment, not defence. Forward deployment, not protection of the continent. The Collins-class, he reminded the room, was designed for sea denial — to patrol Australia’s approaches, not to “sit off the Chinese coast sinking Chinese submarines.” The new boats will do exactly that, he warned, putting Australian sailors “in shallow Chinese waters where they’ll be shot like ducks in a barrel.”

His fury extended beyond hardware to history. Britain, he said, “witnessed the capitulation of Singapore in 1942, announced its ‘East of Suez’ withdrawal in 1968, dumped us in 1973 when it joined Europe, and now after the folly of Brexit comes crawling back with talk of Global Britain.” He could barely disguise the contempt in his voice. “They’re searching the world for suckers and found an accommodating prime minister, a conservative defence minister, and a risk-averse foreign minister. Here we are again, the suckers.”

If that seems harsh, it is because Keating’s standard for sovereignty is not transactional. It is existential. He still sees Australia as a potential republic, a self-defining state in its own region, not a polite outpost of inherited allegiances. “Our head of state is a monarch of another country,” he said. “Our strategic sovereignty is being outsourced to another. We don’t know what we are or what we should be.” The tragedy, he insists, is that it is Labor — the party of independence — that has done the outsourcing.

“Wong and Albanese,” he said, “are the two principal people of the Left, and they have accommodated the strategic wishes of the United States uncritically.” He recalled the moment the Morrison government unveiled AUKUS and briefed Labor at four o’clock one afternoon. By ten the next morning, Labor had adopted the policy in its entirety. “They were proud,” Keating said, “that they could take the policy in twenty-four hours. How could you take a decision of that magnitude, with those costs and consequences, in twenty-four hours? You can only do it if you have no perceptive ability to understand the weight of what you’re agreeing to.”

That weight, he argued, is not only financial. It is moral and regional. “Australia’s strategic bread is buttered in the Indonesian archipelago,” he said. “A major attack on them would affect us whether we liked it or not, and a major attack on us would affect them. But instead of strengthening that relationship, we’re buying submarines to impress Cornwall.” Indonesia, not Washington or London, should be the pivot of our security. “Prudent governments,” he said, “build safety rails close to home. Not in someone else’s hemisphere.”

Keating’s grasp of geography remains forensic. He described the Chinese continental shelf, a shallow plateau stretching a hundred miles off the coast, loaded with sensors and surveillance equipment. Any large submarine entering those waters, he said, would be detected instantly. “Our boats will be sitting in the most concentrated sensor environment on earth. That’s not deterrence; that’s suicide.” The defence minister’s rhetoric about deterrence, he said, was “rubbish — the Chinese don’t want to attack us, and they never have.”

When journalists pressed him about Chinese militarisation of reefs or cyber-attacks, he brushed it off with the disdain of a man allergic to hysteria. “Commercial friction is not a strategic threat,” he said. “You can’t equate a tariff on wine or barley with an invasion of the country. China cannot attack the United States and has never thought to. It cannot attack Australia and has never thought to. All this is spook talk.”

Then came one of those Keating flourishes that turns analysis into parable. He pulled a line from the U.S. Department of Defense’s own report: “The PRC aims to restrict the United States from having a presence in China’s periphery.” He looked up. “In other words,” he said, “China wants its front doorway clean. Just as the United States wants the Western Hemisphere free of foreign navies. Could you imagine if the Chinese Blue Water Navy decided to do its sightseeing six miles off California? Can you imagine the brouhaha?”

The room laughed, but the laughter had an edge. Because behind the humour sat an uncomfortable symmetry: the world’s two great powers acting according to the same instinct, and Australia pretending one of them was uniquely virtuous.

For Keating, the underlying sin is not strategic but psychological — the Australian fear of being alone. “Australia,” he said, “has a very poor idea of itself.” We mistake dependence for friendship, obedience for reliability. We are terrified of a future in which we have to make our own choices. The monarchy is one symptom, AUKUS another. Both are monuments to self-doubt.

The exchange with the journalists became theatre. When a reporter from Sky News asked whether he was out of touch because he hadn’t received a security briefing in decades, he shot back: “Because I’ve got a brain, principally. And I can think. I can read.” When another demanded he condemn China’s human-rights record, he accused The Sydney Morning Herald of “losing its integrity” and suggested its reporter “hang his head in shame.” It was raw, unfiltered Keating — arrogant to some, invigorating to others — but every barb carried a larger point. Australia, he said, had stopped thinking in its own interests. “Great power diplomacy cannot be about reaching down into the low social entrails of other states any more than they can with us.”

While that spectacle played out in Canberra, Albanese was en route to Washington, a prime minister travelling halfway around the world to seek reassurance from a president who measures alliances in invoices. Trump’s team has already made its expectations clear: allies must pay more, buy American, and align their critical-minerals supply chains with U.S. policy. What Keating warned of — an alliance measured not in trust but in transaction — has come to pass. The Americans will re-examine AUKUS not to abandon it, but to monetise it. Australia will be expected to underwrite that too.

Keating’s prescription is stark but simple. If we are to proceed, we must proceed on Australian terms. That means binding guarantees on access to spare parts, dry-dock slots, and training billets; a genuine domestic sustainment industry; and a mission profile centred on the defence of Australia, not the offence of others. It means, above all, a willingness to say no.

The political class calls such realism recklessness. Yet it is far less reckless than the alternative — a century spent paying for weapons we cannot use, in wars we did not start, against enemies we do not have.

Keating’s critics call him nostalgic, a relic of the 1990s. But nostalgia implies a longing for the past. What animates him is not nostalgia but betrayal — the sense that a generation he once led has lost the instinct for self-respect. “Labor got the big ones right,” he said. “Knocking Hughes off over conscription. Curtin knocking Churchill off over Burma. Calwell opposing Vietnam. Simon Crean saying no to Iraq. Labor’s had a knockout set of rights against the Coalition. But this one breaks the winning streak.”

He is right. Each of those moments defined Labor as the party willing to tell allies no. AUKUS defines it as the party afraid to try.

What Keating offers, beneath the invective, is not isolationism but adulthood — the belief that a middle power can act like a country, not a colony. It is a radical thought only because the nation has grown timid. We are an island continent pretending to be a satellite, an economy rich in resources yet poor in confidence, a democracy that still borrows its reflection from others.

“Our head of state is a monarch of another country,” he said again near the end. “Our strategic sovereignty is being outsourced to another. We don’t know what we are or what we should be.”

That line hung in the air as the audience applauded, half in admiration, half in discomfort. Because in that single sentence lies the entire dilemma of modern Australia: a country old enough to know better, still young enough to pretend it doesn’t.

As Albanese shakes hands with Trump, promising continuity, stability, and alliance, the ghost of Keating’s warning lingers. If it is too late to stop AUKUS, it is not too late to own it — to insist that Australian money buys Australian control, that Australian sailors fight for Australian missions, and that Australian policy is written in Canberra, not cleared in Washington.

Otherwise, the submarines will surface not as symbols of strength but as monuments to a quiet capitulation — the moment a nation that once looked to Asia for its future turned back, out of habit, to the Anglosphere for its permission.

And if that is the price of safety, it is far more than sovereignty can afford.

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