Australia's Albanese stares down party rebellion over AUKUS
Labor opponents of nuclear submarine program vow to fight on
MELBOURNE -- Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese avoided an embarrassing party revolt against the AUKUS security agreement during the national conference of his Labor Party on Friday. But some party activists believe that opposition to acquiring nuclear submarines under the pact with the U.S. and U.K. will only grow amid public doubts about the costs and benefits of Australia's largest defense project.
A motion supporting the nuclear-powered submarine program, whose estimated price tag is 368 billion Australian dollars ($235 billion), was carried by a majority of the 402 delegates during Labor's three-day conference in Brisbane. The conference, which is held once every election cycle, is an opportunity for Labor delegates to vote on the party's policy platform.
However, a tense debate spilled out onto the floor, with the head of the powerful Electrical Trades Union, which comprises 20,000 members nationwide, arguing the pact is too expensive and would lead to further nuclearization throughout Southeast Asia.
One Labor parliamentarian also broke ranks with the government and spoke out against AUKUS, while Defense Minister Richard Marles' passionate address in favor of the pact was met with a mixture of heckles and cheers.
Albanese, who leads the center-left party, was not originally scheduled to speak during the AUKUS debate but intervened to quell discontent. "These are the choices of a mature nation, a nation that understands that a bright future calls for more than sunny optimism, that strategic complexity that we face is far removed from the bleak certainties of the Cold War," Albanese said to party faithful.
"We have to analyze the world as it is, rather than as we would want it to be. We have to bring our defense capabilities up to speed, and AUKUS is central to that."
AUKUS envisions new nuclear-powered submarines being built in Australia, while the second pillar of the agreement will focus on technology transfer between the three nations. The security agreement has been perceived as a means of countering China's growing influence in the Asia-Pacific region.
Internal opposition against Australia's largest defense project has been building among the party's rank and file and the broader union movement. Several hundred anti-AUKUS demonstrators rallied outside the party's national conference at the Brisbane Convention Centre to voice their discontent. Fifty Labor Party branches and federal councils around Australia -- out of hundreds -- have opposed AUKUS in recent months and called on the government to review it.
"We see this as just the start and certainly don't feel we have hit a high-water mark in terms of organizing opposition to AUKUS whatsoever," said Marcus Strom, national convener of the Labor Against War group, which is leading the rank-and-file rebellion against the nuclear pact. "When you have got the U.S. explicitly saying AUKUS is about being on a 'war footing,' how does that make us a more secure country? I don't buy it."
Key U.S. Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher said AUKUS must adopt a "war footing" during the annual Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Canberra last week, where he called for the arrangement to be more comprehensive to deter the threat of war.
Strom said his group is planning several regional conferences around the country to drum up opposition in the months ahead.
Members of the party's old guard, including former Prime Minister Paul Keating and former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, have also spoken out vehemently against the sweeping defense plan.
But internal Labor Party divisions over the U.S. alliance stretch back decades, according to renowned Australian political historian Frank Bongiorno, who argues the government will likely "ride out" the current wave of discontent.
"The more difficult situation for the party is if you have significant trade unions which adopt positions which are at odds with the leadership," Bongiorno told Nikkei Asia. "They exercise significant power within the party and obviously hold the purse strings [to finance Labor's campaigns]."
Nonetheless, Kosmos Samaras, a former longtime Labor strategist who is now director of the polling and advocacy outfit RedBridge Group, said public attitudes toward the security pact remain mixed. He argued the government must sell AUKUS as a job-creation program to keep the public onside.
Recent polling by the Lowy Institute think tank found that while two-thirds of Australians supported the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, 47% said the projected AUKUS price tag of AU$268 billion to AU$368 billion was not worth the cost.
Perhaps aware of this political reality, Albanese promised 20,000 "secure, well-paid union jobs" from AUKUS during his address on Friday.
"The government has to be straight to the public that this will result in local jobs; there has to be some kind of localized benefit there," Samaras argued. "Once some of those employment opportunities start appearing, I think we will move to more engagement in support of it."