AUKUS Inquiry Opens with Big Questions — and a Terms of Reference That Already Knows Where to Look
Australia’s most expensive defence project will finally face a public hearing room, though not one convened by the government that signed the cheque.
A national Public Inquiry into AUKUS launches today at Federal Parliament, led by former Labor minister, environmental campaigner and Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett. The launch, co-hosted by independent Senator David Pocock and independent MP Andrew Wilkie, comes after years of criticism that the $368 billion-plus nuclear-powered submarine deal has been rushed through Australia’s political bloodstream with too little public debate, too little parliamentary scrutiny and far too many unanswered questions.
The inquiry’s central question is simple enough to fit on a protest placard, but large enough to swallow several decades of defence policy: will AUKUS make Australia safer — and at what cost?
That cost is not merely financial. The Terms of Reference ask whether Australia will receive the submarines it is paying for, whether they will arrive on time and on budget, where high-level nuclear waste will be stored, what the program means for Australian jobs and industry, and whether a country that has long prided itself on being nuclear-free in civilian power generation is ready to host, service and eventually dispose of naval nuclear reactors.
“AUKUS is by far the most expensive and complex undertaking ever entered into by any Australian Government and yet the opportunity to question, debate and decide has been taken out of the hands of the parliament and the people. A Public Inquiry into this massive spend of taxpayer’s money is long overdue,” Lead Commissioner Peter Garrett said.
Garrett will be joined by four other high-profile commissioners: Carmen Lawrence, Chris Barrie, Leanne Minshull and Karina Lester .
This is not a Senate committee buried in Hansard, nor a closed strategic review written in the language of “capability uplift” and “interoperability”. It is a civil society inquiry, funded by public donations, seeking submissions from citizens, experts, organisations and affected communities. That gives it moral force. It does not give it legal teeth.
“As Chief of the Defence Force in the late 90s and early 2000s, I investigated the proposition of acquiring nuclear powered submarines for Australia but there was little interest in it then and we all need to know why suddenly, there is huge interest, secrecy and money available for the AUKUS submarines today. That’s what this Inquiry is for,” Commissioner Admiral (Retd) Chris Barrie AC said.
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Primary Questions of the Public Inquiry
1. Cost & Fiscal Impact: Is the $368 billion+ price tag accurate? What is the opportunity cost to healthcare, education, climate action, and closing the gap?
2. Strategic Rationale: Does AUKUS genuinely enhance Australian security, or does it increase our exposure to great-power conflict with China?
3. Sovereignty & Independence: Is AUKUS locking Australia further into the US war machine at the expense of our independence as a middle power?
4. Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Does the transfer of nuclear technology set a dangerous precedent? Where will high-level nuclear waste be stored?
5. Environmental Consequences: What are the long-term environmental risks of operating nuclear-powered submarines in Australian waters?
6. Alternatives Considered: Were credible and less costly alternatives to AUKUS properly assessed before the decision was made in secret?
The Commissioners: Credibility, Dissent and the Charge of Bias
The commissioners will not have royal commission powers. They cannot compel classified documents from Defence, force ministers into the witness chair, or prise open the locked cabinets where the most sensitive assumptions about China, the United States and future war planning are kept. That is the inquiry’s first limitation, and possibly its most important one. It can test the public case for AUKUS, but it cannot fully interrogate the secret case unless insiders choose to speak.
Still, public inquiries have a habit of changing the temperature of a debate. They gather what official processes prefer to scatter. They put cost, risk, strategy, sovereignty and community impact in the same room. They also ask the awkward questions that governments often treat like unexploded ordnance: best left fenced off and described as “being managed”.
Peter Garrett is not a neutral figure in the AUKUS debate. That is both the strength and vulnerability of the inquiry.
Garrett has already criticised AUKUS in strong terms. His presence signals that this inquiry is not being assembled to admire the machinery. It is being assembled to examine the machinery, kick the tyres, check the invoice, and ask whether the whole contraption is heading toward national security or national dependency.
