The Great Submarine Swindle
AUKUS is a scam!
A few days ago, there were two back-to-back interviews on ABC. The first was with Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Richard Marles telling us that Australia must that we must spend $375 billion on eight nuclear submarines to “protect the Australian way of life.”
The second interview was with a young woman named Billie, who is living in her car with her two kids because housing is so unaffordable.
Australia is spending all this money on nuclear submarines we might not even see until the 2040s. Currently, we spend $55b a year, about 2% of GDP, on defence. That’s set to double to over $100b a year by 2033. AUKUS spending is already hidden in the budget, with billions for shipyards, design, and training. But that’s just the start. The full cost is spread over 50 years, far beyond the neat ten-year forecasts politicians like to wave around. Given a build schedule of one sub every three years (once the Australian yard is up and running) for the domestic boats, all eight could realistically be in service by the mid-2050s to 2060s. We’re locking ourselves into decades of debt for submarines that will certainly be outdated before they even hit the water.
If you were a soldier at Waterloo in 1815, muskets cracking and cavalry thundering, you couldn’t imagine the rifled artillery and mass slaughter of Gettysburg fifty years later. Many Civil War veterans lived to see the Somme in 1916, where machine guns, gas, tanks, and planes left 1.2 million casualties. And the men who staggered from the Somme could never have conceived of the atomic bomb. The destruction of Hiroshima was total. A city that had stood for centuries was erased in a single flash. Fifteen years later, the Soviet Tsar Bomba was more than three thousand times as powerful.
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By the time our AUKUS submarines finally arrive, the battlefields of the 2050s will be unrecognizable. Swarms of AI drones, quantum detection grids, and weapons we can’t even picture. And for what?
The whole premise of AUKUS rests on one idea: be afraid of China. But China is our biggest trading partner. Most Australians have no appetite for war, no interest in being America’s deputy sheriff in the Pacific. We sell iron ore, wine, barley, milk powder to Beijing. We don’t need nuclear tubs in the South China Sea to prove anything. The threat is manufactured. Fear sells hardware. And America knows how to sell.
We’re being swindled. The sting was hatched by Scott Morrison, already lining up his post-politics gigs when he inked this mess. He flogged us AUKUS as prime minister, then strolled straight into cushy jobs with the very firms set to profit: American Global Strategies, a Washington consultancy, and DYNE Maritime, a venture fund banking on AUKUS contracts. The steppingstones are a kid’s treasure map running from ink in Canberra to payday in Washington.
The “submarine program” is a countdown to retirement, not defence. The only real question is how many gigs Morrison had lined up before voters, and his own party told him to fuck off.
AUKUS is less a defence pact than a jackpot for the insiders.
Any examination of AUKUS must begin with the premise that Morrison is as bent as a nine-dollar note. The deal is less a defence pact than a jackpot for the insiders. American arms giants will swallow billions for submarines that may never arrive. The big consultancies, PwC, Accenture and their ilk will bleed the public purse with endless “strategic advice.” Ex-politicians like Morrison slide into cushy board seats and advisory roles, while defence bureaucrats stroll through the revolving door to lucrative consultancies. Even venture funds such as DYNE Maritime are circling, ready to cash in on dual-use tech spin-offs. It’s a bonanza for the well-connected, and a bill for the rest of us.
What We Could Have Had Instead
Eight submarines = $375 billion (assuming it doesn’t blow out)
Housing: At about $600k per dwelling, that’s 610,000 homes, enough to all but end the social housing crisis. Imagine wiping homelessness off the map instead of building weapons that kids born today could be in their 40s before we have them.
Hospitals: At around $3 million per hospital bed, we could add 120,000 beds, nearly doubling our national capacity. That’s fewer ED queues, more ICU space, better health for everyone.
Libraries and community hubs: Projects like Yarrila Place in Coffs Harbour cost about $80m. For the sub budget, we could build 4,500 of them across the country. Every suburb, every town could have a gleaming public space.
Instead, we’re signing decades-long cheques for weapons systems that may be obsolete before they even leave dry-dock.
The Real Security Threat
The real threats aren’t Chinese submarines slipping into Sydney Harbour. They’re poverty, inequality, climate change, and health collapse. A country that can’t house its people, staff its hospitals, or fund its schools has already lost the long war of decline. The slow collapse where inequality, climate chaos, and corruption destroy us from within. Eight outdated subs won’t keep Australians safe. Homes, hospitals, and schools will. Billie doesn’t need submarines. She needs a home. And so do thousands of others. Morrison sold us a scam, and unless we call it what it is, our kids will be paying for his retirement while growing up in the backseat of a car.