Submission to the AUKUS public inquiry

SUBMISSION TO THE AUKUS PUBLIC INQUIRY

AUKUS Pillar I: Submarine Acquisition

The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull AC

29th Prime Minister of Australia

SUMMARY

I make this submission as a former Prime Minister of Australia and as a citizen with serious concerns about the strategic consequences of the AUKUS arrangements.

I have been on the public record since AUKUS was announced by my successor in September 2021, and have written and spoken publicly in Australia and internationally about the risks embedded in the Pillar I submarine acquisition.

I was so concerned about the lack of public discussion and debate that I convened the Sovereignty and Security Forum in April 2025 with a second forum held in partnership with the University of New South Wales in March 2026. My position is consistent and well documented. This submission draws those arguments together for this Inquiry.

I am a supporter of the alliance with the United States of America. The ANZUS Treaty and the broader architecture of intelligence, military, and diplomatic cooperation with Washington have been indispensable to Australian security for over seventy years. Nothing in this submission should be read as a rejection of that alliance.

I believe Australia is a better ally to, and friend of, the United States by being self-reliant, enhancing our sovereign capabilities and at all times telling the Americans what they need to know, not what they want to hear.

The Pillar I submarine acquisition, as currently structured, was created by the Morrison Government and adopted by the Albanese government. It is a bipartisan error; a submarine deal that will likely result in Australia not receiving any submarines at all. It will certainly leave Australia with long gaps in submarine capability. The AUKUS bargain is thoroughly unfair to Australia. It makes Australia even more dependent on the United States as the US is becoming, by design, a less dependable ally.

The AUKUS agreement requires that any sale by the United States of America must not ‘degrade US undersea capabilities.’ It is a contractual and legislative constraint. The United States is nowhere near meeting the conditions that would allow that transfer to proceed in the 2030’s. The UK’s submarine industrial base is in absolute disarray and the delivery of SSN-AUKUS has been acknowledged by the House of Commons as “a lengthy and complex undertaking” the delivery of which is attendant with very great risk. The arrival of the SSN-AUKUS boats in the early 2040s seems highly optimistic.

I also note, with regret, that this Inquiry had to be convened by civil society rather than by the Parliament of Australia which of the three parliaments involved has had the most at stake but been the least curious and the least informed.

I. A SUBMARINE DEAL WITH NO SUBMARINES

The stated long run goal of AUKUS is for Australia to build and operate nuclear powered submarines in a design and construction partnership with the UK — the SSN-AUKUS. Thus the central foundation of AUKUS was the Australian Government cancelling a shipbuilding partnership with France so that it could be replaced by one with Britain.

The new submarine was to be based upon the as yet undesigned SSN to succeed the Royal Navy’s current SSN, the Astute Class. The first of the new SSN-AUKUS was to be completed in 2041. Given the impending retirement of the ageing Collins Class boats this left a submarine capability gap in the 2030s.

The solution was for Australia to acquire three Virginia Class submarines from the United States through the 2030s and possibly another two if the SSN-AUKUS were late (as they inevitably would be). Australia will now receive three second-hand Block IV Virginia-class submarines rather than the original mix of two second-hand and one new-build. This is a material change to the programme that puts further pressure on the SSN-AUKUS component as the life cycle of the Virginias is 33 years. 

The transfer of Virginia-class boats is conditional by design, and the conditions are clearly set out by the United States Congress and enshrined in law. Section 1352 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 (Public Law 118-31), signed by President Biden on 22 December 2023, authorises the President to transfer up to three Virginia-class submarines to Australia. This transfer can only proceed upon Presidential certification to Congress, no later than 270 days before any such transfer, that the sale will not degrade the undersea warfare capabilities of the United States Navy, and, among other conditions, that the American submarine industrial base has the capacity to meet the requirements of both the US Navy and Australia. That certification is a legal precondition and cannot be waived. On current submarine production rates, and with rising threats from adversaries, it is clear that a President could not honestly make that certification today.

