Let’s face it, when your government tells you that we need to spend in the region of four hundred Billion dollars on a few submarines that we won’t get till the 2040’s at least, it should trigger much more attention than it has. Perhaps the lack of scrutiny is because both the Federal Coalition and Labor broadly support this huge spend. To the extent that when the Morrison government wasted a lazy four billion dollars having changed its mind on a deal for the French to build diesel powered subs (even though the French had originally pitched nuclear powered subs) Labor barely batted an eyelid.
The 400-billion-dollar sum has also not generated the level of community debate one would expect when such an enormous amount of money is proposed to be spent. Perhaps when the inevitable blowouts and delays start rolling in more often than they are already and it triples in costs (if we’re lucky) then people will wonder how such a stratospherically costly balls up ever came about.
Why do I think it will blow out? Don’t all government funded projects, especially long-term adventures? It seems the bigger they are the more they grow. Exhibit A – Snowy Hydro 2.0. Touted as a high tech, low cost, renewable energy source and costed at two billion dollars when announced in 2007. This is now an enormous black hole (literally) that just keeps getting bigger. But the government’s response is to just keep digging. Again, both parties are equally guilty. First the then Turnbull government with its appalling lack of planning, due diligence and research. Then, since they inherited it, the Albanese government’s decision not to cancel it. Despite it continually haemorrhaging money. At time of writing, it now seems it is deemed ‘too big to fail.’ Some estimates for the final cost vary wildly between twenty-two billion dollars and forty billion dollars. Ten to twenty times the original estimate.
My maths isn’t that good but if the AUKUS deal blows out by those multiples, we’ll have to take out a ten-thousand-year mortgage or sell up and move out. I’m mystified as to the lack of regular examination of the AUKUS pact. There’s nothing wrong with the intent – increased security cooperation in the Pacific between Australia, the UK and US. But the price tag? Surely there are cheaper and faster ways to deter an adversary. Especially at the rate at which modern technology is being developed in warfare.
Anyone studying the Ukraine war can clearly see unmanned weaponry and hardware is the future of war. Huge credit goes to the Ukrainian government, their incredible armed services and even the private sector. Ukrainian business has stepped up not just to make money but to serve their country in innovation and supply. Bringing drone technology from the workshop to front line deployment, in rapid time. The cooperation between the armed forces, the bureaucracy and business has been seamless. No doubt an existential threat is a serious motivation but the scale, depth and breadth of the development and deployment of unmanned boats, robotic machine gunners, as well as any amount of drones piloted across huge distances to devastating effect, is of enormous significance.
Ukraine has developed all this deadly weaponry inside four years while in a state of war with a much more powerful enemy. Mass production of cheap, innumerable, autonomous or semi-autonomous weaponry is overwhelming Russian attackers in the field and Russian air defences within Russia itself. While Australia has taken steps in the right direction, with some “cardboard drones” being used by Ukraine to take down Russian helicopters and some promising moves in the development of lasers to target drones, it’s just a drop in a bucket.
Australia also has the much touted but also ‘classified’ 1.7-Billion-dollar Ghost Shark, “an extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle” (XL-AUV). We are also developing “Uncrewed Surface Vehicles” (USV’s). So why can’t we just built hundreds of those? I’m always prepared to believe there are greater minds than mine at work but surely on cost ratio alone we could get hundreds of pieces of deadly equipment for the money we’re spending for between eight and twelve submarines. Vague though the AUKUS proposal is, even that lowly number is in doubt with recent reports suggesting the Americans can’t guarantee to build enough subs for themselves let alone Australia.
The problems encountered so far and delays pushing out the delivery to Australia of nuclear powered submarines, should be pause for thought on its own. Add in the uncertainty of what the United States future priorities will be, and whether Trump and his clown car administration is an aberration or the beginning of the end of a superpower and the case for a review becomes stronger still. Not just a closed door bureaucratic and armed services analysis either. The government should bring the information out into the open so we can, as an educated, common sense, patriotic population, have our say about whether we want to mortgage our future on a project that could be dead on arrival by the time it comes to its conclusion. If AUKUS is that good an idea why doesn’t it feel like it, and is the price already stifling spending on new and emerging technology?
At a cost of who knows what in the end, it’s time we all had a closer look. Before it becomes another balls up deemed “Too big to fail”.
2 Responses
And yet they won’t release the money that was promised for medical research.
The UK’s latest balls up is the never-needed and never-ending HS2 line. £100bn, 10 years and counting ….