AUKUS: Marles brushes concerns over British subs brushed aside after AUKMIN meeting

Concerns over British shipbuilding and the Royal Navy’s lack of deployable submarines are being brushed aside as Australia declares full confidence in its AUKUS partner to deliver on the massive security partnership.

Australia’s Foreign and Defence Ministers have held annual talks with their counterparts in the United Kingdom overnight, where both sides have also discussed continuing security challenges across the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

Just last weekend Britain’s Daily Mail revealed that none of the UK’s five existing Astute-class nuclear attack submarines were operational at sea as they undergo maintenance and repairs.

Earlier this year a Labour-chaired House of Commons defence committee into AUKUS also detailed “shortfalls or delays in funding” which it warned could threaten to delay the delivery of a submarines being built by the UK and Australia.

Under AUKUS, Australia is hoping to first acquire Virginia-class submarines from the United States in the 2030s, before a new fleet developed together with the UK, known as SSN-AUKUS, is delivered into service the following decade.

Following the AUKMIN talks Defence Minister Richard Marles said he was “really confident” about the trajectory of AUKUS, insisting facilities were being built “at pace” in Western Australia to host deployments of US and UK submarines from next year.

“Of course there are challenges. I mean, this is the single biggest industrial project in Australia’s history. This represents the biggest leap in our military capability since the establishment of the Navy,” he told reporters in London.

“We had sorts of doubters about whether or not United States would come to the party in relation to supply of Virginia-class submarines, we are creating the space in terms of increased production rates in the United States.

“I am very confident that we will see the transfer of US Virginia-class submarines to Australia in the early 2030s as planned.”

This week the Pentagon confirmed a new US military hub had begun operations at Western Australia’s HMAS Stirling naval base ahead of the arrival of hundreds of American personnel for the start of AUKUS submarine rotations next year.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong also pushed back on criticism and doubts about the $368 billion project declaring: “AUKUS is ambitious and AUKUS is challenging, but it is also critical to ensuring our sovereignty.”

“This is not an academic exercise or a theoretical procurement exercise. It is the response to the central question, which is, how do we secure capability for Australia that is critical to assuring our sovereignty and ensuring peace in a much more contested region.”

Last week outspoken Labor MP Ed Husic joined criticism of AUKUS by urging the Prime Minister to give government MPs a new vote on the trilateral agreement following revelations Australia would only receive second-hand boats from the US.

British Defence Secretary John Healey also revealed that the first steel for the initial AUKUS submarine design being built in Barrow-in-Furness in England will be cut next year.

Asked about production delays and bottlenecks in the local shipbuilding sector, Secretary Healey insisted the problems were being addressed following “14 years in the UK where British military and armed forces were hollowed out and unfunded”.

“With submarines it’s a personal priority for me, it’s a personal priority for the new First Sea Lord to raise the levels, and pace, and effectiveness of our maintenance program, to raise the level of infrastructure that allows that maintenance to be better,” he said.

“You will see the first steel cut for SSN AUKUS that will become the joint submarine force, nothing is more profound, nothing is more important between us as ministers, than that as a conversation.”

Secretary Healy also announced new cooperation on radar technology which would see Canberra-based company CEA Technologies test its world-leading product has with UK forces.

Against a backdrop of rising strategic tensions British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Britain was committed to an Indo-Pacific region “that is open, stable and free from coercion”.

She said both nations discussed how the continuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a “chokehold on the global economy” that was affecting the UK and Australian economies at opposite sides of the world.

“At a time when global security faces pressures, we have discussed latest developments, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and supporting Ukraine,” the Foreign Secretary told reporters at Lancaster House.