Congress made the American obligation to transfer submarines subject to these conditions in order to protect America’s interests, not Australia’s. This conditionality is part of the deal and represents a risk Australia, in its folly, assumed with open eyes. The United States can comply with the AUKUS agreement and not sell any submarines to us if the President determines that the US Navy cannot spare them. But this risk is not acknowledged by either the Government or the Opposition in Australia. Neither of them have any plan to account for it. The United States has been honest about the conditions. It is Australia that has not been honest with itself.

The Congressional Research Service is a non-partisan research body of the United States Congress, and has documented this risk since the inception of AUKUS. Its most recent assessments of the Virginia-class program state:

Although they have been procured since FY2011 at a rate of generally two boats per year, the actual Virginia-class production rate has never reached 2.0 boats per year, and since 2022 has been limited to about 1.1 to 1.2 boats per year, resulting in a growing backlog of boats procured but not yet built. The Navy and industry are working to increase the Virginia-class production rate to 2.0 boats per year by 2028, and subsequently to 2.33 boats per year, so as to execute the two-per-year procurement rate, replace three to five Virginia-class boats that are to be sold to Australia under the AUKUS submarine (Pillar 1) project, and reduce the accumulated Virginia-class production backlog.

Congressional Research Service, Navy Virginia-Class Submarine Program and AUKUS Submarine (Pillar 1) Project: Background and Issues for Congress, January 2026

The United States has never in fact built two submarines per year, despite procuring at that rate for over a decade. Production has fallen to approximately 1.1 per year since 2022. The production rate must reach 2.0 per year by 2028, and then 2.33 per year, to meet both American needs and the commitment to Australia. The interim goal of 1.5 submarines per year, to have been achieved by the end of 2024, has already been missed.

The UK House of Commons Defence Committee reached the same conclusion in its April 2026 report, noting that low Virginia production rates in the United States are “a matter of concern” for the delivery of the Optimal Pathway. It is not only Australian critics who see the problem.

The prospect of the US doubling its rate of Virginia production in the next six years is highly unlikely.

So there is a very real risk Australia gets no Virginias at all. This risk is acknowledged everywhere but in Canberra. There is apparently a view that if anyone were to openly contemplate a Plan B (what to do if no submarines arrive) this might discourage the Americans from selling us any.

I have long advocated that there was a better way for Australia to acquire nuclear powered submarines in terms of sovereignty, time and cost. 

Australia could have proceeded with the Attack class programme with the diesel/electric propulsion, and switched to the nuclear powered version in the mid 2030s once we were ready. Australia would then have been operating one type of submarine, but with different propulsion systems.

Australia should examine alternative submarine acquisition pathways as a matter of urgency, including reopening discussions with France regarding the Suffren-class.  At 4500 tonnes and with a crew level of 60 they are more suitable for Australia than the much bigger Virginia class submarines which are 10,200 tonnes requiring a crew of 134.

II. AN ABDICATION OF SOVEREIGNTY

Beyond the delivery failure risk, there is a structural problem with the AUKUS Pillar I arrangement: it represents an abdication of Australian sovereignty in matters of national defence.

Sovereignty, in the realm of national security, means the capacity and freedom to make independent decisions about when, where, and with whom Australia deploys its military force. When I was Prime Minister my goal was to give Australia genuine operational and industrial sovereignty over its submarines. Australia would own the technology transfer, build the submarines domestically, and not be dependent on a foreign supplier for the physical production of our fleet. All of the IP necessary for the Attack Class submarines was transferred to Australia.

The AUKUS deal makes Australia dependent on a foreign legislature for the delivery of our primary undersea deterrent until the 2040’s, and possibly longer. In the interim, the rotational deployment of American and British submarines to HMAS Stirling gives Washington and London a forward base in the Indian Ocean, funded substantially by Australian taxpayers, crewed and commanded by personnel under foreign chains of command. The base may be Australian but the navies that will use it are not.