Commissioner Dr Carmen Lawrence said, “A basic requirement of any functioning democracy is transparency from our Government. It is simply not credible that the Federal Government can take nearly $400 billion from the Australian people, make private deals with US and UK technology companies and foreign governments to access the Australian mainland and our data, and then tell us not to ask questions. Australians would never accept that, and nor should we. That’s why this Inquiry is vital.”
The language of the Terms of Reference does not begin from a clean sheet. It states that AUKUS was announced without prior notification or policy explanation. It says the opportunity costs are significant. It asserts that AUKUS expenditure is already reducing the overall capability and force posture of the Australian Defence Force. That is not the language of a blank-slate inquiry. It is the language of an intervention.
But that does not automatically invalidate it. In Australian political life, Terms of Reference are rarely neutral tablets handed down from Mount Bureaucracy. They are often the fence around the answer. Governments use them to narrow an inquiry. Oppositions use them to widen one. Royal commissions use them to define the battlefield. A loaded Terms of Reference can produce a predetermined outcome; it can also be the only way to investigate a question official Canberra has refused to ask.
The key test for Garrett and the other commissioners will be whether they allow the evidence to complicate their argument. A credible inquiry into AUKUS cannot simply become a long-form press release against nuclear submarines. It must hear from naval experts, defence planners, industry advocates, regional analysts, China specialists, Pacific voices, nuclear engineers, unions, First Nations communities, budget experts and those who believe AUKUS is the least bad option in a dangerous century.
If the commissioners do that, the inquiry may become something Australia has not yet had: a public reckoning with the whole AUKUS bargain. If they do not, it risks becoming a choir with subpoenas missing.
Commissioner Leanne Minshull said, “The projected cost of $368 billion for AUKUS is hard to conceptualise. Think about Australia’s biggest wealth fund, set up in 2006. After 20 years of squirreling away money and banking investment returns, the future fund is now worth $337 billion. The cost of AUKUS would wipe out these generational savings and then some. If we are to spend the equivalent of our national savings, on a single project, the benefit needs to be clear and overwhelming. What won’t we be able to fund? How many jobs will be created from this project? Where will those jobs be? In a tight labour market, how will those jobs be filled? Will they divert skills from other national priorities like building residential homes? Will these jobs be the worst targeted, most expensive in Australian history?”
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The Terms of Reference: Broad, Sharp — and Not Quite Neutral
The Terms of Reference are unusually broad. They cover strategic rationale, operational capability, regional security, Australia’s relations with China, ASEAN and Pacific nations, the Treaty of Rarotonga, economic impacts, workforce consequences, industry and research, delivery risk, Pillar 2 technologies, nuclear accidents, nuclear waste, First Nations impacts, alternative defence options, transparency, consultation and parliamentary oversight.
That breadth is useful because AUKUS is not just a submarine program. It is a strategic realignment, an industrial project, a nuclear stewardship challenge, a diplomatic signal and a generational budget commitment wrapped inside one of the most complex defence procurement deals Australia has ever attempted.
The Terms of Reference also recognise something often missing from official debate: opportunity cost. Every dollar spent on AUKUS is a dollar not spent elsewhere in Defence, or beyond Defence altogether. The inquiry is right to ask whether AUKUS strengthens the Australian Defence Force or hollows out other capabilities to feed one very large, very late-arriving machine.
But the Terms of Reference are also written from a sceptical premise. They ask whether AUKUS enhances or jeopardises Australia’s security, but the surrounding language leans toward jeopardy. They ask whether nuclear accidents can be “absolutely” averted or contained, a standard no complex technology can honestly meet. Aircraft, dams, mines, ships, refineries and hospitals are not assessed on absolute safety, but on risk, mitigation, regulation, consequences and accountability. By using the word “absolutely”, the inquiry gives critics of its fairness an easy target.
The better question is not whether risk can be abolished. It cannot. The better question is whether the risk is understood, disclosed, governed and justified by the strategic benefit.
