AUKUS Must Stay

I rise to speak on this urgency motion of the Greens, which I think demonstrates some intellectual dishonesty, because anyone who studies geopolitics and our national security will understand this: it matters little who is in the White House; competition in the Indo-Pacific will persevere no matter who is the President of the United States.

As we know, AUKUS is not just about submarines. It's mostly about signalling that we have allies and friends that will come to our aid and provide us with what we need to be able to contest any battle. Those battles may arise even if Australia is not involved in a war on one side or the other. If there is contestation in the Indo-Pacific, more than anything we are going to need to protect our ships bringing in goods that we need to run our country, like fuel and medicines, as well as our ships getting our exports out of the country. We are a nation girt by sea, as the poem says, that trades with the world. To protect that trade and to ensure our economic survival and our ability to thrive, we must be able to protect our sea lanes of communication.

So cancelling AUKUS because of who is in the White House is just nonsensical. Yes, the submarines are important, but the Greens seem to ignore that there is a second pillar to AUKUS. Pillar 2 is all about quantum computing, AI and hypersonic things—things that we will use, that will benefit Australians in their everyday lives and that have nothing to do with the military. They are things that are going to propel Australia in the competition for technological advances faster than anything we could do just on our own. So, yes, nuclear submarines act as a capability and are capable of deterring aggressors from taking any action against us because they know we can hold them at risk, so AUKUS must stay.