Sam Roggeveen

We're investing billions of dollars in American shipyards and in the American military-industrial complex.

Pretty good deal for the United States.

Well, I would say, first of all, that more scrutiny is welcome.

And that hasn't happened in the parliament.

So if it's going to happen outside the parliament, then great.

But ideally, we would have much more parliamentary scrutiny on this deal as well.

It's interesting to me that over the past few years since AUKUS was announced, criticism and scepticism about AUKUS has tended to come from the progressive side of politics.

I notice the Labor MP Ed Husic has spoken up, so have certain members of the union movement, so that's

roughly in line with that progressive left side of politics.

What's, I think, even more notable in this regard is that we're also seeing some doubts emerging from the right of Australian politics.

Recently, we've had Senator James Paterson, who's the opposition's defence spokesman, give a speech at the Press Club in which he aired the idea that just in case these submarines arrive late, the government should be thinking about other kinds of military capabilities to fill the gap.

And then Joe Hockey, who is the former Liberal Treasurer, of course, in the Abbott government, and these days really well plugged in in Washington through his consultancy, he said that for the first time he's having some worries about whether these submarines can be delivered.

That's significant because when the Morrison government announced AUKUS, so at that moment in late 2021, we were less than a year out from an election.

The Morrison government was unpopular.

And I think part of the political reasoning behind the agreement was, well, if we can make this big announcement about a submarine project,

we can kind of goad the opposition into opposing it and then we can have a car key election, as they say, and we would be traditionally the Liberal Party tends to win those kind of debates.

Now, the Labor Party decided not to take that bait.

They endorsed AUKUS right from the beginning.

But if now we're in a situation where we start to see the Liberal Party distancing itself a little bit from AUKUS or expressing doubts, then I think that does create a little bit more political space for the government to do that as well.

Well, the previous deal was that Australia was going to get, as I said, three and maybe as many as five submarines from the United States.