The Public Inquiry into AUKUS
Social licence for AUKUS lacking as Public Inquiry report and recommendations due
The Lead Commissioner of Australia’s independent, crowdfunded Public Inquiry into AUKUS has warned the Federal Government about growing community unease about the project, ahead of the release of the Inquiry’s report and recommendations next week in Canberra.
Lead Commissioner Peter Garrett said today that the Inquiry hearings showed successive Governments had comprehensively failed to make the case for the AUKUS submarine pact, and that the sheer scale and cost of the project meant it risked becoming a threat to social cohesion in Australia over time.
“In the absence of any social license for this deal I fear Australians struggling through the current cost-of-living crisis will come to see the AUKUS expenditure going to the US and the UK in a very poor light.
“People aren’t mugs. As well as helping fund overseas shipyard construction these submarines will generate high level nuclear waste, which remains Australia’s responsibility. Once people understand this highly dangerous material needs to be stored somewhere safely, at great expense and for a very long time, they are bound to seek answers that have simply not been provided through the AUKUS process.
“Where is the Government’s plan for this massive waste management undertaking? It would be negligent not to have a plan, but up to now the community has been kept in the dark.
“That is unsustainable.”
A substantial number of Australians – including a former Prime Minister, former Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministers, senior academics and military experts, community groups and citizens – have presented to the Inquiry across 10 day-long hearings in 8 cities around Australia since it launched in the middle of the year.
Nearly 10,000 people watched the proceedings, either attending in person or via the live-stream. Over 1,000 written submissions were received.
$220,000 was raised by crowdfunding, from individual donors and from civil society organisations, in order to hold the inquiry.
The Commissioners have now drafted a comprehensive report which will be presented at the National Press Club next Wednesday November 4.
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Seems to me that Minister Marles is personally in too deep for any sense of humility that would enable him to retreat from this unpopular and potentially catastrophic project. Marles will be aware that he may not survive the next federal election so his post parliamentary aspirations will disappear if AUKUS is cancelled now. And that would not be an injustice.
@ Mediocrates: The sooner the USUKA sub debacle is sunk & forgotten the better. Now which Coalition PM has been the only Australian citizen to benefit financially from this absurd loss of national sovereignty??
However, the underwhelming Retched Mediocrity aka Richard Marles is clinging to the USUKA project to protect the USA at the expense of Australian voters, then those voters have a problem. As the 2IC Labor & Far Right faction leader, he may be in line to become the next PM on the retirement/resignation of Alb-Appeasie. If this happens then we will be stuck with USUKA which is pipedream of military mythology. Meanwhile that would be good news for the combined remnants of the LIARBRAL$, NOtional$ and the PHONys (Profiting Hanson Only Naturally) you see. However, such a lack lustre collection of potential Opposition political rejects and political incompetents leaves much to be desired by thinking voters.
From P&I 281026; Peter Briggs.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/10/aukus-cannot-build-submarines-with-public-relations/