NEXT DOOR TO THE BASE

Started handing out the Vote 1 cards around town today.

Secret Harbour sits next to the Rockingham electorate, and Rockingham has HMAS Stirling on Garden Island inside it — the base the nuclear submarines are coming to.

And the news: the US Navy expects around 2,300 Americans — sailors, civilian staff, contractors and their families — to be based in Western Australia by 2030. A United States Navy support unit, Naval Support Activity Stirling, was formally established at the base in May this year. It is administered under Navy Region Japan.

Does anyone understand what has happened here? Nuclear submarines, and now a permanent American support presence next door. How did that happen without a debate with the Australian people?

The official line is that Australia has a longstanding bipartisan policy of no foreign bases on Australian soil, and that the submarines rotate through rather than being based here. Then in August the Defence Industry Minister said the arrangement would begin “fading away” once we had our own boats — and within days the Defence Minister and the Chief of the Defence Force had corrected him: the American presence at Stirling is meant to be enduring.

So which is it? That is the whole problem. The public is told one thing about sovereignty and the record says another, and nobody was asked.

It is a slippery slope. What next — more base expansion, more personnel, more weapons? Each step is small and each step is permanent, and together they are our sovereignty.

This is war posturing towards our Asia-Pacific neighbours and our own trading partners, and it is destabilising for the region. AUKUS is a bad deal for many reasons. I write about them, and I offer another option.

The defence policy →
AUASIA — the alternative →

Vote 1 Brett Murrell, and AUKUS becomes AUASIA: an energy and manufacturing superpower for peace, not war.