An AUSMIN pantomime in Washington

It does suggest that there’s something odd happening when the BBC’s fabled Goon Show provides the script for the AUSMIN talks just concluded in Washington.

The multi-billion dollar handouts – which will amount to over $6 billion by year’s end, without any deliverables or refund provisions – to American and British shipbuilding yards in the vain hope that, somehow, nuclear-powered submarines might materialise must owe something to Neddy Seagoon. And the fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced another big cheque in advance of its receipt makes it all the weirder.

In Dishonoured-Again, written by Spike Milligan in 1959, Seagoon declares “it’s too damn noisy in the Navy”, prompting Major Bloodnok to proclaim the regimental oath “open your wallets and say after me” ‘help yourself’.” And don’t the Americans and Brits enjoy doing just that.

To judge by the “outcomes” of this week’s AUSMIN talks, Rubio and his newly re-monikered Secretary of War, Hegseth – the unlikeliest of unlikely couples – must have thought that Washington had been invaded by antipodean hayseeds. Cash was flowing out of the Australian wallets while invitations to station even more military assets in Australia were flowing into America’s overseas-basing inbox.

In the words of the more-or-less recently appointed British First Sea Lord (it might have been Seagoon, but that’s for another episode), it was a case of “lick up and kick down”. The American duo got their flattery and forelock tugging, while the Australian Defence Force and Department of Defence got a reorganisation and a swathe of hefty program cuts. Australia’s three armed services are belt-tightening so that we can realise an increasingly improbable dream.

It beggars belief that any Australian government can find billions to prop up the shipbuilding capacities of nations as wealthy as the US and Britain (ranking first and sixth respectively, with Australia at thirteenth) when we have a diminutive shipbuilding capacity ourselves.

A sovereign submarine capability needs a sovereign submarine construction industry. It hasn’t got one. And as far forward as we can reasonably see, it won’t have one. Oh, and we beggar our defence services while we do so. The opportunity costs are totally ignored.

Without any sense of irony, the Joint Fact Sheet on Australia-US Ministerial Consultations (it used to be called a communiqué) began with a forlorn reference to the failing Quad, then talked about building resilience to economic coercion without a single reference to tariffs. It continued with a list of all the new forms of US access to Australian defence establishments before re-affirming the deployment of US SSNs “to support Australia’s sovereign-ready efforts for its conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine program”, whatever “sovereign-ready” might mean.

And consistent with the mercantilist aspirations of two free enterprise nations yoked together in pursuit of secure critical minerals supply chains, a couple of private-sector mining corporations, Alcoa and Tronox, are accorded special mentions in a formal inter-governmental “fact sheet”.

All of this would be amusing if it weren’t so serious: a subservient Australia, handing out cash to failing shipyards, and an America led by a collection of grifters and incompetents. The Albanese Government of course has a responsibility to shore up the deep institutional and structural links between Australia and the US. That’s in the interests of both countries. But don’t the citizens of both nations deserve something more than an un-funny farce? And don’t Australians deserve something more competent, confident, poised and self-assured?

Allan Behm is an advisor in the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs Program.