Labor luminary says AUKUS has turned country into ‘compliant cash cow’

June 11, 2026 — 10:34amLabor’s longest serving foreign minister says the AUKUS submarine plan is likely to be regarded as one of the country’s worst foreign policy and defence mistakes, as he called for the Albanese government to quickly develop a back-up plan in case the pact falls over.Gareth Evans, who served as foreign minister from 1988 to 1996, used the first day of hearings at a public inquiry into AUKUS to savage the nuclear-powered submarine plan as “misconceived from the outset”, arguing it has made Australia a “compliant cash cow” to the United States and United Kingdom.Former Labor minister Gareth Evans.“Those who deny, or ignore, the loss of Australian sovereign independence that is necessarily involved in our commitment to the AUKUS project are simply defying reality,” Evans said in a submission to the inquiry.“And those who accept the reality of our loss of sovereign agency but actually applaud it as a price worth paying for our protection ... seem to have lost not only any sense of national pride, but of Australia’s national interest.”Evens, a longtime AUKUS critic, said his “regretful conclusion” is that the bipartisan embrace of the submarine plan “is more likely than not to prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions our country has made, not only putting at profound risk our sovereign independence, but generating more risk than reward for the very national security it promises to protect”.“I cannot imagine this decision being made by any of the Hawke-Keating governments of which I was part for thirteen years. Times have changed,” he said.The crowd-funded public inquiry, which is holding its first hearings in Melbourne on Thursday, is chaired by former Labor minister and anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Garrett, another AUKUS sceptic.It came as Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles met with their British counterparts in London to discuss AUKUS and other issues.Only a couple of sitting Labor MPs – Ed Husic and Josh Wilson – have publicly questioned the wisdom of the AUKUS pact, and it was strongly endorsed at Labor’s most recent national conference.Evans, who has been critical of AUKUS since the “optimal pathway” was announced in 2023, said because of the “huge doubts about its deliverability, its cost to Australia manifestly outweighs its benefits, and its implementation would profoundly limit Australia’s independent sovereign agency”.He said it required “heroic levels of optimism” to believe the US would deliver three Virginia-class submarines to Australia as planned, and that Australia and the United Kingdom would successfully create a new model of nuclear-powered submarine known as SSN-AUKUS.“There has been from the beginning zero certainty of the timely delivery of the eight promised AUKUS boats, and every piece of evidence now available on the public record reinforces scepticism as to whether any of them will be delivered on time, or indeed at all,” he said.Evans said the superior capabilities of nuclear-powered submarines, including their ability to travel long distances at speed, made it more likely Australia would be dragged into a war between the US and China, he said.“It simply defies credibility to think that Washington will ever go ahead with its sale of Virginias to us, or allow the further access to highly sensitive nuclear technology involved in the SSN-AUKUS follow-on project, in the absence of an understanding that we will deploy those boats to join the US in any fight in which it chooses to engage anywhere in our region, particularly over Taiwan,” he said.Evans said it would be best for the Albanese government to abandon the submarine plan altogether, but given this appears unlikely, argued it “should now devote major resources to developing a fallback plan”.He said the government should examine buying cheaper off-the shelf submarines from a capable supplier such as France, Japan, Germany, Sweden or possibly South Korea, and that the submarines need not be nuclear-powered.Australia should also beef up its investment in other military equipment such as drones, uncrewed submarines, anti-ship missiles, sea-mines, air-to-air missiles and strike missiles to defend itself, he said.Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X, Facebook or email.From our partners