Australia Agrees To Build US Missiles; US Dismisses Australian Concerns About Assange
The reason Blinken keeps repeating the word “risk” here is because the Pentagon already publicly acknowledged in 2013 that nobody was actually harmed by the 2010 Manning leaks that Assange is being charged with publishing, so all US officials can do is make the unfalsifiable assertion that they could have potentially been harmed had things happened completely differently in some hypothetical alternate timeline.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, JUL 30, 2023, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/australia-agrees-to-build-us-missiles?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=135542172&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
Two different news stories about US-Australian relations have broken at around the same time, and together they sum up the story of US-Australian relations as a whole. In one we learn that Australia has agreed to manufacture missiles for the United States, and in the other we learn that Washington has told Australia to go suck eggs about its concerns regarding the US persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange.
The relationship between Australia and the United States is all the more clearly illustrated by the way they are being reported by Australia’s embarrassingly sycophantic mainstream press.
In a Sydney Morning Herald article published Friday titled “‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US,” the US-educated war propagandist Matthew Knott exuberantly reports on the latest development on Australia’s total absorption into the American war machine.
“Australia is set to begin manufacturing its own missiles within two years under an ambitious plan that will allow the country to supply guided weapons to the United States and possibly export them to other nations,” Knott reports,” adding that the “joint missile manufacturing effort is being driven by the war in Ukraine, which has highlighted a troubling lack of ammunition stocks in Western nations including the US.”
Knott — perhaps best-known for being publicly told to “hang your head in shame” and “drum yourself out of Australian journalism” by former prime minister Paul Keating over his virulent war propaganda on China — gushes enthusiastically about the wonderful opportunities this southward expansion of the military-industrial complex will offer Australians.
“As well as creating local jobs, a domestic missile manufacturing industry will make Australia less reliant on imports and provide a trusted additional source of munitions for the US,” Knott writes ecstatically in what has somehow been presented by The Sydney Morning Herald as a hard news story and not an opinion piece.
An article published the next day, also in The Sydney Morning Herald and also by Matthew Knott, is titled “Assange ‘endangered lives’: Top official urges Australia to understand US concerns”.
It’s not unusual to see this type of propagandistic headline designed to convey a specific message above Knott’s reporting on this subject; in 2019 he authored a piece which was given the bogus title “‘A monster not a journalist’: Mueller report shows Assange lied about Russian hacking”.
“The United States’ top foreign policy official has urged Australians to understand American concerns about Julian Assange’s publishing of leaked classified information, saying the WikiLeaks founder is alleged to have endangered lives and put US national security at risk,” Knott writes. “In the sharpest and most detailed remarks from a Biden administration official about the matter, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Assange had been involved in one of the largest breaches of classified information in American history and had been charged with serious criminal conduct in the US.”
Blinken’s remarks came during a press conference for the Australia–US Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) forum on Saturday, in response to a question asked by Knott himself.
Here are Blinken’s comments in full:
“Look, as a general matter policy, we don’t really comment on extradition matters, extradition proceedings. And so, I really would refer you to our Department of Justice for any questions about the status of the criminal case, whether it’s with regard to Mr Assange or the other person in question. And I really do understand and can certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us as it has been in the past. And I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and views of Australians. I think it’s very important that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter. And what our Department of Justice has already said repeatedly, publicly, is this, Mr Assange was charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he is alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries and put named human sources at grave risk, grave risk of physical harm, grave risk of detention. So, I say that only because, just as we understand sensitivities here, it’s important that our friends understand sensitivities in the United States.”
The reason Blinken keeps repeating the word “risk” here is because the Pentagon already publicly acknowledged in 2013 that nobody was actually harmed by the 2010 Manning leaks that Assange is being charged with publishing, so all US officials can do is make the unfalsifiable assertion that they could have potentially been harmed had things happened completely differently in some hypothetical alternate timeline.
In reality, Assange is being persecuted by the United States for no other reason than the crime of good journalism. His reporting exposed US war crimes, and the US wishes to set a legal precedent that allows for anyone who reveals such criminality to be imprisoned in the United States — not just the whistleblowers who bring forth that information, but publishers who circulate it. This is why even mainstream press outlets and human rights organizations unequivocally oppose his extradition; because it would be a devastating blow to worldwide press freedoms on what is arguably the single most important issue that journalists can possibly report on.
So here is Australia signing up to become the Pentagon’s weapons supplier to the south — on top of already functioning as a total US military/intelligence asset which is preparing to back Washington in a war with China, and on top of being so fully prostrated before the empire that we’re not even allowed to know if American nuclear weapons are in our own country — being publicly hand-waved away by Washington’s top diplomat for expressing concern about a historic legal case in which an Australian citizen is being persecuted by the world’s most powerful government for being a good journalist.
You could not ask for a clearer illustration of the so-called “alliance” between Australia and the United States. It’s easy to see that this is not an equal partnership between two sovereign nations, but a relationship of total domination and subservience. I was only half-joking when I wrote the other day that our national symbol should be the star-spangled kangaroo.
Australia is not a real country. It’s a US military base with marsupials.
US rejects Australian plea to drop Assange case
29 July 23, https://www.rt.com/news/580512-blinken-rejects-assange-australia/
Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the WikiLeaks founder caused “serious harm” to US national security
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has confirmed that Australia has raised the case of Julian Assange’s continued prosecution, but declared that Washington will not cease seeking the extradition of the former WikiLeaks boss and intends to try him for espionage.
Speaking alongside Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Brisbane on Saturday, Blinken said that while he understands “the concerns and views of Australians,” Assange’s alleged actions “risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named human sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”
Assange, he said, was “charged with very serious criminal conduct” and had allegedly taken part in “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.”
An Australian citizen, Julian Assange is currently being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison. He is fighting extradition to the US, where he faces 17 charges under the Espionage Act and potentially a 175-year prison sentence. Human-rights and press-freedom activists have demanded his release, citing his deteriorating mental and physical health, while Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in May that he was “working through diplomatic channels” to press the US into dropping the case.
The charges against Assange stem from his publication of classified material obtained by whistleblowers, including Pentagon documents detailing alleged US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables exposing US efforts to – among other things – spy on its allies and influence foreign elections.
While Assange did not personally steal these documents, he is nevertheless being prosecuted for espionage. He and his supporters argue that WikiLeaks’ publication of this material is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
“We have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long,” Foreign Minister Wong said on Saturday. “We’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the position we articulate in private.”
The extradition of Assange from Britain to the US was approved in 2020 by then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel. The publisher lodged his final appeal against the decision in June, after all eight grounds of a previous appeal were rejected by a British High Court judge.
Responding to Blinken’s comments on Saturday, Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, said that it is now up to Prime Minister Albanese to make a public appeal for Assange’s freedom, during his upcoming visit to the US.
Australian National Sovereignty and Economic Welfare in Peril? Feedback from the AUSMIN Meeting in Brisbane
Behind the scenes intrigues by defence chiefs and intel services through their media releases are a quite inadequate substitute for these democratic consultations.
Hopes of US co-operation in releasing Julian Assange who is languishing in Belmarsh Prison in London while awaiting extradition to the USA to face charges for breaches of the US Espionage Act were dashed at the recent AUSMIN Meeting.
July 30, 2023. by: The AIM Network, By Denis Bright
Decades ago – in 1951 – the ANZUS Pact promised ongoing consultations about strategic policies within the US Global Alliance. Now, from the elite surroundings of Queensland’s Government House in Brisbane, media statements from AUSMIN have taken everyone back to school days. Our elected leaders are now the principals in a frightening new age in which preparation for war is a key element in foreign and strategic policies (Joint Statement from AUSMIN 29 July 2023):
Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles hosted the U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on 29 July in Brisbane to advance the Australia-U.S. Alliance and their cooperation in the Indo-Pacific and globally. Building on the high tempo of engagement between leaders and ministers, including the meeting between Prime Minister Albanese and President Biden in May 2023, the Ministers and Secretaries (the principals) determined that the Alliance has never been stronger. Based on a bond of shared values, it remains a partnership of strategic interest – premised on a common determination to preserve stability, prosperity, and peace.
For our visiting US Principals, it seems that peace will be delivered by exporting cluster bombs to extend the war in Europe.
National sovereignty is always imperiled by unnecessary secrecy like the Treaty of London (1915) which moved Italy from neutrality to becoming a participant in the Great War (1914-18) at the instigation of the British Government.
Extracts from the Treaty of London 1915
ARTICLE 2. On her part, Italy undertakes to use her entire resources for the purpose of waging war jointly with France, Great Britain, and Russia against all their enemies…………………………….
ARTICLE 16. The present arrangement shall be held secret.
It would have been better for Italy if a brave Julian Assange from the era told the Italian people about the secret strategic deals with Britain in 1915. Italy’s involvement in the Great War brought family tragedies, mass immigration, financial ruin and the rise of fascism in its wake.
The current militarization of the global economy by potential friend and foe alike will ultimately be ended by accidental conflict or economic recession from burnt out commitments and distortion of investment flows globally. Going too far by Australian leaders risks schism in the Labor Movement as in the Great War or tensions within the Labor Party during the Cold War in the 1950s and more recently when New Zealand withdrew from the ANZUS Pact over visits by naval vessels that were either nuclear powered or carrying nuclear weapons or both in the 1980s.
If there is a chink in the armour of public support for Australia’s defence commitments to the US Global Alliance, it lies in medium and long-term concerns about the costs of the AUKUS defence commitments which are apparent in the Lowy Institute’s 2023 Polling.
It would have been better for Italy if a brave Julian Assange from the era told the Italian people about the secret strategic deals with Britain in 1915. Italy’s involvement in the Great War brought family tragedies, mass immigration, financial ruin and the rise of fascism in its wake.
The current militarization of the global economy by potential friend and foe alike will ultimately be ended by accidental conflict or economic recession from burnt out commitments and distortion of investment flows globally. Going too far by Australian leaders risks schism in the Labor Movement as in the Great War or tensions within the Labor Party during the Cold War in the 1950s and more recently when New Zealand withdrew from the ANZUS Pact over visits by naval vessels that were either nuclear powered or carrying nuclear weapons or both in the 1980s.
If there is a chink in the armour of public support for Australia’s defence commitments to the US Global Alliance, it lies in medium and long-term concerns about the costs of the AUKUS defence commitments which are apparent in the Lowy Institute’s 2023 Polling.
The financial costs of the submarine deal is the real chink in favourable Australian public opinion towards more participation in the US Global Alliance.
Despite the outpouring of patriotic rhetoric at the launching event in Mobile, Alabama, Austal Limited Australia had not finalized its Australian taxation commitments from an annual revenue of $579.4 million in 2020-21 by 2 November 2022. The tax owing under review by the ATO was a paltry $28 million due to legalized tax minimization by the company’s accountants. Austal’s explanation of these processes is well covered in the 2022 Annual Report from Austal Australia which can easily be perused by interested readers.
Orders for AUKUS vessels and commitments to the QUAD Defence Arrangements will provide windfall revenue for the military and industrial complexes of Britain and the USA for a generation ahead until 2050. In the traditions of the original ANZUS Defence Alliance of 1951, our bipartisan strategic commitments were always consistent with adherence to the UN Charter and to open discussion of defence arrangements.
Behind the scenes intrigues by defence chiefs and intel services through their media releases are a quite inadequate substitute for these democratic consultations.
Hopes of US co-operation in releasing Julian Assange who is languishing in Belmarsh Prison in London while awaiting extradition to the USA to face charges for breaches of the US Espionage Act were dashed at the recent AUSMIN Meeting. Defence analyst Chelsea Manning who actually released the Pentagon documents to Julian Assange for publication had his charges commuted by President Obama in 2017.
These documents are largely in the public domain through sites like ChatGPT which can retrieve the gist of most items released but without adequate referencing by the AI robots at Opensystems in San Francisco. Readers can avail themselves of the resources of ChatGPT in the absence of full and frank media releases from Australian government strategic agencies.
Environmental risks of nuclear-powered ship visits to Australian ports also add to the policy dilemmas facing Australians.
It was the Morrison Government which welcomed the ageing French nuclear powered submarine to HMAS Sterling near Perth in late 2020 en route to naval manoeuvres near Guam and likely stealth operations in the South China Sea to test China’s maritime intelligence. Such manoeuvres in troubled waters are hazardous operations. This epic seven-month voyage to the Indo-Pacific Basin was well covered in this YouTube video.
The New York Times (31 March 1994) and other global media outlets of the nuclear accident involving the nuclear-powered submarine off Toulon. ChatGPT has a blind spot about the reporting of this incident from media monitoring:
Ten sailors died today in an accident aboard a French nuclear-propelled submarine that was taking part in naval exercises in the Mediterranean off Toulon, the Defense Ministry announced.
A ministry spokesman said that the Émeraude, a 2,400-ton Rubis-class attack submarine, did not carry nuclear missiles and that its 48-megawatt nuclear reactor was not damaged in the accident, which occurred when a burst pipe released high pressure steam into a turbine compartment.
“The steam is certainly not radioactive,” Rear Adm. Philippe Roy said at a news conference in the southern port city of Toulon this evening.
Hours after the accident, the navy recalled three other nuclear-propelled submarines — two from the Mediterranean and one from the Atlantic — pending an investigation. “We are recalling them because we are asking questions about what happened,” Admiral Roy said.
Since I covered this topic the WA State Police Minister’s Office has kindly provided details of protocols operating for the containment of accidents involving nuclear powered ship visits which possibly carry nuclear weapons under Don’t Ask Won’t Tell Protocols operating within the US Global Alliance……………………………………………………………………………….
Nuclear powered vessels from countries in the US Global Alliance have been visiting Australian ports since 1960. The details of these visits can be monitored on the web sites of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency and the Departments of Defence itself in both Australian and the USA.
Specialist staff within DFAT will of course have access to some classified documents generated by the US Department of Defense and its related intel networks. To guard against the emergence of any new generation of Australians wishing to follow in the traditions of Chelsea Manning of Oklahoma, it is my understanding from personal communications from just one staff member on my reporting rounds for AIM Network that personal phones and communication systems are all monitored by local intel services and probably by overseas agencies as well.
Whilst ChatGPT is tightening up on the topics on which it is able to release information, it can still provide a wealth of anecdotal information to assist in the reporting of hearsay on strategic and intelligence matters. Reporters can work on this anecdotal information by perusing reliable documents in the public domain such as annual reports of companies within the global military industrial complexes.
Like the manufacturers of lethal weapons during the Great War, not all corporate data can be withheld from potential investors and curious members of the general public. Corporations here and overseas will make windfall profits from defence contracts. ChatGPT could offer these details of key defence companies operating in Australia:
- Thales Australia: Thales is a major defense contractor with operations in various sectors, including aerospace, defense, security, and transportation. They have a significant presence in Australia and are involved in projects such as armoured vehicles, naval systems, and communications.
- Austal: Austal is an Australian shipbuilding company known for designing and manufacturing high-speed aluminum vessels for defense and commercial purposes.
- BAE Systems Australia: BAE Systems is a global defense company with a significant presence in Australia, involved in areas such as maritime, aerospace, and land systems.
- Rheinmetall Defence Australia: Rheinmetall is a German defense company with operations in Australia, focusing on armored vehicles and defense technology.
- ASC (Australian Submarine Corporation): ASC is a government-owned company that specializes in submarine maintenance, sustainment, and upgrades.
US Companies operating in Australia who are likely to gain from international strategic tensions include:
- Lockheed Martin Australia: Lockheed Martin is a prominent U.S. defense contractor, and its Australian subsidiary, Lockheed Martin Australia, operates in the country. They are involved in various defense projects, including aerospace, cybersecurity, and naval systems.
- Boeing Defence Australia (BDA): Boeing, a major U.S. defense and aerospace company, has a subsidiary known as Boeing Defence Australia. BDA is actively engaged in providing defense products, services, and solutions in Australia, including aviation and intelligence systems.
- Northrop Grumman Australia: Northrop Grumman, another U.S. defense company, has a presence in Australia through its subsidiary Northrop Grumman Australia. They focus on delivering advanced defense and security technologies and systems.
- General Dynamics Land Systems – Australia (GDLS-A): General Dynamics is a U.S. defense contractor, and its Australian subsidiary GDLS-A is involved in the design, engineering, and support of military land systems.
- Raytheon Australia: Raytheon, a major U.S. defense and technology company, has a presence in Australia through its subsidiary Raytheon Australia. They are active in areas such as defense systems, cybersecurity, and intelligence.
Inquisitive readers can easily check which prominent Australian family is a big shareholder in Austal Limited which manufactured the USS Canberra in Mobile, Alabama prior to its commissioning in Sydney on 22 July 2023. With so many millions to spare, this family is a prominent investor in the Ukrainian Development Fund with just a small holding of US $500 million.
More than a century ago during the Great War (1914-18) peace initiatives were by-passed because both sides of the conflict in Europe hope for strategic advantages from continuing the fighting. These peace initiatives involved the Vatican under Pope Benedict XV and ultimately diplomatic engagement between the warring parties in 1916-17.
More than a century later, Pope Francis has authorized his peace envoy in Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna to visit Washington, Kiev, Moscow and Beijing to sound out the possibilities for an end to the current conflicts with colleagues from the Vatican secretariat of state. As in the Great War, initial efforts are on behalf of the civilian victims of warfare. These efforts became mainstream in the Great War as noted by Philip Zelikow in his book for the US Woodrow Wilson Institute.
he Road Less Travelled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917
For more than five months, from August 1916 to the end of January 1917, leaders from the United States, Britain, and Germany held secret peace negotiations in an attempt to end the Great War. They did so far out of public sight – one reason why their effort, which came astonishingly close to ending the war and saving millions of lives, is little understood today. In The Road Less Travelled.
As Australia is not a current non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, our immediate efforts for some token welfare support for the victims of war can be made through the efforts of NZ’s UN Ambassador Carolyn Schwalger (NZ Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade). NZ is still officially outside the US Global Alliance but is kept well in the loop by the Australian Government.
Supporting governments which are involved in the use of cluster bombs to counter Russian aggression against Ukraine is dramatically at odds with the values of the broader Labor Movement and this opposition should be taken up by delegates from the progressive wings of the Labor Party within the National Conference. Supporters of lobbyists from the commercial military industrial complexes across the US Global Alliance have no affinity with Labor Values and should be exposed by committed delegates who believe in peace and disarmament.
https://theaimn.com/australian-national-sovereignty-and-economic-welfare-in-peril-feedback-from-the-ausmin-meeting-in-brisbane/more https://theaimn.com/australian-national-sovereignty-and-economic-welfare-in-peril-feedback-from-the-ausmin-meeting-in-brisbane/
Australian media’s alarm over Chinese spy ship highlights stark double-standard
Pearls and Irritations, By Brian Toohey, Jul 31, 2023
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had publicly assured his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese that his country would attend, India did not turn up.
The unnamed enemy is China. A London based journalist reported from Townsville that the latest exercise was occurring against a “changing security landscape in which China grows evermore belligerent”. Apparently, he didn’t see any need to give evidence for this dubious claim. The defence minister, Richard Marles said Talisman Sabre provided an opportunity to practice “high-end” warfare. Just how participants such as PNG, Tonga and Fiji can do this is not clear. In a war, their role would be to let the US operate from their territory.
During the last exercise, the ABC’s national television news each night ran a video of the spy ships across the top of the screen. It hasn’t gone that far this time, but has given extensive coverage to the spy ships without explaining what harm they might be doing.
