Antinuclear

AUKUS and democracy: why both matter

Pearls and Irritations, Leanne Minshull June 17, 2026

A Commissioner on the Public Inquiry into AUKUS responds to Waleed Aly’s view that the inquiry will have no impact.

Waleed Aly is spot on in his Sydney Morning Herald article (5 June) when he observes that AUKUS is crystallising into a contest of competing worldviews, with Labor caught between them. However, his ideas about how this debate should be conducted, and who should be included in it, miss the mark.

The suggestion that mechanisms such as a public inquiry would not change outcomes is problematic. It overlooks the role that public scrutiny can play in shaping policy and risks presenting as fact the assumption that governments determine defence policy entirely independent of public sentiment.

In the absence of a parliamentary inquiry to interrogate a policy of this scale, the Public Inquiry into AUKUS provides a platform for all Australians to ask questions, safe in the knowledge that they will be listened to. Every submission will be read; all information synthesised, written up and provided to government. This is what we can do and this is why I decided to serve as a commissioner. There are five commissioners contributing their time to the public inquiry. We all already participate in public policy debates.

Aly describes all the commissioners as ‘fierce critics of AUKUS’. If our only goal was a coordinated attack on AUKUS, there are far simpler and more direct ways for us to achieve this. It’s no surprise that all commissioners have opinions on various parts of AUKUS; it’s hard not to. But if an opinion makes you ineligible to participate, who could? If a former Chief of the Defence Force is to be excluded from what is effectively the ‘square of public ideas’, then the standard for participation in a debate on defence becomes unclear and, ultimately, self-defeating.

Aly’s speculation about the likely findings – that the United States will not deliver the submarines on time, that the costs are excessive, that alternative investments would yield greater strategic benefit and that AUKUS risks constraining Australia’s sovereignty – is not controversial or novel. These arguments are already part of the public record, advanced by former prime ministers, senior defence officials and analysts across Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. The real question is not whether these views exist but whether they should not be subjected to further scrutiny in a formal, structured process designed precisely to test contested assumptions.

Furthermore, the commissioners are not clones; we bring distinct and often conflicting perspectives, particularly on nuclear policy. That diversity alone makes the notion of a scripted conclusion difficult to sustain.

Aly says there is ‘a sense that AUKUS was never properly examined’. This is not a ‘sense’ but an observable fact. ……………………………………………………………….https://pearlsandirritations.com/post/2026/06/aukus-democracy-and-why-both-matter/

June 23, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment