How AUKUS is Becoming the Largest Wealth Transfer in Australian History – and Why the Government Won’t Tell You the Cost
Dedicated to my wife, who sees through the secrecy and still chooses to fight for transparency.
I. The Question the Government Will Not Answer
In July 2025, Michael West Media submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA). The question was simple: what are the latest cost estimates for a solution for the treatment and storage of high‑level radioactive waste from AUKUS?
This is not a radical question. Defence is supposed to provide “cradle to grave” costings for any major capability before it is approved. The AUKUS submarines were approved without those costings. The $368 billion price tag does not include radioactive waste storage and disposal.
The government has calculated preliminary costs. They exist. They are just not willing to share them with the people who will have to pay for them.
When the ASA finally responded, it did not provide the estimate. It claimed it could not find it.
The agency advised that:
“Preliminary searches have been carried out within one branch of one division of the ASA … that branch has advised that approximately 3,000 documents are potentially in scope. They would require manual examination.”
Three thousand documents. For one simple costing request. The agency is managing a $368 billion project, and it cannot find a single estimate for a cost that will likely run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
As Rex Patrick, the former senator and transparency crusader, put it: “Quite unbelievable!”
II. The Cradle: Billions in Wealth Transfer
The cradle of the AUKUS program is a cascade of taxpayer funds flowing out of Australia.
The 2024 AUKUS budget of $53–63 billion has already blown out to $71–96 billion – a 52 per cent increase for the upper band. The Collins class submarine upgrade has blown out from $4–5 billion to $7.8–11 billion – a 120 per cent increase.
The money is not staying in Australia. It is flowing to American and British defence contractors. The US has expanded its AUKUS submarine support package to $1 billion. Australia is spending at least $30 billion on a new construction yard, and $21 billion on missile manufacturing.
The total cost of ownership of AUKUS could exceed $1 trillion.
This is not defence. This is wealth transfer – from Australian taxpayers to foreign defence giants.
III. The Grave: A Liability We Will Never Escape
The grave is the radioactive waste. The $368 billion AUKUS price tag does not include radioactive waste storage and disposal. That cost will be enormous – experts estimate it could double the total AUKUS price tag.
Under the revised AUKUS agreement, Australia will be liable for any problems or losses associated with disposing of nuclear waste. If something goes wrong, Australia pays. The liability is indefinite. The waste will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years.
The government has calculated preliminary costs. The ASA has the documents. But when a citizen asks, the agency claims it cannot find them.
As Rex Patrick has noted, if the Minister asked for the latest cost estimates, he would get them almost instantly. But when a citizen asks, the agency claims it cannot find them.
This is not incompetence. It is a strategy.
IV. The Secrecy Is Deliberate
This is not the first time the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide information about AUKUS nuclear waste.
The ASA has argued that a $360,000 report on potential locations for a high‑level nuclear waste dump – a decision that will impact Australia for millennia – is a Cabinet document and must remain secret.
It took the agency to the Administrative Review Tribunal to fight the release of this report. The agency spent taxpayer dollars on lawyers to argue that the public should not be allowed to see a roadmap for where the most toxic material on our planet may be dumped for tens of thousands of years.
The report was prepared on unclassified computers and transferred on unclassified networks. It was never a Cabinet document. But the agency successfully argued that it should be treated as one.
This is not transparency. This is a cover‑up.
V. The Pattern: Moral Disengagement
This is the same pattern we have seen with Robodebt. With the Pezzullo affair.
The government has calculated the costs. The government has the documents. The government knows where the waste will go. But it will not tell you.
Why? Because the numbers are too big. The decisions are too controversial. The truth is too uncomfortable.
So they hide behind “Cabinet‑in‑confidence.” They hide behind “preliminary estimates.” They hide behind “3,000 documents.”
And they hope you will stop asking.
VI. The Mess at the Australian Submarine Agency
The ASA is not just disorganised. It is in a mess.
In November 2024, the government asked Boston Consulting Group to review the agency’s organisational structure. A contract was signed for $2.7 million. In April 2025, it was amended to $7.4 million. Three months later, it was amended again to a whopping $12.1 million.
In parallel, the defence minister asked former Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson to undertake an urgent top‑to‑bottom review of the ASA amid “serious concerns” about how it was managing AUKUS.
None of that seems to have helped. The agency still cannot find its own cost estimates.
VII. The Opportunity Cost
Every dollar spent on AUKUS is a dollar not spent on aged care, on health, on education, on housing, on climate action, on the things that actually keep Australians safe and well.
The $368 billion price tag is already blowing out. The waste disposal costs will add hundreds of billions more. The total could exceed $1 trillion.
This is not a defence strategy. It is a wealth transfer strategy – dressed up in flags and naval jargon.
The money is leaving Australia. The profits are flowing to Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Babcock. The waste is staying here. The liability is staying here. The secrecy is staying here.
VIII. Whose Cradle? Whose Grave?
The cradle belongs to the defence contractors. The profits flow to their shareholders. The grave belongs to Australia – to the communities that will host the waste, to the taxpayers who will pay the bill, to the generations who will inherit the liability.
This is not a failure of process. It is the process working as designed.
The government has calculated the costs. The government has the documents. The government knows where the waste will go. But it will not tell you – because the truth is too uncomfortable, and the wealth transfer is too profitable.
IX. A Final Word
Rex Patrick is one of the few people in this country who refuses to stop asking. He is a “Transparency Warrior” – a former senator and submariner who has made it his mission to hold the powerful to account.
He needs support. He needs attention. He needs people to share his work, to amplify his voice, to demand answers.
The truth will still be buried in those 3,000 documents – unless we keep digging.
Whose cradle? Whose grave? The answer is clear. And the silence is complicity.
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Thanks Dr Kein for this well researched piece. AUKUS is steered by an inner circle of ministers with the assistance of a military support team as well as local and overseas intel services on the The National Security Committee (NSC) of Australia. It is the key decision-making body for national security and major foreign policy matters, established to oversee the country’s security policies and military operations. Local mainstream news services foster misinformation about our best and most profitable trading partner to deter Chinese investment on security grounds in favour of investment from Britain and especially the USA. No wonder there is tension in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait as our military aircraft trawl these routes from bases in Butterworth and operations with US MIlitary aircrafts from Micronesia.
At times we tend to forget who got us into this mess tied us to a contract ehich was dubious to begin with, but a contractural arrangement which the current government is tied to.
I well remember the era of the Viet Nam Moratorium when rising public disapproval resulted in a new government that was prepared to end Australia’s involvement in that disastrous war that America created. If the Australian population of today has anything left over from the vigour of the anti-war movement of the 1960-70s then AUKUS and the 5 Eyes should be at the forefront of political debate before the next federal election lest we are drawn into another American warmongering debacle.
The speed of the AUKUS deal makes snails look like they’re bombed out of their brains on methamphetamines. Most of us will be ashes in urns before we see the first of these mythical and fantastical things the ancients called subbmahrenes.
This article correctly identifies that Scummo’s USUKA sub debacle to obtain a personal post-politics career in the US military industrial complex should correctly be tried as treason, rather than excused as incompetence.
These is now no doubt that Australia is the vassal 52nd state of the Undemocratic Sewer of Apartheid (USA) thanks particularly to the unthinking COALition politicians since 2013.
Yes, Morrison signed us up to AUKUS in Sept. 2021, but does anyone seriously believe that Labor couldn’t have pulled us out of it when they won office in May 2022?
Instead, Albanese signed up to AUKUS 2.0.in August 2024
“US President Joe Biden announced that a new AUKUS agreement has been signed with Australia that contains secret “political commitments”.
This new AUKUS deal supersedes the previous agreement formulated under the Morrison Government, which entered into force in February 2022.
Attached to this new agreement is an undisclosed “Understanding” which covers the approaches the respective governments will take to the new agreement and provides “additional related political commitments.” These additional political commitments have been kept secret.
The new agreement will allow for the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants and other equipment, including equipment needed for the disposal of naval nuclear propulsion plants.
The agreement also expressly protects US intellectual property, including the prevention of information, material or equipment going beyond “the jurisdiction” without the consent of the US.
There is also a provision in the agreement that will allow the UK and US to intervene in the arrangements between Australia and the International Atomic Energy Agency.” (Greens)
Have we found out yet what those political commitments were? Not to my knowledge.
Labor treats the public knowing what they’re doing with utter contempt.
Labor sees fit to jettison any pretense that it represents standing for supporting all vulnerable Australians but rather in keeping the neoliberal media happy with its cuts to the NDIS – so much for no one will be left behind.
The justification for the NDIS reshaping and cuts is the cost blowout, yet Labor keeps the blowout on defence spending, including AUKUS, secret.
The Pro-war Labor Party’s priorities are keeping corporate profits growing, not serving the people.
It seems to me that most Australians are complicit with this schadenfreude from Defence, mainly from emotional history and links, and I’m saying that as my deceased father was a Rat of Tobruk, his full military history is yet to be discovered.
In terms of Morrison, he should be tried for Treason, no if’s and’s or butts and they tried to silence Julian Assange?
Jesus, Mary & Joseph, wake the fuck up people. Clearly defence may be a good option for some, however given that we have taken civilization to the brink of disaster, maybe Defence should be expanded and deployed to repair civilian fractures.
This ongoing debacle is just the most outstanding example of an egregiously pusillanimous government who have shown, repeatedly ,that they are desperately out of their depth when dealing with the corrupt monster of the war machine that mainly resides in the crumbling,incompetent ’empire’, led by a corrupt , psychopathic,deluded, lunatic.
It has been well documented how the defence department in this country has been an open cesspit of mismanagement, rorting,lies and an abyss of wasted money
Our defence minister,Marles is a joke.Change to this ongoing atrocity will only happen when the current crowd of career politicians is given the arse,and replaced with Greens, Independents and Teals.It need only be a minority Labor government.If only it had happened last time.