The participants don’t seem alarmed. During the last exercise, an ABC journalist asked an American soldier on an amphibious ship if he was worried about the presence of Chinese spy ships. He replied, “No, we do it to them and they do it to us”. An Australian military spokesman said this time that it had taken the appropriate precautions to ensure the spy ships don’t cause any harm. A core reason is that all signals traffic is encrypted. The reality is that the US and its allies conduct electronic intelligence gathering on a much greater scale than China can. The Pine Gap satellite ground station in central Australia, for example, generates billions of pieces of intelligence every day. This did not stop the ABC defence correspondent Andrew Green commenting on the activities of one Chinese spy ship, “If knowledge is power, China has just become more powerful”.
The RAAF’s P8A Poseidon electronic spy planes pose an aggressive threat to China by dropping sonar buoys in the South China Sea where its submarines are based on Hainan island close to the mainland. The small buoys contain an underwater microphone to pick up the sounds from submarines and relay the data to the spy planes conducting surveillance for potential military use.
Australia’s behaviour in the South China Sea is the same as if Chinese planes dropped sonar buoys outside the Fremantle base for Australian and US submarines. But the Chinese planes don’t do this. …………………………………………………………………………………
Certainly, Australian media would consider it provocative if China developed a long-range air capability and dropped sonar buoys off the submarine base at Fremantle. Albanese portrays the co-operation between the US and Australia to conduct potentially aggressive military activities in the South China Sea as part of the struggle between autocracies and democracy. Unfortunately, the draconian nature of some of Australia’s national security laws, deprive Australia of the right to call itself a liberal democracy.
Similar problems arise with Albanese’s iron grip on the Labor party’s federal conference in Brisbane on August 17-19. Although he describes Labor as a democratic party, he has effectively banned any parliamentarians attending the conference from supporting motions in favour of scrapping the AUKUS pact or the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Albanese has also banned any parliamentarian from supporting the existing conference policy of making it a priority to recognise of Palestine as a state. https://johnmenadue.com/australian-medias-alarm-over-chinese-spy-ship-highlights-stark-double-standard/
Readers disgusted with pro militarism report on Australia getting a “missiles industry”.
‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US’ (SMH)
‘Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US and others’ (9 News)
‘US to help Australia develop guided missiles by 2025’ (Aljazeera)
Above are just a few of the rapturous headlines in the print media. Then the joyous Australian TV and radio media – orgasmic delight at Australia’s new subservience to USA militarism.
BUT – by today – 204 comments on thed Sydney Morning Herald’s delighted article by Matthew Knott. July 28, 2023. Yes quite a few comments rejoicing in the prospect of the missiles industry . BUT the overwhelming majority of commentators were disgusted. Below are some of the comments.
Australia will be the front line in a US war with China
And make Australia a target for attacks un-necessarily ? Australia should NOT be drawn into any activity that is war-like in nature. We are a peaceful country that should not be militarily engaged in other nations issues. Sure we can have a voice BUT NOT ACT MILITARILY .. If the Americans want to stick their nose in other nation’s affairs, so be it .. Don’t drag us in militarily !!!
We voted Labor and they are throwing any semblance of autonomy we had away.Terrible idea !We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
The Syrian war and Ukraine wars have generated 10 million refugees who have fled into the rest of Europe. The South China Sea has 200 million people living within 10 km of the coastline. Australians were easily convinced to turn back the boats and create a cruel offshore detention program all for the expediency of the LNP’s re election. The obsession with contributing to the US led arms race and the insistence of provoking a war over Taiwan will inevitably lead to our shiny new missiles and military arsenal being used as an expediency to turn back the thousands of boats
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
More military lunacy.
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?As Fraser said, we should have got out of Anzus at the end of the Cold War. Seems now we’re more captured by the US’s foreign policy agenda than ever before.
For Labor it’s clearly about the domestic optics. They want to be seen as the tough guy on military and defence matters, so long that being the Coalition’s political play.
Because of Morrison, and no Choice. We ended up with ALBO the United States Cheerleader.
Albo will NOT
provide leadership and he will not provide intellectual input in the following areas;
•‘Made a public call for building an autonomous Australia in a persistent attempt to shake off Australia’s shackles and prove that it is not the vassal of The United States.
•that Australia should be one pole of multipolarity with its own independent position to serve its own interests, and cannot be a vassal of other forces,
•When dealing with its relations with the US, it is hoped that Australia can truly safeguard its own core interests and get rid of the shackles the US has placed on it in the fields of economy, trade, ideology and even security,
Finally he has no idea on how to make Australia a world class manufacturing hub as declared in his election policy speech.
I’d much rather see Australia manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines and exporting them to the rest of the world to help tackle the growing threat of global climate change. Instead we focus on weapons and the machinery of war. Strange priorities from a Labor government…..disappointing really!
Big cheers for this ‘Hugely significant’!!! We finally became like North Korea, soon we will be able to replace New Year celebrations with real deadly missiles.
With the added bonus for politicians: whenever they make a mess they just fire missiles to distract the electorates … and at the same time it would be ‘Hugely Great’. The Rednecks and war mongers will be cheering all the way … it’s win win… well done Albo
We are being conned.
Can we go back to making cars. At least they were useful.
Missiles are for war.
Unless we agree to annilate all Mankind we are walking down the wrong path.
In a car you can go somewhere.
And so the violence industry marches on. By setting such an example is it little wonder there is so much killing & maiming in the world today?
So now new funding just extending the Morrison/Dutton Missile manufacturing policy announced in 2021?
Will it be like the F18 program all over again – assembling kits from the US? How much will the taxpayer subsidise the program?
So we’ve been sold out to the military industrial complex and will become fully integrated into the US War machine as the US makes its last ditch attempt to maintain its global hegemony and it control over the pacific region.
We are being marched into WWIII by the crazy neo cons in the USA and we are too blind to see it, chanting USA, USA, USA as we are led like lambs to the slaughter.
Unbelievable.
How are we a ‘peaceful country’ – name a war we HAVEN’T been involved in! We’re sycophants, hiding under the US’s skirt.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
Unbelievable.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
This is a step up from days of Lithgow Small-Arms .303s and these days, our Bushmasters. We’ll just be making them here to another nation’s specs & IP, all for the promise of jobs.
Blinken & Bush: “We have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia.
A charm offensive that Albanese must take heed.
We import foods & goods from our neighbours for survival only for them to be killed by our missiles. How gross!
While the US and Australia are incessantly focusing on arms and the military in the Pacific, China’s hospital ship, the Peace Ark is in Tonga and will depart Nuku’alofa on 4 August 2023. It will also visit Kiribati, Vanuatu, Solomons Islands and Timor-Leste during its mission. The ‘Peace Ark’, on her third goodwill visit to Tonga on a humanitarian medical mission from 28 July to 4 August 2023.
So which country is doing more for the people in the Pacific?
American owned, designed, parts supplied. We are just like a 3rd world country assembling stuff, all profits going offshore with no tax paid. What a waste………… And paying for the privilege
And another target added to the growing number of American bases.
..and what about all the bs about becoming self-sustaining after the pandemic when we saw how reliant we are on imports? Or this is suddenly irrelevant? They need a Royal Commission into the capabilities of Australia when another and worse pandemic hits. Oh, I can write the summary now “We will be stuffed – starvation, no drugs, no products”. But yes, focus on warheads. Made with Australian metal I hope? Stick some kangaroo prints on it so when it is dug out of children we can be proud.
Yes, “assembled ‘Down Under’ from imported components subject to our strict specifications so you can rest assured that when you get hit by a genuine ‘Aussie’ missile it’s gonna hurt”…………….. Exactly! How gullible we are to trust the Americans? It’s unbelievable!
Now imagine if an LNP government announced we were making killing things for Uncle Sam. You’d never hear the end of it. Oh the hypocrisy.
Nice not, when we have industry again it is all about weapons and destruction.
What have we become? So we are not making products that will make our life easier and more comfortable? We are not making tools and machines to facilitate our normal daily activities? We are no building metro lines to reduce commute times? We are not making electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions? Yet we are going to making missiles for wars that will kill human beings. What a weird sense of priority we’ve got ???
Lloyd Austin moved from the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defence. Is it any wonder we are now getting sucked into arms manufacturing a cycle of endless wars, which is a bona fide policy of the US. We need to be much more discerning than “all the way with Uncle Sam” this is a very poor sign of our priorities, and the “jobs and growth” mantra has been taken from the liberal playbook to justify this stupid and dangerous choice.
So the plan is to continue a longstanding trend to make us even more financially and militarily dependent on foreigners right?
“Sydneysiders are aghast at the level of gun violence breaking out. On to happier news, Australia is going to create its very own missile manufacturing plants”.RESPECT8
We’re being used again, it won’t be to our advantage everything the US does is for theirs.
We are their lapdog.
The anti-China brigade in Canberra is pushing hard to get Labor to think China wants to go to war & so we have to be closely allied with the US.
NO it is the USA that always wants to go to war – look how many we’ve followed them into and look at China, only min-wars or skirmishes on their borders, never ever far afield.
I think this idea stinks.
ALP – American Lapdog Party
What is hugely significant is Albo’s lost his marbles.
No way. To restore our manufacturing capacity, I’d rather prefer we start making electric vehicles and solar panels, not missiles.
We’re becoming completely dependant upon the American military machine. AUKUS are about all our government seems to care about anymore. Meanwhile… over 1 million young people are living in poverty and koalas are going extinct. It’s all about priorities and it’s 100% obvious what and who our leaders are working for and it ain’t the people or the country. With friends like Labor, who needs Liberals?
Who cares what Simon Birmingham thinks, or says.
He represents a government that made defence decisions that were more photo-op than substance; cancelled the SEA1000 project that put us squarely into the ship-building “Valley of Death” that the COALition hyperventilated over; failed abysmally in both defence and foreign policy, all the while telling us what absolute standouts they were in government.
It was the COALition that left us with this mess called AUKUS.
I can’t see us receiving nuclear-powered submarines, despite the efforts to push through with AUKUS. At some point, the taxpayers of Australia will simply say “enough!” The options being offered are far too expensive.
