David Shoebridge

When we think of AUKUS, most people picture the dangerous $368 billion gamble on a handful of nuclear submarines. The truth is AUKUS is a lot more, and a lot more dangerous, than these submarines.

The broader implications of AUKUS have suddenly come into focus with an Australian weapons system surfacing in Israel, reportedly having travelled there via the US, as a direct result of AUKUS.

Those selling AUKUS have split it up into two parts, or “pillars”. Pillar One is the AUKUS nuclear submarine project, where Australia has signed up to spend $368 billion trying to buy some second-hand submarines from the US and then design and build some more with the UK. This part of AUKUS is in a tailspin right now, with very few informed observers thinking it will ever produce nuclear submarines for Australia.

While the eye-watering cost and public meltdown of Pillar One have taken most of the attention, Pillar Two has been rolling out, mainly across Australia and the US with little public oversight.

Pillar Two is designed to remove export and import controls over weapons, weapons parts and weapons technology between Australia and the US. It is sold as increasing our access to US defence technologies. The reality is very different.

Labor and the Coalition are both paid-up believers of this part of AUKUS. Last year, they pushed through the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Act 2024 as part of a suite of AUKUS-related legislation to bind Australia’s scientific community, industry and military even more firmly to the US. These legal changes were a US precondition for Australia to receive nuclear submarines under AUKUS Pillar One.

The legislation did what was on the box and made it far easier for technology, weapons, and weapons parts to flow back and forth between Australia and the US without formal permits and with far less paperwork. The Greens were the only party to oppose the legislation, seeing it as an attack on Australia’s ability to control and direct Australian defence forces and scientific and defence research and technology.

AUKUS Pillar Two is not a partnership of equals. When you compare Australia’s defence industry and research pool against the US, we are a puddle while they are an ocean. The result will be major US defence companies like Lockheed Martin, General Electric and Raytheon totally dominating Australian industry with the goal of incorporating us into their global weapons production chains. With that, comes a dangerous loss of control over what we produce and where we send it.

We have already seen a pilot version of this deal with Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet program. This US-led weapons program has recruited 15 US allies, including Australia, to build critical parts of the fighter jet to feed into US supply lines. The Australian Government, until very recently, bragged about this, with more than 70 companies feeding more than $4 billion of parts into the supply line. But once it became clear that these parts were being used in Israeli F-35 fighter planes to commit genocide in Gaza, this information was scrubbed from the Department’s website.

AUKUS Pillar Two is the systematic expansion of this, from one weapons program to Australia’s entire defence industry. The idea that we are this loyal arm of the US military industry that cannot act independently is not a bug, it is a feature of AUKUS. As Minister for Defence industry, Pat Conroy, told The New York Times last year when discussing Pillar Two: “We are there to supplement, not supplant, the American industrial base… They [the US] should see this as an opportunity for us to be a second supply line.”

This is how an Australian-made weapon system ended up in Israel earlier this year. In 2021, Australian manufacturer EOS opened a US subsidiary to put together Australian-made parts of their remote weapon systems. When EOS exported a similar weapons system to Ukraine, they were quite clear about this, saying:

“This is Australian technology; these systems were designed and manufactured here in Australia, particularly Queanbeyan and in Canberra. There’ll be delivered from Canberra to the US, and then on to Ukraine."

Think of it like an IKEA table. Australia makes all the parts of the table, the legs, the screws and the table top, then puts it in a box and sends it to the US. In the US, they put it all together with an Allen key and send it off wherever they choose. This is exactly what happened with EOS’ R400 remote firing cannon.

EOS manufactured parts for their R400 weapon system in Australia, then exported them to the US. EOS then put them together in the US and obtained US Government permission to send them to Israel.

When the news of this weapon export to Israel broke, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responded by saying, “… that particular system was not exported from Australia".

This statement uses a narrow truth to hide a great big lie. It is true that the final export to Israel went from the US. It may also very well be true that there was no official permit from Australia to allow that Australian weapon to go to Israel. The undeniable truth is that this is an Australian weapon, and it is in Israel in the hands of the IDF in the middle of a genocide.

This is AUKUS Pillar Two working exactly as planned, to allow Australia to launder what would otherwise be illegal — or at the very least grossly immoral — weapons sales to Israel through the US.

Of course, this does not stand up to domestic or international law, which requires any country that exports weapons to have effective monitoring and end-use controls. International law also makes it very clear that “weapons” include their component parts. These points have been made by organisations like the Australian Centre for International Justice and Amnesty International.

While the Albanese Government misleads and tries to deflect blame, AUKUS is working exactly as intended, providing a pipeline from Australia through the US to some of the worst conflicts in the world with little to no oversight. In January, it was Israel. Next, it might be Sudan or Myanmar.

It is critically important to realise here that there is a total loss of government control over where and when Australian weapons are exported. Like so much of the defence posture of Labor and the Coalition, they are cravenly surrendering our independence to Washington.

This is what the Greens are so concerned about, this is why we have proposed a policy to end AUKUS and disentangle Australia’s defence from US weapons supply lines. We cannot have an independent foreign policy, or be a force for peace, when we have our entire defence industry, and the strategic direction of our defence forces, paid for by Australia and controlled out of Washington.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/04/aukus-is-more-than-nuclear-submarines-and-thats-a-problem/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy claims have been conspicuously absent from his election campaign. Now a leading energy analyst calculates the cost at more than $4.3 trillion, way above the Coalition’s touted $331B. Kim Wingerei reports.

