Omigawd! Nuclear zealot Jonathon Mead is to get his own little government department nuclear supergroup
While the exact contours, structure and mandate of the group are yet to take shape, the role of this new organisational arrangement bears examination. Driven by the complexities of nuclear technology, the group’s remit reaches outside conventional defence policy domains into areas such as education and industrial policy that are usually led by domestic policy agencies at the federal and state level.
Planning for Australia’s nuclear submarine ‘supergroup’ , 30 Mar 2023, |Hugh Piper, The Strategist,
“………. With the nuclear-powered submarines to be acquired under the AUKUS partnership, Australia has set itself perhaps the most ambitious public-procurement undertaking in its history. To match the scale of this venture, according to a report in The Australian, the submarine taskforce led by Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead will evolve and grow into a new ‘a stand-alone group inside Defence that will draw personnel from across the government’.
In public-service speak, a ‘group’ is usually the largest organisational unit in a federal government department, headed by a deputy-secretary-level public servant or a three-star military officer. That the submarine acquisition is being elevated to this level reflects the magnitude of the enterprise and the fact that it will become a permanent and dominant feature of the Australian defence organisation for decades to come.
Equally interesting, though, is the scope of this new group in Defence. The Australian described it as a multiagency group ‘responsible for all elements of the program, including safety, non-proliferation and regulatory measures, international engagement, education and training, industry development and project management’. Its head will have ‘a direct reporting line to Defence Minister Richard Marles’.
While the exact contours, structure and mandate of the group are yet to take shape, the role of this new organisational arrangement bears examination. Driven by the complexities of nuclear technology, the group’s remit reaches outside conventional defence policy domains into areas such as education and industrial policy that are usually led by domestic policy agencies at the federal and state level.
Defence will have to acquire new policy capabilities to tackle these issues—but also develop networks and institutional relationships with a much wider range of domestic stakeholders. Moreover, the government will need to decide the exact limits of Defence’s policy leadership. Education and industrial policy are, for instance, intrinsically linked to labour and innovation policy.
The reported scope of the group also includes policy domains and functions that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade would conventionally lead, namely international engagement and non-proliferation. For Defence instead to take leadership of these areas would mark a fundamental shift in the division of labour in Australian foreign policy.
………………………… There needs to be room for proper consideration of broader foreign policy equities within a structure that is unapologetically mission-focused on delivering defence capability. As the mixed reaction in the Indo-Pacific to AUKUS has demonstrated, Australia can’t assume an overall permissive environment for its strategic policy, so diplomacy is as vital to manifesting the submarines as building a nuclear industrial base. These risks are, however, manageable through effective governance.
…………..There’s also speculation that it could have its own budget line separate from the rest of Defence https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/planning-for-australias-nuclear-submarine-supergroup/
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