“US defence contracting giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been selected by the government as preferred partners for its guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise“. The Hawkei is made by Prime contractors including Thales Australia (French) Boeing (US) Plasan (Israel). The Virginia submarines are designed and built by US General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) and Huntington Ingalls Industries. Virtually all military equipment purchased or being built in Australia by foreign, usually US companies. Australia is feeding overseas military complexes, not developing anything new.
A gigantic error from the government here. The only priorities here are for shareholders of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The US are always looking for the next endless war. History repeating itself over and over. We will be used as pawns between the US and China.
Australia – an international nuclear wasteland?
By Richard Broinowski, Jul 29, 2023 https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/to-avoid-nuclear-instability-a-moratorium-on-integrating-ai-into-nuclear-decision-making-is-urgently-needed-the-npt-prepcom-can-serve-as-a-springboard/
The spectre of an international nuclear waste dump in Australia hangs over AUKUS and what this secretive agreement commits Australia to. Does it oblige us simply to dispose of spent nuclear reactors from our submarines if and when we get them? Or is there a hidden agenda whereby we also take the expired nuclear reactors from US and British submarines? If so, could it lead to Australia becoming a dump for high-level waste from civil nuclear reactors around the world?
Crikey.com is the latest to set speculative hares running. On 26 July it published an article by David Hardaker claiming the Albanese government had struck a secret deal under AUKUS to build a high-grade nuclear waste facility in Australia. Crikey claimed the deal has echoes that resound from 26 years ago.
Indeed it does. In December 1998, a proposal was made by Jim Voss, an American nuclear evangelist, who through his company Pangea proposed constructing an international nuclear waste repository on Billa Kalina, a pastoral lease near Roxby Downs in South Australia. Roxby Downs is a town built to service the giant BHP uranium, gold, copper and silver mine at Olympic Dam. Water for the town and the mine comes from Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
As I wrote in Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions (Scribe 2003 and 2022), Voss’s proposal was leaked to the public by Friends of the Earth. Pangea was flying a kite on behalf of Anglo-American and possibly other nuclear interests. It made the unassailable observation that there is a real risk of nuclear weapons proliferation through the theft of plutonium or highly enriched uranium from nuclear power programs. Voss proposed a nuclear waste dump in Western Australia to take about a quarter of the high-level waste from the 445 commercial power reactors in 30 countries around the globe.
This, he claimed, would achieve several things – support international efforts to reduce nuclear weapons proliferation, further the objectives of nuclear disarmament, strengthen Australia’s relations with the United States, protect the global environment, and support the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations. How all this would happen he didn’t say.
Such a repository has also been a gleam in the eyes of the Australian nuclear lobby and several politicians for many years. In 2006, John Howard’s Nuclear Review sought to expand Australia’s nuclear footprint by making nuclear power ‘a practical option’ in Australia’s electricity production. He also envisioned an international nuclear waste dump somewhere in the Outback. In 2014, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, supported by then South Australian Premier Adam Giles, proposed to put a high-level nuclear waste depository at Muckaty Station north of Tennant Creek in South Australia. Hawke said the money earned would be of immense value to indigenous communities.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott had similar aspirations. So did Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2015 suggested that Australia should not just export uranium oxide (U3O8), but enrich it, process it into fuel rods, retain Australian ownership by leasing the rods abroad, and take them back as spent fuel for permanent disposal in Australia. That way, he said, Australia retained ownership of the uranium, preventing it from being diverted into clandestine weapons programs.
None of these proposals resulted in practical action. Except for qualified acceptance of the export of Australian yellowcake under safeguards to approved civil nuclear energy companies, the Australian public maintained an aversion to all things nuclear. The earlier careless disposal of nuclear tailings at Radium Hill, the contemptuous and ineffective clean-up of highly toxic plutonium in the aftermath of Britain’s nuclear tests at Emu Field and Maralinga in the 1950s, and French nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1990s, all consolidated Australians’ aversion.
Following negative public reactions to his proposal, Voss quietly closed his Pangea office In January 2002 and retreated to Europe. But several years later, he was given renewed hope.
In 2016, the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission under former South Australian governor Kevin Scarce concluded that although nuclear energy in Australia would not be economically viable for the immediate future, research should continue regarding the feasibility of an international spent fuel repository.
Voss returned to Australia in 2022, and took over the optimistically-named Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation in Melbourne. Safe disposal of nuclear waste remained on his agenda. According to Crikey, Voss reckons very deep boreholes of around three to five kilometres could safely incarcerate spent fuel from the reactors of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines for thousands of years.
Could such a storage facility attract US or British attention? Could their governments pressure Australia to take their own submarine spent fuel reactors as well as those of Australia?
They have strong motives to do so. Around 90 British spent fuel submarine reactors are said to be lying around Devonport Docks in Plymouth and the Rosyth dock in Fife, safeguarded only at huge expense. The US Navy has many more in open trenches at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. There are plans to process and store their transuranic elements somewhere permanently, but the Yukka Mountain Deep Geological repository in Nevada was de-funded in 2010, and has been subject to complex political manoeuvring ever since.
Given Albanese’s and Marles’ supine acceptance of US conditions to keep the reactors from our own submarines after their service lives, they could also easily be leant on to take US and UK used submarine reactors as well.
Could this in turn lead to Voss’s grand vision of Australia becoming a spent fuel repository for the international nuclear industry? Since we cannot even decide on the location of a repository for low-level nuclear waste from hospitals and materials testing laboratories, let alone places for intermediate and high-level waste, such an expansion seems a pipe dream. But we must not under-estimate the persistence of the Australian nuclear industry or its backers in Federal and State parliaments and in the Murdoch press.
Australia’s nuclear waste
finding a national waste repository is not urgent because it has been stored this way for 60 years.
it’s not even clear if centralising the waste is the best option. ..there’s an implicit risk in transporting the waste from the various sites to a new site, and there should be a safety comparison with leaving it where it is.
Courts have quashed a decision to store water in Kimbra, meaning there is still no centralised repository in the country
Guardian. Tory Shepherd, Sat 29 Jul 2023
More than 20 tonnes of reprocessed nuclear fuel will stay at Australia’s only reactor in southern Sydney, while nuclear waste will remain scattered in “cupboards and filing cabinets” around the country, after the federal court blocked plans for a long-term storage site in outback South Australia.
The site in Kimba was selected more than 40 years after Australia started planning for a centralised repository. But this month, that decision was quashed by the courts.
There is currently no live national facility option, and the waste pile is growing.
Successive governments and agencies have said there are more than 100 sites that are storing nuclear waste littered across the land, in hospital basements and universities, on defence and mining sites and in research laboratories.
There’s no definitive list, because of a licensing split between the federal and state governments, but the vast majority is produced and stored at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) facility in Lucas Heights.
A national inventory published last year found Australia’s 2,061 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste (ILW) will more than double to 4,377 cubic metres in the next 50 years.
………….The inventory predicted that the 2,490 cubic metres of low-level waste will more than quadruple to 13,287 within the next five decades. LLW includes gloves, paper, gowns and other ephemera used in nuclear medicine. Much of it can be left to “delay and decay”, and can be disposed of as regular rubbish.
Ansto’s waste makes up about 93% of the LLW, and about 96.5% of the ILW.
Ansto is also responsible for the spent fuel rods from its Opal research reactor at Lucas Heights, in Sydney’s south, which are sent to France, the UK or the US for reprocessing.
Last year, the UK shipped two tonnes of ILW to be stored at Sydney’s Lucas Heights facility until it could be transported to a national facility – it was part of a waste-swap deal after Australia sent spent fuel rods from Opal predecessor to be recycled.
In 2015, 25 tonnes of radioactive waste from France was returned to Australia after reprocessing – that too will be housed at Lucas Heights until a dump is selected and built. Since then, Australia has sent more spent fuel rods to France to have the uranium and plutonium extracted, but their return has not been announced, and it’s not clear what will happen with such deals now that Kimba option is off the table.
The current government policy is to build a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (NRWMF) to dispose of LLW permanently, and ILW temporarily while a permanent dump is built.
The traditional owners of the land around Kimba, the Barngarla people, took the government to court, and won – former resources minister Keith Pitt’s declaration of the site was cast aside because of his “apprehended bias” and “pre-judgement”.
Now, the process is on hold as the government considers the judgement, and as the case continues with final details to be ironed out.
Top nuclear waste expert, emeritus professor Ian Lowe, says waste is kept in “cupboards and filing cabinets in universities and hospitals”…………“It’s clearly not optimal … the reason it hasn’t been a problem is there’s not actually anything very nasty you can do with low level waste. It’s not very radioactive,” Lowe says.
Ansto says such waste needs “minimal shielding”, while some major hospitals use “delay tanks” and other facilities use drums.
So, Lowe says, finding a national waste repository is not urgent because it has been stored this way for 60 years.
Lowe, who is from Griffith University, says it’s not even clear if centralising the waste is the best option. He says there’s an implicit risk in transporting the waste from the various sites to a new site, and there should be a safety comparison with leaving it where it is.
“I haven’t even seen a crude, back of the envelope calculation,” he says.
With the intermediate level waste, which is “much nastier stuff”, he says he “couldn’t see the point of moving it from temporary storage at Lucas Heights to temporary storage at Kimba while we work out a permanent solution”.
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Greens are pushing for it to remain at Lucas Heights for now.
The ACF’s Dave Sweeney says the waste at Lucas Heights is secure, and that keeping it there could be a “circuit breaker” after years of political wrangling. He accepts that Lucas Heights is not set up to permanently dispose of the waste, but points out that the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency has said it is safe there.
And, he says, much of the LLW currently being managed in hospitals was never going to get to Kimba anyway. On top of all that, Kimba was only ever going to hold ILW temporarily until a permanent facility was built.
“We need to actually take a breath and get very serious, systematic and credible about how we advance radioactive waste management,” he says.
“[This shows] the need for and a clear ability to deliver a circuit breaker and inject some responsibility, credibility and respect into this process.”
A spokesperson for resources minister, Madeleine King, said it would be inappropriate to comment on the future of a NRWMF while the Barngarla case is still before the court. The government has lodged a submission to the federal court and could appeal the decision……………………………………
Lowe says only Finland and Sweden have managed to solve the issue with long-term waste storage, and they did it by finding communities who are keen to have the waste in return for investment.
He says permanent disposal of all types of waste will need somewhere geologically stable. “That probably means remote parts of SA, WA, NT, but there’s any number of parts of Australia. “The point is finding a community that’s happy to have it there.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/29/nuclear-waste-australia-how-much-why-kimba-lucas-heights
If Albanese’s such a buddy of Biden’s, why is Assange still in jail?
An initial refusal from Biden is only an invitation to ask a second time, in a firmer voice
Bob Carr Bob Carr was NSW’s longest-serving premier and is a former Australian foreign affairs minister. 27 jul 23, https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/if-albanese-s-such-a-buddy-of-biden-s-why-is-assange-still-in-jail-20230721-p5dqci.html
Julian Assange is in his fourth year in Britain’s Belmarsh prison. If the current appeal fails, he will be shackled and driven off in a prison van and flown across the Atlantic on a CIA aircraft for a long trial. He faces likely life imprisonment in a federal jail, perhaps in Oklahoma.
In 2021, then opposition leader Anthony Albanese said, “Enough is enough. I don’t have sympathy for many of his actions, but essentially, I can’t see what is served by keeping him incarcerated.”
As prime minister, Albanese said he had already made his position clear to the Biden administration. “We are working through diplomatic channels,” he said, “but we’re making very clear what our position is on Mr Assange’s case.”
So we can assume that at one of his seven meetings with US President Joe Biden he has raised Assange, even on the fringes of the Quad or at one of two NATO summits. Or perhaps in San Diego when they launched AUKUS, under which Australia will make the largest transfer of wealth ever made outside this country. This $368 billion is a whopping subsidy to American naval shipyards and to the troubled, chronically tardy British naval builder BAE Systems.
But it clinches Australia’s reputation as a deliriously loyal, entirely gullible US ally. It gives President Biden the justification for telling Republicans or Clinton loyalists in his own party that he had no alternative but to end the pursuit of Assange. “Those Aussies insisted on it. They’re doing us all these favours … we can’t say no.”
In addition to the grandiose AUKUS deal, Biden could list other decisions by the Albanese government that render Australia a military stronghold to help US regional dominance while materially weakening our own security.
Candid words, but they aren’t mine. They belong to Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute in this month’s edition of Australian Foreign Affairs. In a seminally important piece of analysis, Roggeveen nominated Australia’s decision to fully service six American B52 bombers at RAAF Tindal, in the Northern Territory, as belonging on that list. It is assumed these are aimed at China’s nuclear infrastructure such as missile silos. “It is hard to overstate the sensitivity involved in threatening another nation’s nuclear forces,” Roggeveen writes.
In his article, he reminds us we’ve also agreed to host four US nuclear subs on our west coast at something to be called “Submarine Rotational Force-West”. Their mission would be destroying Chinese warships or enforcing a blockade of Chinese ports.
The east coast submarine base, planned most likely for Port Kembla, will also directly support US military operations. It’s another nuclear target. As Roggeveen says, all these locations raise Australia’s profile in the eyes of the Chinese military planners designing their response in the event of war with the US.
In this context, I can’t believe the US president is not on the point of agreeing to the prime minister’s request to drop charges against Assange.
Apart from the titanic strategic favours, two killer facts help our case. One, former US president Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, who had supplied Assange with the information he published. The Yank is free, the Aussie still pursued.
Two, the crimes Manning and Assange exposed involved US troops on a helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians in Baghdad. They are directly comparable to the alleged Australian battlefield murders in Afghanistan we are currently prosecuting.
An initial refusal from Biden is only an invitation to ask a second time, in a firmer voice.
It’s possible to imagine an Australian PM – Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard or Rudd – being appropriately forceful with a US president. There would be an inflection point in their exchange – prime minister to president – when the glint-eyed Australian says, “Mr President, it’s gone on too long. Both sides of our politics are united. Your old boss commuted Chelsea Manning, an American, in the same case.”
A pause. A beat. Then the killer summation. “Mr President, I speak for Australia.”
Surely this counts.
I don’t believe the president can shake his head and say, “nope”, given all we have gifted – the potent symbolism of B52s, nuclear subs and bases on the east and west coast. It would look like we have sunk into the role of US territory, as much a dependency as Guam or Puerto Rico.
US counter-intelligence conceded during court proceedings there is no evidence of a life being lost because of Assange’s revelations. Our Defence Department reached the same view.
If Assange walks out the gates of Belmarsh into the arms of his wife and children it will show we are worth a crumb or two off the table of the imperium. If it’s a van to the airport, then making ourselves a more likely target has conferred no standing at all. We are a client state, almost officially.
AUKUS nuclear dump deal decades in the making by nuclear evangelists with prescience.
David Hardaker 26 July 23 https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/aukus-nuclear-dump-deal-decades-in-the-making-by-players-with-prescience/ar-AA1elV6p
he story of the long, slow journey to a nuclear waste dump being built in Australia as required by the AUKUS agreement is probably best told through one Jim Voss, a nuclear evangelist from America who has been part of the Australian scene for at least a quarter of a century.
Part of a push which began in 1997, he’s one of a handful of international figures who’ve never gone away. Now, arguably, that push has won the day courtesy of a secret deal struck by the Australian government.
Voss’ most recent appearance was at a parliamentary committee hearing into nuclear legislation on May 15. Courtesy of the government’s AUKUS agreement he was now, finally, able to make a link between the benefits of small modular nuclear reactors — the sort sold by his company — and the nuclear-powered submarines Australia has committed to.
It all went to show, as Voss put it, that “a nuclear culture will be essential for this nation in the future”.
Voss could afford to be just a little triumphant that Canberra day. The inspirational words “If at first you don’t succeed then try, try and try again” could well have been written just for him.
Apart from sheer doggedness, the Voss story tells us much about the close connections between the military and commercial worlds when it comes to nuclear energy, as well as the powerful roles played by the UK and the US governments in seeking a solution for a terrible problem they share: how to permanently store nuclear waste. Australia, it emerges, has been a long-term target.
It was only when Scott Morrison came along — later backed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — that all that work paid off, with the bonus that it was all done in secret.
Pangea 1997
Voss first came to public attention in Australia courtesy of a Four Corners investigation in the late 1990s. Voss was then general manager of a company called Pangea which was attempting to realise the idea of building a nuclear waste dump in Australia, catering to an international need for a permanent solution for disposing of radioactive waste. The company considered that outback parts of Western Australia met the checklist for safety, remoteness and geological stability.
Voss was joined by a Pangea scientist, Charles McCombie, who would also go on to become a mainstay of international efforts to have a nuclear waste dump built in Australia.
Other now-familiar connections emerged at this time. Pangea, backed by a multimillion-dollar marketing and lobbying budget, brought on board then-rising star of conservative political polling, Mark Textor. Textor was soon to establish the powerful Crosby-Textor (ClT) group with then Liberal Party director, Lynton Crosby. Textor was reportedly paid some $250,000 for his work. (As we revealed in May, ClT’s American arm acts as a lobbyist for the giant US defence company General Dynamic, which builds the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines and is set to play a key role in the AUKUS program. It already hosts a growing Australian workforce at its Connecticut shipyards.)
In America, Pangea had signed up a former US nuclear submarine commander, Ralph Stoll, who helped lobby members of the US Congress to back Pangea’s plans for an Australian dump. Not that the US needed much persuading. Back in 1999, Four Corners reported that Pangea’s case found favour with US security and defence officials when it shifted its focus from a commercial venture to play to America’s strategic preoccupation with growing stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
Former US defence official Jan Lodal who had been responsible for running nuclear policy for the Pentagon put it this way:
There are thousands and thousands of tonnes of [nuclear waste] and thousands of tonnes more coming online each year, so to speak, as well as many thousands of tonnes that are derivative from former nuclear weapons programs. And these have to be stored safely and securely for thousands of years, and the world simply doesn’t have a solution to this. And as long as this waste is stored in an imperfect fashion, in which it is now — virtually everywhere — it represents something of a threat.
The Pangea company drew on American expertise but it was essentially a front for the UK government. It was 80% owned by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), which in turn was wholly owned by the British government. BNFL and the UK had the same problem as the US: it held the largest stockpile of high-level radioactive waste in the world (after America) kept in canisters cooling beneath the water at its Sellafield facility in the north of England.
CrikeyFollow
AUKUS nuclear dump deal decades in the making by players with prescience
Story by David Hardaker • Yesterday 8:01 pm
(IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES)© Provided by Crikey
The story of the long, slow journey to a nuclear waste dump being built in Australia as required by the AUKUS agreement is probably best told through one Jim Voss, a nuclear evangelist from America who has been part of the Australian scene for at least a quarter of a century.
Part of a push which began in 1997, he’s one of a handful of international figures who’ve never gone away. Now, arguably, that push has won the day courtesy of a secret deal struck by the Australian government.
Why Seniors with private health cover are losing money
Voss’ most recent appearance was at a parliamentary committee hearing into nuclear legislation on May 15. Courtesy of the government’s AUKUS agreement he was now, finally, able to make a link between the benefits of small modular nuclear reactors — the sort sold by his company — and the nuclear-powered submarines Australia has committed to.
It all went to show, as Voss put it, that “a nuclear culture will be essential for this nation in the future”.
Voss could afford to be just a little triumphant that Canberra day. The inspirational words “If at first you don’t succeed then try, try and try again” could well have been written just for him.
Apart from sheer doggedness, the Voss story tells us much about the close connections between the military and commercial worlds when it comes to nuclear energy, as well as the powerful roles played by the UK and the US governments in seeking a solution for a terrible problem they share: how to permanently store nuclear waste. Australia, it emerges, has been a long-term target.
It was only when Scott Morrison came along — later backed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — that all that work paid off, with the bonus that it was all done in secret.
Pangea 1997
Voss first came to public attention in Australia courtesy of a Four Corners investigation in the late 1990s. Voss was then general manager of a company called Pangea which was attempting to realise the idea of building a nuclear waste dump in Australia, catering to an international need for a permanent solution for disposing of radioactive waste. The company considered that outback parts of Western Australia met the checklist for safety, remoteness and geological stability.
Voss was joined by a Pangea scientist, Charles McCombie, who would also go on to become a mainstay of international efforts to have a nuclear waste dump built in Australia.
Other now-familiar connections emerged at this time. Pangea, backed by a multimillion-dollar marketing and lobbying budget, brought on board then-rising star of conservative political polling, Mark Textor. Textor was soon to establish the powerful Crosby-Textor (ClT) group with then Liberal Party director, Lynton Crosby. Textor was reportedly paid some $250,000 for his work. (As we revealed in May, ClT’s American arm acts as a lobbyist for the giant US defence company General Dynamic, which builds the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines and is set to play a key role in the AUKUS program. It already hosts a growing Australian workforce at its Connecticut shipyards.)
In America, Pangea had signed up a former US nuclear submarine commander, Ralph Stoll, who helped lobby members of the US Congress to back Pangea’s plans for an Australian dump. Not that the US needed much persuading. Back in 1999, Four Corners reported that Pangea’s case found favour with US security and defence officials when it shifted its focus from a commercial venture to play to America’s strategic preoccupation with growing stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
Former US defence official Jan Lodal who had been responsible for running nuclear policy for the Pentagon put it this way:
There are thousands and thousands of tonnes of [nuclear waste] and thousands of tonnes more coming online each year, so to speak, as well as many thousands of tonnes that are derivative from former nuclear weapons programs. And these have to be stored safely and securely for thousands of years, and the world simply doesn’t have a solution to this. And as long as this waste is stored in an imperfect fashion, in which it is now — virtually everywhere — it represents something of a threat.
The Pangea company drew on American expertise but it was essentially a front for the UK government. It was 80% owned by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), which in turn was wholly owned by the British government. BNFL and the UK had the same problem as the US: it held the largest stockpile of high-level radioactive waste in the world (after America) kept in canisters cooling beneath the water at its Sellafield facility in the north of England.
Pangea collapses but the dream lives on
Pangea’s best laid, secret plans came unstuck when the British arm of Friends of the Earth came into possession of a corporate Pangea video which the company had produced for the launch of its Australian venture.
The leaking of the video triggered a federal parliamentary backlash, including from the Howard government’s resources minister Senator Nick Minchin, who denounced the idea of Australia being an international waste dump.
Yet Pangea left a legacy to be reckoned with. It had hit on messaging designed to allay community concerns about safety. One line distilled its argument to house the world’s nuclear waste in remote Australia: “There’s no safer place in the world to make the world a safer place.”
Some influential political voices warned this would not be the end of the matter. Australian Democrats senator Meg Lees told Parliament: “Let us look a couple of years down the track. Knowing the pressure that is coming from Britain, combined with pressure from state governments such as Western Australia, I think we may then have a whole different ball game.”
Then federal MP and former WA Labor premier Dr Carmen Lawrence said: “[Pangea] are serious; they are well-funded. They’re people who’ve worked around the mining industry for a very long time. And I think it would be foolish of anybody — government or people such as me opposed to what they’re proposing — to underestimate their long-term commitment to this proposal.”
Speaking to Four Corners from his office in Seattle, Pangea’s chairman (the late) David Pentz had the most prophetic of words:
The idea of an international repository and the benefits it will bring the world is real. We think we have begun to see how we could put the genie back into the bottle, and you know ideas of this size don’t go away.
Never say never
The big idea never went away. Nor did Jim Voss. Among his voluminous collection of writings and presentations, he has covered some eye-catching topics.
He was joint author of the tantalisingly titled “From subs to mines: what would it take for Australia to develop a nuclear-powered submarine capability?” Written in 2013 — a full decade ago — the paper uncannily anticipated the future.
It canvassed issues relating to “procuring, leasing or assembling a complete military off-the-shelf (MOTS) nuclear-powered submarine in Australia”. This happens to be exactly the AUKUS approach which would see the US provide three of its used nuclear submarines to the Australian Navy to bridge Australia’s capability gap.
The paper continued: “This scenario would likely require Australia to develop a nuclear-powered submarine operations, maintenance, refuelling, waste management and possibly decommissioning capability, without presenting Australia with the considerable upfront challenges of developing a nuclear reactor and fuel enrichment supply chain.”
It also raised the possibility that “procurement, leasing or development of nuclear-powered submarine capabilities in Australia” would potentially open the way to “expansion into other aspects of the high-value nuclear energy supply chain, and provide opportunities for increased nuclear power plant deployment capabilities in the future, for instance, with small modular reactors (SMRs)”.
Voss’s Pangea colleague McCombie also stayed close to the action. As Pangea dissolved, McCombie became part of another international not-for-profit organisation called Arius (Association for Regional and International Underground Storage).
2015, and South Australia calls
The big idea of Australia as the site of an international radioactive waste dump came roaring back into contention in 2015. The South Australian government established the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, chaired not by a judicial figure, as custom has it, but by a retired rear admiral of the Australian Navy, Kevin Scarce, the former governor of South Australia.
A wait worth the while
More than 20 years on and with Australia part of the nuclear submarine club with the US and the UK, Voss is back in town, having taken on the reins of the Melbourne office of the exquisitely named and American-headquartered Ultra Safe Nuclear corporation.
Ultra Safe Nuclear is in the business of selling small modular nuclear reactors. Voss shifted into the managing director’s role in late 2020, about nine months before Morrison announced the AUKUS deal. Given his writings of 2013 which explored the business consequences of Australia acquiring nuclear subs, it appears to be a case of a destiny fulfilled. So how does he feel now about Australia’s nuclear embrace and its pledge to — finally — build a nuclear waste facility?
As a seasoned pro, Voss knows better than to be triumphant. This is not a win for him. It is more an opportunity for Australia:
Australia crossed the Rubicon of needing long-term deep disposal in 1958 [when the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor was established]. Starting at that point, Australia is generating long-lived alpha-bearing waste, in other words, waste with plutonium contaminant in it.”
The waste from Lucas Heights is generally regarded as much lower level than the high-grade waste from nuclear submarines, though Voss says it will also require “a deep disposal solution”. He maintains both can be dealt with by a technique called “very deep borehole disposal”. This is three- to five-kilometres deep at a location where the geography and the physics allowed it to be “absolutely secure for the aeons”.
But what about the 100-tonne spent nuclear reactor of a nuclear sub?
“You’re not putting the entire reactor down,” he says. “You’re putting the most highly radioactive alpha-bearing parts of the reactor down such a hole. So the deep borehole solution is quite amenable to the most highly active waste from a fleet of submarines.”
Australia’s eight submarines would need around six boreholes, he suggests, each costing around $200 million to construct. A snip at $1.2 billion.
But what if the deal to bury Australia’s AUKUS waste is just the start? After all, the cost of a nuclear dump is directly related to the amount of material to be buried. He says:
I would say that I do not personally believe that any part of AUKUS is the thin end of the wedge to an international repository. Two reasons. One is I’ve never heard anybody in any corner suggest that linkage. The second is there is a tried and true premise that a country that generates highly active waste is responsible for its management.
But with the UK and the US still seeking a permanent solution for highly active waste, does he agree it’s not a big step to take the waste of the AUKUS allies? “It would not be a huge leap,” he says. “But again, I cannot see the tea leaves politically lining up to support that path.”
Asked to reflect now on warnings from politicians and others 25 years ago that ultimately Australia may host international nuclear waste, Voss agrees that in some respects those words were prophetic: “Yes, I completely agree. With the problems we face today we are always searching for solutions. And sometimes older solutions have a place where they didn’t 25 years ago.
“But I want to emphasise that nobody that I am aware of in Australia, or frankly in the world, is working on an international disposal solution for all parties for highly active waste.”
Voss says Pangea’s failure was due not to government but to the fact that the social licence or community acceptance to operate a nuclear waste facility was lacking. For the record, he has not seen Textor since Pangea days.
The post AUKUS nuclear dump deal decades in the making by players with prescience appeared first on Crikey.
Aboriginal Australians defeat nuclear dump
Dr Jim Green 26th July 2023 https://theecologist.org/2023/jul/26/aboriginal-australians-defeat-nuclear-dump
Historic win as South Australian Aboriginal traditional owners defeat nuclear dump plan.
Bipartisan efforts by successive federal governments to impose a national nuclear waste dump on the land of Barngarla Aboriginal traditional owners in South Australia (SA) have been upended by a federal court decision in favour of the Barngarla people.
Australians will have their say in a referendum about whether to change their constitution to recognise the First Nations of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice later this year.
READ: Radioactive waste and the nuclear war on Australia’s Aboriginal people
The Voice would be an independent and permanent advisory body giving advice to the Australian parliament and government on matters that affect the lives of first nations peoples.
Ignored
Sadly, the federal Labor government has at the same time continued with the plan of the previous regime to establish a national nuclear waste dump near Kimba in South Australia – despite the unanimous opposition of the Barngarla traditional owners.
This plan has now come a-cropper. The Barngarla traditional owners sought to revoke the nomination of the dump site and the federal court this month agreed, arguing that the nomination of the dump site was infected by “apprehended bias” and “pre-judgement”.
The government might yet appeal the decision. However it seems likely that the plan for a nuclear dump on Barngarla country will instead be abandoned.
Aunty Dawn Taylor, a Barngarla elder, said: “I am so happy for the women’s sites and dreaming on our country that are not in the firing line of a waste dump. I fought for all this time for my grandparents and for my future generations as well.”
Jason Bilney, chairperson of the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation, said: “The Barngarla fought for 21 years for Native Title rights over our lands, including Kimba, and we weren’t going to stop fighting for this. We have always opposed a nuclear waste dump on our country and today is a big win for our community and elders.”
The Kimba site has been targeted for a dump since 2015. In 2021, the conservative Coalition government formally nominated the Kimba dump site, and the Labor government has continued with the plan since winning the May 2022 election.
Violation
Barngarla traditional owners were excluded from a so-called ‘community ballot’ by the Coalition government. An independent and professional ballot of Barngarla traditional owners found absolutely no support for the proposed dump ‒ but it was ignored.
The federal parliament’s joint committee on human rights unanimously concluded in an April 2020 report that the government was violating the human rights of Barngarla people. Even the Coalition members of the committee endorsed the report.
But the Coalition government continued to ignore the human rights of the Barngarla people. The Coalition government also tried to pass legislation which would deny Barngarla traditional owners the right to challenge the nomination of the Kimba dump site in the courts. However the draft legislation was blocked by Labor, minor parties and independent senators.
It was expected ‒ or at least hoped ‒ that the incoming Labor government would abandon the controversial dump proposal after the May 2022 election. But Labor only went as far as pointing out that Barngarla traditional owners could challenge the dump plan in the courts.
The Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation was forced to launch a legal challenge against the previous government’s nomination of the Kimba dump site – and the Labor government fought the case.
Battle
There are at least two problems with Labor’s position. Firstly, the government has vastly greater resources to contest a legal challenge. Indeed, the government has spent A$13 million (£6.8 million) fighting Barngarla traditional owners in the federal court.
Barngarla traditional owners have spent significantly less than A$500,000 – needless to say, they have many pressing demands on their limited resources. There is no other example in recent Australian history of this level of legal attack on an Aboriginal group.
Secondly, the relevant laws are stacked against the interests of traditional owners. In 2007, the conservative Coalition government passed legislation ‒ the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act ‒ allowing the imposition of a nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land with no consultation, and no consent from traditional owners.
At the time, Labor parliamentarians described the legislation as “extreme”, “arrogant”, “draconian”, “sordid”, and “profoundly shameful”.
But when the Labor government returned to the legislation in 2012 ‒ and renamed it the National Radioactive Waste Management Act ‒ the amendments were superficial and still allowed for the imposition of a nuclear waste dump with no consultation or consent from Traditional Owners.
Immoral
Regardless of the federal court’s decision, the plan to impose a nuclear dump despite the unanimous opposition of Barngarla traditional owners is immoral. It contradicts the spirit of the Voice to Parliament currently being championed by the Labor government.
Jayne Stinson, chair of the South Australian parliament’s environment, resources and development committee, said: “In this day and age, when we’re talking about ‘voice, treaty and truth‘, we can’t just turn around and say, ‘Oh well, those are our values but in this particular instance, we’re going to ignore the voice of Aboriginal people’.
“I think that’s just preposterous and it’s inconsistent with what most South Australians would think.”
The plan to dump on Barngarla country makes a mockery of Labor’s professed support for the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that “no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent”.
There is no informed consent from Barngarla traditional owners: there is informed unanimous opposition.
‘Dreadful’
Dr Susan Close, now the Labor deputy premier of South Australia, has consistently opposed the dump. She said in 2019 that it was a “dreadful process from start to finish” that led to the nomination of the proposed Kimba dump site and that SA Labor is “utterly opposed” to the “appalling” process which led to Kimba being targeted.
Dr Close noted in a 2020 statement, titled ‘Kimba site selection process flawed, waste dump plans must be scrapped’, that SA Labor “has committed to traditional owners having a right of veto over any nuclear waste sites, yet the federal government has shown no respect to the local Aboriginal people.”
She has called for her federal Labor colleagues to abandon the Kimba dump proposal once and for all in the wake of the recent federal court decision.
In February 2008, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd highlighted the life-story of Lorna Fejo ‒ a member of the stolen generation ‒ in the historic National Apology to Aboriginal People in Parliament House.
At the same time, the Rudd government was attempting to impose a nuclear waste dump on Fejo’s country in the Northern Territory. Lorna said: “I’m really sad. The thing is ‒ when are we going to have a fair go? Australia is supposed to be the land of the fair go. I’ve been stolen from my mother and now they’re stealing my land off me.”
Resistance
Federal Labor’s “nuclear racism” is disgraceful and it diminishes all Australians. And Labor’s nuclear racism is always supported by the conservative Coalition parties, who are still today arguing for a ‘no’ vote in the upcoming referendum on a Voice to Parliament.
But nuclear racism has always met with resistance. Remarkably, community campaigns led by Aboriginal people have stopped five nuclear dump proposals since the turn of the century.
Plans for a national nuclear waste dump in SA have been defeated in 2004, 2019 and 2023 (touch wood), a planned national nuclear dump in the Northern Territory was defeated in 2014, and a plan to turn SA into the world’s high-level nuclear waste dump was defeated in 2016.
Three of the five successful campaigns involved legal challenges that made it much more difficult for governments to override community resistance.
The federal Labor government should abandon the Kimba dump site and apologise for attempting to foist a dump on Barngarla country despite the unanimous opposition of traditional owners.
Veto
The federal Labor government should also adopt SA Labor’s policy that traditional owners should have a right of veto over any proposed nuclear dumps.
That would give traditional owners across the country some confidence that their voice will be heard as the government progresses plans to store and dispose of waste arising from nuclear-powered submarines in the coming decades.
Finally, Labor must commit to amend the shameful and racist National Radioactive Waste Management Act.
This Author
Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.
More information:
Radioactive waste and the nuclear war on Australia’s Aboriginal people
Barngarla: Help us Have a Say on Kimba (facebook)
Friends of the Earth nuclear-free campaign
No Radioactive Waste Facility for Kimba District (facebook)
Key British Assange supporter says Wikileaks founder could cut deal to secure freedom
The Age, By Latika Bourke, July 26, 2023
London: One of federal parliament’s leading supporters of Julian Assange says the WikiLeaks founder could cut a deal with prosecutors and plead guilty to “whatever nonsense” necessary to secure his release from prison.
Labor MP Julian Hill, the member for Bruce, tried unsuccessfully to visit Assange in Belmarsh prison, where he has been held since 2019, during a private trip to Europe recently.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has directly lobbied US President Joe Biden for the Queenslander’s release but has so far failed to secure it, and has hinted that Assange may have to accept a plea deal.
“The reality is that Australia cannot force the United States to [release Assange], and if they refuse, then no Australian should judge Mr Assange if he chooses to just cut a deal and end this matter,” said Hill.
“His health is deteriorating and if the US refuses to do the right thing and drop the charges then no one would think less of him for crossing his fingers and toes, pleading guilty to whatever nonsense he has to and getting the hell out of there.”
Hill, a member of a cross-party group of MPs who support Assange’s release, also hit out at supporters who he sees as fixated on having Assange suffer as a martyr and continue to languish in prison as he faces extradition to the United States.
“It worries me greatly that there are some Assange supporters who would rather he be a martyr than a free man, but ultimately it’s important for everyone to respect what Julian himself chooses to do,” he said.
His wife Stella Assange has repeatedly warned his health has deteriorated badly due to his incarceration over the last four years…………………………………….
Stella Assange has not said if her husband will accept any plea deal, urging instead that the Biden administration force the US Department of Justice to drop the case, which began under the former Trump administration……………….
Hill said there was only one priority as the case continued to drag on and that was “bringing him home safely to be with his family”.
“I’m not privy to the negotiations that may be occurring but frankly the parliamentarians would back him to the hilt in cutting a deal if that’s what he chose,” he said.
“That’s a message that I wanted to convey personally and hear from him what he wants.”
The Australian High Commission in London tried to help Hill visit Assange on July 1, but the request was denied at the last minute by prison authorities.
“It was incredibly frustrating and disappointing that the Belmarsh Prison authorities failed to approve Mr Assange’s request for me to visit him,” Hill said. “The required paperwork was completed by Julian multiple times.
“However it mysteriously got lost and mislaid until the day before the scheduled visit when they said it was too short notice. It’s up to them to explain whether it’s a conspiracy or a stuff up, but it’s profoundly disappointing to the cross-parliamentary group.”
Jenny Louis, the governor of Belmarsh Prison, was contacted for comment. https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/key-assange-supporter-says-wikileaks-founder-could-cut-deal-to-secure-freedom-20230725-p5dr7n.html
The Star-Spangled Kangaroo
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, JUL 27, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-star-spangled-kangaroo?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=135485598&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
A new US warship has been ushered into service in Sydney. The ship is called the USS Canberra to honor the military union of the United States and Australia, and, if that’s still too subtle for you, it has a literal star-spangled kangaroo affixed to its side.
That’s right: the first US warship ever commissioned in a foreign port has been emblazoned with a kangaroo covered in the stars and stripes of the United States flag. An Australian officer will reportedly always be part of the staff of the ship, to further symbolize the holy matrimony between Australia and the US war machine.
“I can think of no better symbol of this shared future than the USS Canberra,” gushed US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy. “Built by American workers at an Australian company in Mobile, Alabama, her crew will always include a Royal Australian Navy sailor, and from today forward, she will proudly display a star-spangled kangaroo.”
And you know what? She’s right. Not because of her giddy joy over the complete absorption of Australia into the US military apparatus of course — that’s a horrifying nightmare which is increasingly putting this nation on track toward a frontline role in Washington’s war plans against China. But she’s right that the star-spangled kangaroo and the ship which carries it is a perfect symbol for the way these two nations have become inseparably intertwined.
In fact, I’d take it a step further. I’d say the star-spangled kangaroo should be the new symbol for our entire nation.
