Peter Garrett
speaker
112 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 14 Jun
Peter Garrett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
7am · Peter Garrett on Aukus, politics and the fight for “the soul of the country” · 14 Jun 2026
podcast
really good, thoughtful decisions being taken about our defence, about how we spend this money and what the implications are of the arrangements that we can see in front of us.
And when I do a back of the envelope on the cost of AUKUS,
I'm up around $500 billion.
It's a hell of a lot of money.
For that amount of money, you could arguably, according to defence experts, have a bigger fleet of diesel submarines.
You could enhance land-based defence forces and you'd have quite a lot of spare change left over for schools and hospitals.
Now, I'm not making light of it, but that's the fact.
So I think that's the sort of thing that should concentrate anyone's mind, irrespective of whether they're in a political party or not.
Well, it's a legitimate question, but I think there's other ways of framing it because this isn't late in the day.
This is early in the day.
Even though we're already sending money to America for the purposes of it speeding up its submarine building program so that they can build enough submarines so that we can then get the second-hand submarines.
I mean, that's how this deal works.
which is astonishing, really.
We're essentially underpinning the American submariner construction capacity.
Now, if that goes on and the subs never appear or don't appear in time to provide us with any form of defence, which is another issue that's been identified by defence experts, then the sooner we consider the deal clearly and properly, the better.
On the question of the impact on the alliance with the US in particular, the general consensus of views that we're hearing up to this point in time, including from people like Gareth Evans, is that
Yes, the nature of the relationship is important and it's an important relationship for Australia, clearly, and has been for many years.
But circumstances have significantly changed over time.
That's partly because of the rise of China as another major power, but also because of the way in which this deal is structured and the presence of forward defence forces from the United States in Australia.
And the question that arose yesterday, and I think it's
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