The Coalition’s plans to solve ‘all’ our future energy needs with nuclear power were launched in 2023 and reinvigorated last year. Since then, there has been much talk about the cost, and how the cost would be met, with Peter Dutton sometimes quoting $331B and Anthony Albanese saying the cost will be over $600B. Both claims are based on numbers crunched by the parties’ respective favourite consultants.

The Coalition used Frontier Economics for its modelling, while the Government relied on renewable energy lobby group the Smart Energy Council.

They are both very wrong according to Tim Buckley of Climate Energy Finance (CEF), a philanthropically funded think tank focused on “energy transition consistent with the climate science”. Instead of the more limited modelling commissioned by the LNP and Labour, CEF has done a whole-of-economy analysis that demonstrates that the implied costs of the Federal Coalition’s nuclear plan run well into the trillions of dollars, ranging from $4.3-5.2 trillion by 2050,

including $3.5 trillion in lost GDP

That’s at least $4,300B, or around 60% more than Australia’s annual GDP last year ($2.71 trillion).

The CEF report says both the Coalition’s and the Government’s estimates of the price tag of building a nuclear industry in Australia restrict their analyses largely to costs incurred in the energy system itself.

Moreover, Frontier Economics’ modelling is “predicated on advocating for an energy pathway (“Progressive Change”) that differs dramatically to the energy pathway (“Step Change”) deemed most likely by the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated System Plan (ISP) and consistently advocated by the Labor Government.”

While Frontier Economics bases its assumption on a rapid implementation of nuclear power plants to replace “old” energy sources, AMEO’s Step Change plan is for a gradual transition from fossil fuels (gas and coal) towards renewables over the next 20+ years.

The ISP‘s objective is to “optimise value to end consumers by designing the lowest cost, secure and reliable energy system capable of meeting any emissions trajectory determined by policy makers at an acceptable level of risk”.

The progressive scenario imposes enormous additional costs to the economy at large, according to Tim Buckley. It would “by necessity, impose many further flow-on costs to the Australian economy that are unaccounted for by the Frontier Economics modelling.”

These additional costs include underestimating the capital costs, higher fuel costs because of slower electrification under the progressive plan, the economic damage caused by up to 2 billion additional tonnes of carbon emissions, as well as loss of green energy export revenue.

Even without the $3.5 trillion hit to the economy as estimated by the CEF, the total costs of the Coalition’s nuclear plan are between $517B and $1.4 trillion above Frontier’s baseline numbers of between $331B and $446B, according to the AFR ($).

The CEF report states, “GDP difference between Step Change and Progressive Change under the AEMO-modelled scenarios is so large that it swamps anything else – around $3.5 trillion in cumulative undiscounted lost GDP through 2050.”

According to Buckley, this comes about because the savings in investments “come at the cost of delivering much weaker outcomes for Australia.” Electricity demand is much lower for the progressive scenario than for AMEO’s Step Change plan for three reasons:

• There is much lower overall economic growth assumed in AEMO Progressive Change versus Step Change, with Australian GDP up to $300bn annually lower by 2050 than in Step Change.
• There is a significant contraction of large industrial facility demand, likely representing the exit of the aluminium industry, given Progressive Change does not deliver sufficient affordable and clean energy to enable that industry to continue beyond its existing electricity supply contracts.
• There is much less electrification of transport, buildings and industry. This means Australia stays largely reliant on importing our current $60bn p.a. of oil needs from the Middle East, a cost externalised from the Frontier ‘modelling’.

“All of these differences involve broader negative consequences that are not captured in the scope of the modelling, which is limited to the electricity sector. Lower industrial and wider economic output would mean less electricity investment to service it, but also means lost value added, exports, corporate and income tax revenue and so forth.”

This GDP loss reaches a staggering $300bn annually by 2050.

The most criticised aspect of the Coalition’s nuclear plan is the low-balling of the actual costs (and time taken) to build nuclear plants in a country that has no experience with them. As much of the plan is vague at best, CEF has looked at comparable nuclear plants built elsewhere.

Without taking inflation into account, that’s a cool $172.2B just to build seven of them. Dutton has said he wants to build two first, so based on experience elsewhere, that’s two plants up and running by, say, 2040, providing at best 2% of Australia’s electricity.

That’s assuming, of course, places are found that want them, with enough water to cool them, an industry created to maintain and support them, and Federal and State laws changed to approve them, to name just some of the obstacles on the way.

The CEF report says Frontier’s model assumes initial capacity is delivered by the end of 2035 per Coalition ambitions, which is just 1.8gw. Most of the buildout is assumed to be delivered in the 2040s. Frontier states that they amortise the costs of nuclear over 50 years. However, they only report costs incurred through 2050.

But perhaps the most curious part is that the “modelling used by the Coalition is based on an electricity system producing 31% less electricity than Labor’s preferred renewables-based approach.”

https://michaelwest.com.au/new-report-peter-duttons-nuclear-power-plan-to-cost-4-3-trillion/

GUSNOTE: ALL COUNTRIES (EXCEPT IRAN) THAT USE NUCLEAR ENERGY, CAN AFFORD IT (AT A major LOSS) BECAUSE NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS PRODUCE FISSABLE PRODUCT TO USE IN NUCLEAR WEAPONS. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THEY CAN "AFFORD" THE COST OF NUCLEAR ENERGY — AS GOVERNMENTS PAY PREMIUM CASH FOR THE INSTALLATION (AND PROTECTION) OF NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS — EVEN IF "PRIVATELY" RUN LIKE IN THE USA....

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.