The Congressional Research Service recognised the problems around America sparing Virginias for Australia given its own submarine shortage and has helpfully proposed an alternative to the current Pillar I arrangement. This would involve Australia having no submarines of its own at all, providing the base and the dockyard for the benefit of the US Navy and investing the money it would have otherwise used to buy submarines into other long range strike capabilities (also purchased from the US). The report stated:

The proposed forward rotations of US and UK SSNs to Australia would still be implemented; the size of the US SSN force would be expanded by at least three to five boats, and possibly eight boats, above previous plans so as to provide additional US SSNs for performing Australian SSN missions. Australia, instead of using funds to purchase, operate, and maintain its own SSNs, would instead invest those funds in other military capabilities (such as, for example, producing long-range anti-ship missiles and/or purchasing of US-made B-21 long-range bombers), so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States.

Congressional Research Service, Navy Virginia-Class Submarine Program and AUKUS Submarine (Pillar 1) Project: Background and Issues for Congress

It is often said that a threat is the combination of capability and intent; the former can take many decades to put in place, the latter can change in a heartbeat. Equally it can be said the same of alliance security.

The United States has always been a powerful ally whose benign intent we never doubted. But we have seen big changes with the Trump administration. The international rules based order whose maintenance was our key strategic objective is dismissed by Washington as “a cloud castle abstraction.” President Trump routinely treats allies with disrespect and threats — whether it is humiliating Zelensky in the Oval Office or threatening to seize Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark.

When I met with President Barack Obama at the White House in 2016, I described the foundation of the Australian-American alliance in these terms: “We define our national identities by reference to common political values of freedom, the rule of law, democracy, real democracy, which empowers the majority, but constrains them so as to protect the minority.” That was not diplomatic formality. It was a sincere description of what myself and every Australian Prime Minister who had come before me understood the alliance to mean. Two great democracies, bound not merely by strategic interest or geographic convenience, but by a shared commitment to the principles of liberal governance that both our nations had fought to defend and extend.

Those words now require honest re-examination.

At the 39th Daniel Mannix Memorial Lecture at Melbourne University in October 2025, I addressed what I described as “defending Australia’s independent democracy in a might is right world.” The point I made then is relevant to this submission: American presidents, whatever their failings, whatever the motives or occasional hypocrisy, had always made the case that their actions in international affairs were taken in defence of democracy. President Trump does not pretend to share those values. He does not pretend to be interested in them whatsoever. He not only believes might is right, he says he believes it, and he posts on social media: My golden rule is “he who has the gold makes the rules.”

AUKUS has diminished our sovereignty. We have effectively ceded control of a Western Australian naval base to the US Navy. Whether we get any nuclear powered submarines will depend on political decisions in Washington and industrial developments in the US and the UK. It is naive to imagine that the submarines, if ever acquired, could be used other than in accordance with American wishes.

Will AUKUS enhance our security or will it simply draw Australia into a conflict with China whether we like it or not?

III. THE FAILURE OF PARLIAMENTARY SCRUTINY

The fact that this Inquiry has been convened by civil society rather than by the Parliament of Australia is an indictment of our democratic institutions.

Consider what is at stake. Australia is committing hundreds of billions of dollars of public expenditure over the coming decades. We are restructuring our naval force posture. We are transferring strategic basing rights to allied powers without any public discussion. Our nation bears the greatest risk of any party to this arrangement. Our taxpayers carry the heaviest proportionate fiscal burden. Our sailors will crew these vessels, if they ever arrive.

And yet our Parliament has been the least curious and the least informed.

There has been no comprehensive parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS Pillar I comparable in depth or rigour to the scrutiny applied by the United States Congress or the British House of Commons. Australian citizens are better informed about the risks of this arrangement from publications of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), testimonies to Congress, and other bodies that serve American legislators, than from the deliberations of their own elected representatives. The CRS and CBO have published detailed assessments of production shortfalls, maintenance backlogs, industrial base constraints, and alternative configurations. Australia’s Parliament has not met an equivalent standard of accountability. Our parliamentarians have let us down by failing properly to scrutinise the AUKUS programme.