I mean, we might as well, right? Australia is not a sovereign nation in any meaningful way; we’re functionally a US military/intelligence asset, and according to our defence minister Richard Marles our own military is being moved “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US war machine so they can “operate seamlessly together, at speed.”
The US imprisons Australian journalist Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes like he’s the personal property of the Pentagon, and when the US doesn’t like our Prime Minister because he’s too keen on Australian independence or perceived as too friendly with China, they simply replace him with another one.
We even found out recently that Australians are not permitted to know if the US is bringing nuclear weapons into this country. That is a secret the US keeps from all of us, and our government respects their privacy on the matter.
So I think the star-spangled kangaroo is an entirely appropriate symbol for this country. Put it on our flag. Put it on our money. Put it on all our warships and planes, and on every military uniform. When you walk into an Australian government building, Yankarooey (or whatever stupid Aussie nickname we make up for the thing to mask our own cognitive dissonance) should be the first thing everyone sees.
Undignified? Certainly. Humiliating? Absolutely. An admission that Australia is not a real nation? Of course. But at least it would be honest. If we’re going to act like Washington’s subservient basement gimp, we may as well dress the part.
Seven deadly sins in the Defence industry
In the light of such revelations, and of the fact that nuclear-propelled submarines are really suitable only for deep sea operations, not littoral defence, Richard Marles’s obduracy in continuing to pursue Virginia-Class Attack submarines is astonishing.
It is also about whether the Australian tax payer will be ripped off in the process of acquiring them.
By Richard Broinowski Jul 27, 2023 https://johnmenadue.com/seven-deadly-sins-in-the-defence-industry/
If previous defence acquisitions are any guide, the enormous cost of nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy will almost certainly escalate well beyond the estimated but un-itemised initial price of $A368 billion. The record of corruption of the two US submarine builders suggests that the project will also probably suffer from mismanagement. The final bill is likely to be astronomical.
In my article ‘AUKUS exposes Australia’s incoherent defence policy’, (Pearls and Irritations 14 February 2022), I mentioned the findings of Fred Bennett, Chief of Capital Procurement in the Australian Department of Defence from 1984 to 1988. Bennett listed what he called the seven deadly sins of defence procurement projects – novelty, uncertainty, complexity, interdependence, resource limitations, creative destruction and political constraints. (Security Challenges Vol 6 No 3 Spring 2010).
Bennett claimed that all have been present to a greater or lesser degree in most acquisition projects, and none can be entirely evaded or eliminated. The record over several decades, both in Australia and Britain supports his view.
The Australian Jindalee over the horizon radar system suffered similar delays. The Lockheed Martin F-35 joint strike fighter, designed as a low-cost, lightweight high-performance stealth aircraft, is none of these things, and its project director was sacked in 2010 for cost overruns, schedule delays and a troubling performance record. The BAE Hunter class frigate program has been plagued by design changes which made the ships heavier and slower than intended.
Trying to adhere to a prime contract comprising 22,000 pages with 600 sub contracts, the Collins class submarine all but lost its way in a forest of complexity. This was exacerbated when Wormald, the lead corporation in the submarine consortium changed hands. The head of Wormald was also chair of the Australian Submarine Corporation. The ASC lost its CEO and a period of chaos followed.
But it is not just Bennett’s seven deadly sins we have to worry about with regard to the acquisition of US nuclear powered submarines. Nor is it just about confusion about their primary role, and whether they will be the best possible platform available to realise it. It is also about whether the Australian tax payer will be ripped off in the process of acquiring them.
There are precedents. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In the light of such revelations, and of the fact that nuclear-propelled submarines are really suitable only for deep sea operations, not littoral defence, Richard Marles’s obduracy in continuing to pursue Virginia-Class Attack submarines is astonishing. Much cheaper conventional submarines with air-independent propulsion (AIP) are available from Sweden, Germany, Korea or Japan. They are quieter than nuclear submarines, have the capacity to lurk undetected for 30 days or more, are almost as fast, and are very unlikely to suffer the kind of cost blow-outs we are likely to face in nuclear-powered Virginias. We could also get them sooner.
The pro-nuclear lobby in Australia is excited by the prospect that possession of nuclear-powered submarines will lead to the capacity to develop a complete nuclear industry in Australia. This is a pipe dream. Operating experience with ANSTO’s one small Argentinian-designed research reactor at Lucas Heights does not enhance our capacity to enrich uranium, fabricate fuel rods, construct power reactors, or permanently dispose of nuclear waste. Few if any local councils would welcome construction of power reactors in their backyards. Australia still has no designated burial place for low-level medical nuclear waste. A growing number of high-level highly toxic spent fuel rods remain unprocessed at Lucas Heights. Uranium and plutonium residue from rods that have been processed overseas remain in temporary storage.
One can only hope that it is not too late to abandon the purchase of Virginia submarines in favour of much cheaper non-nuclear boats with AIP.
[problems in defence procurement, submarines, corruption, AUKUS, faulty steel plate, nuclear propulsion versus AIP]
Nuclear weapons:“Oppenheimer” won’tmake a difference, but Australia can
The Interpreter GARETH EVANS, 26 July 23
The movie missed a chance to galvanise a renewed campaign, to better protect against existential danger than rely on sheer dumb luck.
Oppenheimer is a big disappointment for those of us who hoped that this super-hyped, all-star-cast new movie might give new life to the nuclear disarmament cause, creating new awareness of nuclear risks and energising popular support for their elimination – maybe even influencing senior policymakers in the way that the 1983 telemovie The Day After was, famously, an epiphany for Ronald Reagan.
…………………………… while making clear that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were big bangs, and the Edward Teller’s anticipated H-bomb much bigger still, it is no part of the film’s mission to convey the sheer flesh and blood horror of these most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever devised.
Oppenheimer’s moral qualms about massive civilian death tolls, and the catastrophic potential of an internationally unregulated post-war nuclear arms race, are not as clearly or forcefully explained as they could be. And the film takes it as given that the bomb-dropping (not the Soviet Union’s almost simultaneous declaration of war) was the decisive factor in Japan’s surrender – an historically flawed storyline, but one that remains critical to this day in keeping alive belief in the utility of nuclear weapons.
So, with no new help from the cinema, it’s back to the same old frustrating drawing board for nuclear risk reduction and disarmament campaigners.
The need for effective advocacy and action here has never been more compelling. Nearly 13,000 nuclear warheads are still in existence, with a combined destructive capability of close to 100,000 Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-sized bombs, and stockpiles, especially in our own Indo-Pacific region, now growing again. The taboo against their deliberate use is weakening, with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin talking up this prospect in language not heard since the height of the Cold War. Longstanding nuclear arms control agreements are now either dead (ABM, INF, Open Skies) or on life support (New START).
Moreover, the risk of use through human or system error or miscalculation is greater than ever, not least given new developments in AI and cyber-offence capability. That we have not had a nuclear weapon used for nearly 80 years is not a result of statesmanship, system integrity and infallibility, or the inherent stability of nuclear deterrence. It has been sheer dumb luck, and it is utterly wishful thinking to believe that this luck can continue in perpetuity.
…………………………..what can reasonably be hoped for, and sooner rather than later, is a serious global commitment to nuclear risk reduction.
Australia has a more useful role in this enterprise than many may imagine, with our generally strong record on arms control – including bringing to conclusion the Chemical Weapons Convention – and our nuclear credentials burnished by the ground-breaking Keating government-initiated Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, the Howard Government’s role in getting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to a vote, and the more recent Rudd government-initiated Australia-Japan International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.
The most commonly proposed risk-reduction measures – and central elements in the Australia–Japan commission’s proposed “minimisation” agenda – may be described as the “4 Ds”. They are Doctrine (getting universal buy-in for a No First Use (NFU) commitment), Deployment (drastically reducing the number of weapons ready for immediate use), De-alerting (taking weapons off high-alert, launch-on warning readiness) and Decreased numbers (reducing the overall global stockpile to less than 2,000 weapons).
A world with low numbers of nuclear weapons, with very few of them physically deployed, with practically none of them on high-alert launch status, and with every nuclear-armed state visibly committed to never being the first to use them, would still be very far from perfect. But one that could achieve these objectives would be a very much safer world than we live in now.
What has been most depressing about Australia’s performance in recent years, which it is very much to be hoped will now change, is that even these realistic objectives have not been actively supported. Australia’s status as a close US ally and, as such, one of the “nuclear umbrella” states, gives us a particularly significant potential role in advancing some key elements of the risk-reduction agenda just described.
The most immediately useful step we could take would be to support the growing international movement for the universal adoption of No First Use doctrine by the nuclear-armed states. ………………… At the NPT Review Conference concluded in New York in August 2022, a great deal of support was evident for such No First Use commitments as part of a larger risk reduction agenda. But the delegation of our new Labor government made no contribution to that debate. I live in hope that that position will change. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/nuclear-weapons-oppenheimer-won-t-make-difference-australia-can
New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance means it won’t play a role in Australia’s submarine plans
New Zealand’s commitment to remaining nuclear-free means it won’t play a role in Australia’s defense plans to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, the leaders from both countries said Wednesday
ABC News, By NICK PERRY Associated Press, July 26, 2023
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — New Zealand’s longstanding commitment to remaining nuclear-free means it won’t play a role in Australia‘s plans to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, the leaders from both countries said after meeting Wednesday…………………………………………………………. more https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/new-zealands-anti-nuclear-stance-means-play-role-101659242
1 This month
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
19 May – Webinar- Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-05-19 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-05-19 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
20 May – Webinar – The dangerous world of AUKUS, US, military occupation and suppression of dissent
National Webinar, 20th May, 2026, 6.30pm AEST. Confronting laws restricting/suppressing protest speech and action
Speakers: Former Sen. Rex Patrick, Lawyer Nick Hanna ,Arthur Rorris ,Jorgen Doyle, Sen David Shoebbridge,
Facilitator Kelley Tranter.
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 