AUKUS:SUBMARINE DREAMS
Unlike most children, who realize that the contents of graphic novels are pure fantasy, our leaders believe that the science fiction depicted in them can be made a reality. They have signed agreements with foreign governments to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, each of which can hide deep in the water for months at a time and emerge silently from the depths to strike at any surface ship no matter how powerful, anywhere in the world.
The commanders of our armed forces appear to share a love for a Marvel comic reality which they have in common with our political leaders.
We have no ability to build these vessels, nor will we have the capacity in the future. We will not be able to afford this enterprise no matter how much money we throw at it. Apart from the initial estimates this would cost, 360 billion, a figure sure to expand to much more than this, we have not had the ability or the expertise to build anything substantial since the Sydney Opera House was completed, as I illustrate below.
The issue of promising to build large-scale projects that fail is not confined to these shores but is something that politicians do all around the world. We last landed on the moon over fifty years ago and have not come near to repeating the feat since then. In other countries, there are many examples of projects that can’t be completed like as the Hong Kong Zhuhai Macao Bridge which while the longest bridge in the world has never been used.
This country has its own examples of massive builds which cannot be completed such as the currently languishing Snowy River Mark 2 scheme and the stalled massive inland railway project. Investigations and government inquiries have shown that we do not have the capacity or the expertise to complete these projects.
Then there are the billion-dollar desalination plants that aren’t used and “brilliant” schemes such as the Geo-Thermal Energy project which went nowhere. These last two over-hyped projects were championed by Chief Scientist Tim Flannery whose credibility remains undaunted like one of the “Anointed” described by the Philosopher Thomas Sowell, essentially members of the elite whose embarrassing failures of prediction are carefully covered up.
The idea that our political leaders are simply overpaid conmen who dream up costly schemes which they hope may be shown to be failures only after they are out of office and relaxing on the luxurious couch of their enormous superannuation payouts, seems to have credence. The submarines are the worst of these.
A candle, lit by one prime minister has now been taken in relay by another who has run with the idea and expanded the candle till it reaches the status of Olympic torch. It matters not that these political con men are from opposing parties. What is clear though is that both leaders, unlike the skilled scriptwriters of the Marvel Movies that derive from the Marvel comics, have totally lost the plot.
Yet this insane enterprise is supported by both sides of politics and even the doves in the party of the prime minister sitting in their comfortable coups, coo loudly in support. Both sides of the media, right and left, are cheering the Government on. We are informed that we will eventually end up with as many as thirteen nuclear submarines and in the process bankrupt the nation, sucking what wealth we have into a military black hole.
Yet we are a middling power of only twenty-five million souls. The analogy is apt because people who purchase expensive yachts are often accused of pouring money into a marine “black hole”.
There are no voices crying out in protest against this madness except for the previous Prime Minister, Paul Keating, an unrepentant Sinophile, who has completely discredited himself by describing China’s genocide as their “bullying phase”.
Breaking the proposal into its separate components, we see immediately the absurdity of each. The government which has steadfastly refused to examine the question of providing electrical power to the nation using nuclear reactors because of the problems of nuclear waste, now proposes to build thirteen of them each using weapons-grade plutonium, useless if we want it for the electrical grid.
The labor force of the enterprise cannot be accurately determined but will be in excess of 20, 000 persons or more than built the pyramids of Egypt. As much as a third of people alive today will never see the first of these vessels reach the water. The sailors who will man them have not even been born yet and those who will command are still in school.
The foolish political leaders who have burdened us with this Gilbertian enterprise will be long out of office and lying on the sandy beaches of their politician’s retirement fund. The price tag of 360 billion is preliminary and, as every military acquisition of this country has gone wildly over budget, we can expect this one to travel north of a trillion dollars.
This investment will be greater than all the money that it took to commence a car industry in Australia after the war but at least we can sell cars, submarines have no value except as military hardware. The cost each year going forward, over thirty billion, will be greater than all the money spent on the Australian army and if another disaster strikes like Covid there will be no reserve in the till.
At present we cannot deal with our youth crime problem, the lack of health services to the outback, pollution problems, and our national debt is greater than at any time in history.
America has twenty Virginia class submarines sailing the globe at the moment and we will acquire up to five of these, but they employ uranium enriched to weapons grade which not only requires us to obtain approval from the International Atomic Energy Commission but be useless to us if we do develop a nuclear electrical grid which cannot use weapon-grade uranium. The United Kingdom vessels, of which we will obtain up to eight, don’t exist yet and have yet to be developed. How and where this will be done is unknown.
We cannot staff our defence forces now, but this fleet of nuclear submarines will require each to have over two thousand personnel trained to the highest degree in naval warfare. Where will these sailors come from? The number of support personnel required is even greater.
How did this bizarre plan come about in the first place? This country on its own could never have conceived such a plan were it not for its AUKUS partners, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Throughout eighty years of conflict we have been the wingman, the fall guy of the United States who needs us to validate its conflicts.
Since the surrender of the Japanese last century, America has been almost continually involved in war. It is the most bellicose nation on the planet and mostly we have been there alongside them. It was Dwight Eisenhower, himself a general and as president of the United States, who warned us about the “military-industrial complex”, that sinister union of business and the military motivated by greed and power that drives the foreign policy of that country.
Our culture is totally different from that of the US, a country that believes it can bully undeveloped nations, like Iraq to become democracies, and with a gun culture that has 120 guns for every 100 persons in the country, where three-year-old children shoot and kill their siblings, and where mass shootings occur every other day and which it is powerless to stop even when dozens of kindergarten children are slaughtered. We are supporting a nation whose policy is to shoot first and ask questions later.
Despite their power, the intrusion of the US in the business of other countries has usually led to spectacular failure. A twenty-year war in Afghanistan led to an ignominious defeat by goat herders whose moral philosophy dates from the early Middle Ages.
Yet our polity fails to be guided by all these facts and now, once again, we are expected to tag along purchasing armaments we will never use so we can join the fight in the OK corral.
The absurdity of this proposal has been brutally illustrated by the ABC comedy “Utopia” which the reader should not miss, where defence force leaders are asked to justify the construction of this nuclear submarine defence capability to protect Asian sea lanes. And who are we protecting them against? The very country with whom most of our trade is conducted.
And what of the United Kingdom? We can only imagine how keen that nation would be for us to purchase as many as eight nuclear submarines, which, as yet, have not been designed for who knows how many billions of dollars. They need money desperately, having taken themselves out of the most successful trading organization in history. Why should it be up to us to prevent their rapid descent into middling power status as they change Prime Ministers every other month, their ports choke with Albanian refugees and their NHS scheme now has a record 7,000 persons waiting to be registered?
The problem is that our governments, both sides of politics, have entered a Marvel comic world where great problems are solved instantly by magical superpowers.
One startling example of this is the national power grid. Every credible expert in Energy research has made it clear that we simply cannot phase out fossil fuels by the year 2030 at which point 70% of the world’s energy will still be reliant on gas, coal, and oil. Still, the government insists that by covering the landscape with wind farms and solar panels, which destroy our farmland, are unable to power our industries, and purchased at huge cost from other countries like China, our energy problems will be solved. Words like “green energy” are utilized to reassure the people that the alternate forms of energy, wind turbines, and electric cars are less destructive and polluting than fossil fuels.
What is really being proposed here is that we join the fight with Captain America and the other Marvel comic heroes and leave it to our grandchildren to pay the price.