This Inquiry, whatever its formal limitations, performs a function that Parliament should have performed. I commend those who established it and urge this Inquiry to press for full parliamentary hearings with classified briefings made available to the relevant committees.

IV. A WEALTH TRANSFER, NOT A DEFENCE ACQUISITION

Australia has already committed approximately $3 billion to the American submarine industrial base as a direct contribution to Virginia-class production capacity. Further billions have been pledged to the United Kingdom. These funds are non-refundable. They are not payments toward a specific vessel. They are capital transfers to the defence industrial bases of our allies, with no guaranteed return in the form of an operational submarine.

Australian money channelled into the American submarine industrial base is subsidising both the Virginia and Columbia programs simultaneously, with no assurance it benefits the one that is supposed to deliver our boats. Australian tax payer billions poured into the UK’s submarine industry are likewise directed at a general industrial uplift, not specifically at the SSN-AUKUS programme. RADM Peter Briggs and others have given this Inquiry detailed evidence on these points.

I have described AUKUS Pillar I as a massive wealth transfer from the Australian government to the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States receives a forward base in Western Australia, Australian capital investment in its shipbuilding industry, Australian sailors to crew its submarines, and Australian diplomatic support, regardless of whether a single submarine is ever transferred. The United Kingdom receives Australian funding for an industrial base widely acknowledged to be in serious difficulty. Australia receives, at best, the prospect of submarines in the mid-2040s and beyond.

V. THE BRITISH PILLAR: A SUBMARINE BEING DESIGNED, AN INDUSTRIAL BASE IN DISTRESS

The problems with AUKUS Pillar I are not confined to America’s shipyards. The United Kingdom’s contribution to this arrangement deserves equal scrutiny, and it receives almost none from the Australian Parliament.

The SSN-AUKUS submarine that Australia is ultimately meant to operate from the early 2040s is not a vessel being built from a finished design. Following an 18-month consultation starting in September 2021, the design was renamed SSN-AUKUS in March 2023 when Australia joined the programme and additional US technology was incorporated. In March 2023, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, head of the Australian Nuclear Powered Submarine Task Force, said the SSN-AUKUS design was “about 70 per cent mature.” A submarine design that was 70 per cent mature in 2023, with Australia expected to take delivery of the first hull in the early 2040s, is not a programme that invites confidence in its timeline. SSN-AUKUS is not a product being purchased off a production line. It is a submarine being designed, incorporating technologies from three countries, to be built simultaneously in the United Kingdom and in Australia whose shipyards have never previously constructed a nuclear-powered vessel.

This design complexity matters enormously for Australia. The Virginia class, which Australia is to receive in the interim, is at least a proven vessel with decades of operational history. SSN-AUKUS is not. It incorporates British hull and structural design, American propulsion and weapons system technology, and Australian modifications. It is, by any reasonable definition, a bespoke trilateral project of extraordinary technical ambition. The risk of cost overruns, design changes, delays, and the inevitable complications of a three-nation governance structure across a programme spanning two decades is not theoretical. It is inherent in the nature of what has been agreed.

The nuclear reactor at the heart of SSN-AUKUS compounds those risks. The reactor programme — the Core Production Capability at Rolls-Royce’s Raynesway facility in Derby — is the single most critical industrial element of the entire British contribution to AUKUS. Without reactor cores, there are no submarines. The UK Government’s own project assurance system has delivered an unambiguous verdict on that programme. The Core Production Capability programme, which aims to build new facilities to deliver nuclear reactor cores for both the Dreadnought-class and the SSN-AUKUS submarines, retains a “Red” rating in the UK Government’s Major Projects Portfolio. The departmental commentary on this rating identifies ongoing challenges associated with achieving the required delivery date for the first Dreadnought submarine nuclear core and the importance of that milestone to sustaining the United Kingdom’s Continuous at Sea Deterrent.