That is where the inquiry could do its best work.
Is the Outcome Already Known?
In one sense, yes. The inquiry is unlikely to conclude that AUKUS is a tidy, affordable, risk-free masterstroke and everyone should stop worrying. Its origin, framing and leadership all point toward a critical report.
But “critical” does not necessarily mean “predetermined”.
The outcome that matters may not be a simple recommendation to scrap or keep AUKUS. The real value may lie in the questions the inquiry forces into the public domain. Can the United States actually spare Virginia-class submarines when its own shipyards are under pressure? What happens if a future US administration decides America’s needs come first? How sovereign is a capability that depends on US technology, US permissions, US maintenance systems and US strategic priorities? Where will Australia store high-level nuclear waste? What does “jobs creation” mean if the industrial base, workforce and skills pipeline are not ready? What capabilities are being delayed, cancelled or weakened to make room for AUKUS spending?
These are not fringe questions. They are the ordinary questions any board would ask before approving a project. The strange thing is that Australia appears to have reached the point of national commitment before the public was allowed to see the business case.
AUKUS supporters argue that the strategic environment has deteriorated, that China’s military expansion has changed the Indo-Pacific, and that Australia needs long-range, stealthy, survivable submarines able to operate with allies. That argument deserves serious examination. Nuclear-powered submarines offer endurance and range that conventional submarines cannot match. Pillar 2 cooperation on artificial intelligence, quantum technology, cyber, undersea systems and electronic warfare may deliver nearer-term benefits.
But the hard question remains: is Australia buying security, or buying dependency?
Yankunytjatjara woman and Commissioner Karina Lester said. “For decades Aboriginal people of this country have had nuclear weapons tested on our traditional lands, we have been pressured to be the solution to nuclear waste. Our traditional lands have been mined on and our communities continually pressured by an industry that has harmed us for generations. What is Australia’s plan to manage the nuclear waste under this AUKUS Agreement? Will Australia be taking in nuclear waste from the UK and the US under this agreement? We fear it will be our mobs and our countries that is expected to take it. And once again, no one has bothered to talk to us. We have the lived experience and that’s why First Nations voices are crucial to this Public Inquiry.”
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The Missing Inquiry Canberra Never Held
The most politically potent aspect of today’s launch is not Garrett’s celebrity, nor even the size of the AUKUS bill. It is the democratic gap the inquiry is designed to expose.
The United Kingdom has examined AUKUS through parliamentary processes. The United States has reviewed the deal through its own defence machinery. Australia, the country paying the biggest political and strategic price relative to its size, has not held a full parliamentary inquiry into the pact.
That absence is the ghost in the room. For a nation asked to accept nuclear-powered submarines, allied submarine rotations, long-term waste obligations, deepening integration with US war planning and a bill stretching into the 2050s, “trust us” is not a policy explanation. It is a very expensive shrug.
The Public Inquiry cannot undo that failure on its own. It cannot replace parliamentary scrutiny. It cannot access everything a government inquiry could access. It cannot compel the national security establishment to explain itself.
But it can make silence harder to maintain.
A Public Test for a Private Deal
AUKUS was born in secrecy. It now faces a public forum.
The commissioners will need to prove that they are not merely prosecuting a case, but testing one. The government will need to explain why a project of this scale has not already faced the level of scrutiny now being attempted outside official channels. AUKUS supporters will need to do more than invoke the alliance and point north. AUKUS critics will need to do more than count the dollars and cry danger.
The question is not whether submarines are good or bad in the abstract. The question is whether this submarine deal, on these terms, with these partners, at this cost, on this timeline, in this region, makes Australia safer.
That is the question the government should have put before the public long ago.
Now Peter Garrett and the AUKUS Public Inquiry have dragged it into the daylight. Whether Canberra answers plainly is another matter. On defence megaprojects, daylight often arrives after the invoice — and by then the ink is usually dry.
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