Labor Tribune editor and convenor of Labor Against War, Marcus Strom, delivered this edited address on AUKUS at the Peace is Union Business conference.
Thank you, comrades for inviting me to speak in my role as National Convenor of Labor Against War. I am also a member of the NTEU and a member of its National Council. At our last National Council in August, we reiterated our opposition to AUKUS and to militarism in the higher education sector.
I’m also a member of MEAA Media, the journalists’ union: a rank-and-file member now, although I was president of that union for five years.
I was thinking about my mother when I was preparing this talk. She’s still alive and healthy at 90, and she’s often referred to how communists have “Cassandra’s curse”: we know what’s going on, but no one believes us. An example she gives is when they ripped up the tramways in Sydney in the 1950s, communists knew it was wrong and protested. Now they’re putting the trams back. Another of her stories is when she was arrested during a Ban the Bomb action with the Eureka Youth League.
Communists and others in the peace movement were trying to ban the bomb in the 1950s, and we’re still trying to ban the bomb today.
AUKUS horrors
Every week it seems there are new horrors announced about AUKUS, aren’t there, comrades? Last week, we learned that the Secretary of the Department of Defence acknowledged before Senate Estimates that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ambiguity policy on nuclear weapons on US vessels and craft means it is likely nuclear weapons will transit through Tindal on B-52s and through HMAS Stirling on nuclear submarines.
Over the weekend, British Royal Navy Rear Admiral Philip Matthias (retired) said that Britain is completely incapable of maintaining a nuclear submarine fleet and should withdraw from AUKUS. These are the people we’re relying on to help build our nuclear submarine fleet.
AUSMIN is meeting as we speak. One of the few things Trump has done that’s straightforward is renaming the Department of Defence as the Department of War. During AUSMIN, the white-supremacist Secretary of War has welcomed the increased military cooperation between the US and Australia, including additional rotations of Air Force bombers through Queensland and the NT, more rotational deployments of US Marines, and deeper cooperation on producing guided missiles, including hypersonic and attack missiles.
Australia’s own ‘minister for war’ Richard Marles has taken his cheque for $1.5 billion off to Washington to pour more Australian government money down the AUKUS drain. Marles has said that at every AUSMIN meeting since Labor was elected in 2022, “a central part of what we have sought to do in the defence space is to increase the US footprint in Australia”. Unbelievable statement and a complete abrogation of sovereignty before their imperial master. In response, his US counterpart said they “applaud Australia’s upcoming delivery of the additional billion dollars to help expand US submarine production capacity”. They love AUKUS because, in the words of Paul Keating, we’re the suckers paying for it.
This is all in the context of a Pentagon review of AUKUS which will not be made public. It has been reported that the review had to be rewritten to satisfy Trump. Marles has refused to say whether the US pushed Australia to spend more on defence or to narrow down the defence capabilities that will share sensitive technology under AUKUS Pillar 2. No word on whether it requires Australia to return the subs in the event of a war with China.
And remember: there are no guarantees any submarine will ever arrive. Who hands over billions upon billions of dollars with no guarantee of delivery? Anthony Albanese does, that’s who. And even then, delivery depends entirely on whoever is US President in 2032 – assuming we even want these submarines, which of course the labour movement does not.
US power and aggression in East Asia
It is increasingly clear that AUKUS is not about Australian defence; it is about US power and aggression in East Asia.
As a Labor Party member, I attended last week’s sham consultation of the ALP National Policy Forum on foreign policy. Two hundred and twenty-four Labor members signed up to listen to Penny Wong waffle for an hour. She said AUKUS was not about defence, but about “deterrence” – the new word. She defined the threat as some unnamed actor in East Asia. It reminded me of that Utopia episode where references to China are acknowledged using the “nodding system”.
We’ve also had Pat Conroy dare to equate the anti-war movement with Menzies-era appeasement. If China really is the threat they believe Japan was in the 1930s, why do they keep selling them iron ore?
All these war clowns will be long retired on fat pensions or selling death machines for the arms industry before any of this comes to fruition. The revolving door continues: Bomber Beazley, Mike Kelly, Brendan Nelson, Christopher Pyne, Scott Morrison – a bipartisan conga line to the arms industry.
But let’s go back to 2011 – to Julia Gillard’s initiation of the Force Posture Agreement with the US, signed off by Abbott in 2014. We have this disturbing bipartisanship that only the labour movement can overturn.
Force posture is about establishing Australia as a base for remote war-fighting for the US empire. This arose not from the needs of the Australian people, but from the US State Department’s “Pivot to Asia”. The pivot was not announced at the White House or the Pentagon, but in the Australian Parliament by Barack Obama in November 2011. The entire Australian political class beamed and lined up for their handshake with the liberal elite’s favourite president – Obama, who smiled nicely while bombing wedding parties in Yemen.
This announcement followed Hillary Clinton’s article in Foreign Policy outlining the pivot; a coordinated shift in policy driven by the realisation that the US was losing control.
After 1991, the US had no global competitor. It thought it could reshape the world in its image through the bombardment of dollars or bombs. This took the form of the Project for the New American Century backed by Bush I and Bush II. This vision died in the bloodied sands of Iraq. Washington’s unipolar moment was over but it took them another 10 years to realise it.
By the mid-2010s, they recognised their moment of dominance they thought they’d established at the end of the Cold War was slipping as China’s rise seemed inexorable.
An example of how this crept up on them: even in 2005, Washington gave the go-ahead for the Magnaquench rare-earths company to relocate to China after having been given reassurances by Beijing that the India company wouldn’t shift when sold to Chinese interests in the 1990s. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed that Deng Xiaoping had already said, “The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.”
With their global rare-earths deals, the Americans are playing catch-up.
In Australia, it wasn’t until Turnbull and then Morrison that their emerging war on China took root: first came the foreign interference laws, then AUKUS. Clinton Fernandes’ new book Turbulence outlines how the most important aspect of the force posture initiative is the forward operational deployment of US submarines west of the dateline.
It’s worth quoting him at length, even though I don’t agree that AUKUS is a distraction.
“The publicity surrounding AUKUS distracts from perhaps the most important force posture initiative of the US in the Indo-Pacific – the creation of Submarine Rotation Force-West (SRF-W) at Garden Island, near Fremantle in Western Australia.
Clinton Fernandes, Turbulence: Australian Foreign Policy in the Trump Era (pp136 -7)
“Australia has committed $A8 billion to upgrade Garden Island’s wharves, maintenance facilities and logistics infrastructure. The aim is to increase the number of nuclear-powered attack submarines west of the international dateline. By the end of the next decade, there are expeted to be 25 allied nuclear-powered attack submarines on permanent or rotational deployment in Fremantle, Guam and Hawaii.
“The spin doctors describe SRF-W as an optimal pathway for AUKUS. In fact, it is a forward operational deployment of the US Navy, independent of AUKUS, not a downpayment on Australia getting its own Virginia-class submarines.
“In the public’s mind the two are erroneously believed to be the same thing. The boats may never arrive, but SRF-W will remain as a forward operational deployment of the US Navy.”
But AUKUS is not a distraction, it is part and parcel of this. Fernandes is correct, that the Americans are mainly concerned with establishing its subs in Australian ports, but AUKUS is the way they try to make it palatable for the locals.
Beyond the submarines in AUKUS Pillar 1 is Pillar 2, highly relevant for my union, the NTEU. It ties Australia’s future technology into a narrow military frame with only two international partners. This is disastrous for science. Yet we saw Marles at the recent arms expo purring over weapons and calling them “beautiful, menacing and extremely cool.” A revolting job application from a man who knows he’ll never be prime minister.
The Prime Minister has tried to sell AUKUS as a jobs program: 20,000 jobs at about $20 million a job – the worst job creation program in history.
And it ignores the question of what kind of jobs the labour movement actually wants. We don’t want jobs building war machines. It’s time for the movement to push back. I salute the ETU, which has made it clear it will not work in nuclear facilities or on AUKUS – and that stance should be replicated across the union movement. It is unedifying to see unions competing over AUKUS crumbs.
Three-plank strategy
That brings us to the labour movement. We need a three-plank strategy: first, in ALP branches, where Labor Against War is moving motions; second, in unions and workplaces, because without union activity we cannot win; and third, in the broader community with the anti-militarist and peace movement.
What’s happened so far? I was press secretary for Ed Husic for six months in 2022. A motivating factor for why I left was AUKUS. I thought this government would put AUKUS in the pile of Scott Morrison’s bad ideas. Instead, it has doubled down.
But the fightback began in Port Kembla at May Day 2023, when that community said no to AUKUS. At the 2023 ALP National Conference, we forced AUKUS onto the agenda despite Albanese trying to keep it off.
In 2024 at the Queensland ALP State Conference, an AWU sponsored motion welcoming AUKUS as a jobs bonanza was defeated, and a motion opposing a nuclear submarine base passed. In 2024 the Victorian State Conference passed a motion opposing AUKUS. Two big states are against it. Next year is the ALP National Conference in Adelaide.
We are up against an entrenched war bureaucracy. But in 1965 Tom Uren and Jim Cairns took a resolution to shadow cabinet condemning US bombing of North Vietnam. They lost – Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam opposed it. Yet within seven years Whitlam led a government that withdrew Australian troops from that US war on the Vietnamese people. That shows how quickly movements can shift when the labour movement backs them.
Tom Uren never bowed to US imperialism, unlike his supposed protégé. In 1972, after further bombing of Hanoi, Uren accused Nixon of mass murder and thuggery. You will not hear such words from Albanese unless we force them.
The labour movement has the power to break “Cassandra’s curse” and make defeating AUKUS a reality. Our first test will be next year’s ALP Conference. I commend you all to be up for the fight so that we can win on that conference floor and in the battles to come.
Thank you, comrades.