A Red rating in the British Major Projects system is the most severe assessment available. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority has reiterated that Red ratings indicate severe delivery risks, requiring significant intervention to ensure successful outcomes. The whole-life cost of the Core Production Capability programme has already risen from £3.77 billion to £4.05 billion. The programme’s end date has been flagged for revision to account for the scope changes introduced by AUKUS requirements. The reactor is behind schedule for the Dreadnought ballistic missile submarine — Britain’s nuclear deterrent — and that programme takes priority over SSN-AUKUS. Australia sits third in the queue.

A separate project at HMNB Devonport — the Submarine Wharf Infrastructure Facility — has also slid from an Amber to a Red rating. The departmental commentary attributes this to design velocity that has not been as forecast, a backlog of approving and closing out design packages, and significant levels of risk and uncertainty remaining in the programme. These are not fringe concerns raised by critics of the programme. They are the British Government’s own assessments of its own projects, published in its own annual reporting.

The state of the existing British submarine fleet tells the same story. Australia is relying on the United Kingdom to rotate operational Astute-class submarines through HMAS Stirling as part of the Submarine Rotational Force-West from 2027. The rationale is that Australian submariners will gain experience operating nuclear submarines before Australia’s own boats arrive. But the Royal Navy is in no position to spare operational submarines. As of June 2026, all five operational Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarines are undergoing maintenance, repairs, or dockyard work, leaving the United Kingdom without a deployable attack submarine force. Availability across the five-strong Astute fleet stayed badly depressed throughout 2025, a year in which the boats are reckoned to have managed only around 300 days at sea between them. Earlier in 2026 it was reported that just one of them was genuinely fully operational at all. The Royal Navy’s own First Sea Lord has launched a Submarine Maintenance Recovery Plan in acknowledgment of the crisis.

The fragility of the British commitment was demonstrated in February 2026 when HMS Anson, the first Astute-class submarine to visit Australia under the AUKUS Optimal Pathway, was recalled to the Gulf within weeks of its arrival following the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East. It was reportedly the only Royal Navy attack submarine operational at the time. Australia’s submarine capability under AUKUS depends, for at least the next fifteen years, on the generosity of navies that cannot meet their own requirements.

The readiness of the UK’s fleet of nuclear attack submarines has been a source of enduring concern for half a decade. The Royal Navy fields fewer submarines than at any time in recent history, and challenges with maintenance — compounded by the priority accorded to ensuring the UK’s Continuous at Sea Deterrent remains operational — have resulted in periods during which the UK did not have an attack submarine at sea. Former First Sea Lord Lord West has described the Royal Navy as being in the most parlous state it has been in for sixty years.

The House of Commons Defence Committee published its report on AUKUS on 28 April 2026 — the first major UK parliamentary inquiry specifically directed at delivery of the trilateral partnership. The Committee found that political leadership essential to AUKUS’s success “has faded,” that “shortcomings and failings” in delivery threaten to prevent AUKUS’s “promise becoming a reality,” and that investment in upgrading the BAE Systems shipyard at Barrow — the only facility in the United Kingdom capable of building nuclear submarines — “has already slipped.” The Committee described submarine availability as “critically low” and noted that the commitment to rotate Astute-class submarines through Australia had stretched the Royal Navy to “or even beyond” its limits. The Committee’s chair, Tan Dhesi MP, stated publicly that “cracks are already beginning to show” in AUKUS funding. This is not the assessment of a hostile critic. It is the considered finding of a cross-party committee of the House of Commons, supported by evidence taken in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia over the course of a year.

I said publicly at Chatham House in May 2026 that the UK shipbuilding industry, and its submarine industry in particular, is in complete disarray. That is an honest diagnosis of a condition decades in the making. Britain took an enormous peace dividend after the Cold War. Defence spending was cut year after year. Shipyards were rationalised, workforces dispersed, industrial skills lost. The expertise and capacity required to build nuclear submarines at scale cannot be reconstituted at the pace of a political announcement. It takes a generation to build the workforce, the facilities, and the supply chains that a nuclear submarine programme demands, and Britain spent the years after 1991 dismantling precisely those assets. The bill for that decision is now being presented — and a significant part of it is being sent to the Australian taxpayer.

None of this is to suggest the programme cannot succeed. It is to insist that Australia’s Parliament be told clearly what contingency plans exist if the British industrial base cannot deliver reactor cores on schedule; what that means for Australia’s SSN-AUKUS delivery dates; and what Australia’s legal remedies are if the United Kingdom’s contribution to this programme falls materially short of what was promised.

VI. BUDGET CONSIDERATIONS

The AUKUS programme expands with each budget cycle regardless of what it delivers, and systematically crowds out the other capabilities on which Australia's genuine near-term defence depends. The budget consequences of AUKUS are not static. They are dynamic and structurally biased toward escalation. There is no mechanism by which Australia can recover funds already transferred or a penalty clause triggered by late or non-delivery. The ten-year headline estimate for nuclear-powered submarines and related infrastructure was revised upward in April 2026 by 34%, from $53–63 billion (2024 NDS) to $71–96 billion ((2026 NDS/IIP). On the evidence of every comparable major defence programme in history, the most recent figures published in April 2026 will not be the final numbers. 

The question this Inquiry should press to answer, and which Parliament has not yet had the resolve to ask, is how much AUKUS will cost both financially, and what is the opportunity cost of the AUKUS programme when it comes to alternative capabilities that could keep Australia safe? I urge this Inquiry to review evidence from the Australian National Audit Office's May 2026 audit of the Collins-class Life of Type Extension programme which documented in detail the pattern of missed milestones and planning failures; the annual Cost of Defence series published by Marc Ablong, Mike Hughes and Linus Cohen at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which has systematically tracked the growing dominance of AUKUS Pillar I within the Defence budget and its risk of crowding out the connective capabilities needed to deliver an integrated force; and research by Dr Marcus Hellyer, Head of Research at Strategic Analysis Australia, who has published detailed analysis of the AUKUS programme's budget trajectory, including his dissection of the 2026–27 Portfolio Budget Statement, which revealed that the submarine programme's estimated actual spend for 2025–26 had grown to more than $5.4 billion which is more than was ever spent on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme in a single year, and achieved before a single nuclear-powered submarine has entered Australian service. 

VII. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This Inquiry should record the following findings:

1.  The AUKUS Pillar I submarine delivery timeline is not credible on current evidence. The United States has not achieved, and is not trending toward, the production rate necessary to transfer Virginia-class submarines to Australia while meeting its own force structure requirements. The Congressional Research Service, the United States Navy, and Admiral Franchetti have all confirmed this publicly.

2.  The United Kingdom’s submarine industrial base faces delivery risks of the highest severity, as confirmed by the British Government’s own project assurance system and by the House of Commons Defence Committee. The Core Production Capability programme for reactor cores retains a Red rating. Australia’s SSN-AUKUS delivery timeline depends on the resolution of these British industrial difficulties, over which Australia has no control and limited visibility.

3.  The AUKUS arrangement as structured carries a significant risk that Australia will enter a period of zero submarine capability as the Collins Class retires. This would be the most serious failure of Australian defence planning in modern history.

4.  The terms of the AUKUS arrangement represent a meaningful reduction in Australian sovereignty.

5.  The absence of adequate parliamentary scrutiny of these commitments is a democratic failure. Parliament must institute urgent, comprehensive committee hearings with access to classified briefings to fulfil its constitutional responsibilities.

6.  Australia should examine alternative submarine acquisition pathways as a matter of urgency, including reopening discussions with France regarding the Suffren-class, to ensure Australia is not left defenceless in its own maritime approaches.

The Honourable Malcolm Turnbull AC

29th Prime Minister of Australia

2 July 2026