Four months after the Aukus deal was announced to fanfare in San Diego, the nuclear-powered submarine plan is facing headwinds in both the United States and Australia.
The political challenges likely won’t sink Aukus but leaders and senior officials in both countries will have to navigate them carefully.
As the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, flew to Brisbane this week for annual talks with their Australian counterparts, a group of US senators and members of Congress fired off a letter to Joe Biden.
The 22 Republican senators and three house members are worried the planned sale of at least three Virginia class submarines to Australia in the 2030s will see the US fall short of its own submarine needs.
Without extra funds being allocated to ramp up US production, the plan “would unacceptably weaken the US fleet even as China seeks to expand its military power and influence”, the letter states.
This doesn’t amount to opposition to Aukus as a whole, but US domestic production difficulties have always been the most likely trigger for a potential holdup in Congress – and members are aware they have the most leverage when being asked to authorise legislation enabling the deal.
That is why the Australian government made the contentious decision in March to pledge at least $3bn to ease production delays in Aukus partner countries, mostly the US. This was described as a “down payment” to ensure the Virginia class transaction can proceed before Australian-built submarines start entering service in the early 2040s.
Canberra is trying to project a sense of calm – it maintains everything is on track and it’s not surprising there is colour and movement in the US as the legislation works its way through Congress.
The assumption is that bipartisan support in Washington DC for Aukus will mean that, eventually, legislative hurdles will be removed. The Biden administration may have to find extra cash for domestic production to smooth over concerns – but to this point, the Australian government hasn’t suggested it could tip in more money.
The US domestic challenges are probably the reason the White House Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, told a thinktank last month: “When submarines are provided from the United States to Australia, it’s not like they’re lost. They will just be deployed by the closest possible allied force.”
Those comments are not helpful to an Australian government trying to allay concerns about sovereign control of the submarines. This brings us to the political challenges in Australia.
Campbell’s intervention caused unease among some Labor members who sympathise with former prime minister Paul Keating who argues Australia is binding itself to US grand strategy for decades to come – and reducing its own room to move at a time when the power balance in the region is shifting.
To date, Anthony Albanese’s cabinet has solidly supported the Aukus deal, and caucus pushback has been almost nonexistent, save for a few members asking questions. Albanese and his senior colleagues rushed to lock in support hours after Scott Morrison announced the broad plans in 2021 and Labor hasn’t looked back.
But there is a good chance a range of concerns will be ventilated when the ALP holds its national conference in Brisbane in August – the first since the party won government.
In the past few months, there has been agitation among leftwing branches on both the strategic impact of Aukus and the potential for it to drain money from traditional Labor priorities such as health, education and welfare.
Labor’s Sydney federal electoral council (FEC) last week passed a motion declaring that Aukus is “not in the interests of the Australian people, threatens a regional arms race, and could take Australia into an unnecessary and devastating war”.
While several party branches have expressed their concerns about Aukus, Sydney is among only three FECs known to have passed motions questioning the policy. (The others are Boothby and Mayo in South Australia.) A pro-Aukus motion was defeated at the recent state Labor conference in Queensland, while the Victorian conference deferred a motion on the same topic.
People within the government say they are not ignorant of the concerns that exist in some quarters of the Labor base – and a lot of conversations are happening behind the scenes to respond.
Perhaps these sensitivities are the reason the draft national platform to be debated at the conference slips in Aukus almost as a throwaway line. “Our self-reliant defence policy will be enhanced by strong bilateral and multilateral defence relationships, including Aukus,” it states.
Labor insiders on both sides of the debate expect that even if some members wish to register their concerns through speeches from the conference floor, there is unlikely to be a rebellion of a scale that would embarrass the party leadership.
There will be efforts to keep Aukus dissent behind the scenes given this is the first national conference since Labor returned to power and Albanese won’t want a damaging brawl.
Opponents know a full rebellion would require backing from “champions” within the caucus – and that doesn’t appear to be there. Some left faction branch warriors find it hard to accept the party’s position but feel unity is winning out over ideals.
The defence industry minister, Pat Conroy, who is from the left of the party but a strong backer of Aukus, argues progressives should support the policy. The key, he says in Guardian Australia’s politics podcast, is to understand that Aukus fits alongside diplomatic efforts and is about deterring conflict, not provoking it.
“War is horrible … and the best way of avoiding war is to invest in deterrence and strong national defence,” Conroy says.
The defence minister, Richard Marles, from the right of the party, and the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, from the left, are working together to ensure the national conference backs Aukus. They will have plenty to talk about when they sit down for formal talks with Blinken and Austin in Brisbane this weekend.
