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Australian leadership is under “no illusion as to the scale of the AUKUS task”, according to recent comments from Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.
The Deputy PM made the statement during a recent joint press conference at Osborne Shipyard in Adelaide on 21 October this year.
“Our starting posture here is to do this as quickly as we can (for AUKUS and acquisition of Virginia Class submarines). If there are ways of moving this thing forward faster, we will always be open to that,” he said during the conference.
“We’re under no illusion as to the scale of the task here. Submarines, nuclear-powered submarines are the single-most complex machine that humanity has ever built.
“We’re not only building that but we are standing up a production facility to build that. It is going to take time. So our best estimate is that those first submarines that will be built here at Osborne will enter the water in the early 2040s. It’s why we were so keen to close that gap if you like, to bring the date forward to the early 2030s in terms of acquiring in service Virginia Class submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.
“We’ll always be open to how this can be done quicker.”
The Deputy PM also outlined the AUKUS initiative as a “national endeavour” for Australia.
“In parts of the country, certainly here in Adelaide, there’s a real focus and understanding of AUKUS and what this place is going to mean to the economy of Adelaide, but the economy of South Australia. I think there is a point to be made that this is actually going to engage the industrial base of our entire nation,” Deputy PM Marles said.
“In states like Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, we don’t get this done without engaging the industrial bases of those states. And that is a message that, you know, I've been working on with Pat Conroy, the Minister for Defence Industry, with the relevant ministers across those states to just highlight how important AUKUS is in an industrial sense, for them.
“And it goes for Tassie, and of course, Western Australia has its own story. I think this is a very well understood project in Western Australia from an operational sense, with the Submarine Rotational Force-West, which will be operating from 2027 at HMAS Stirling in Rockingham. But it is absolutely right to say, yes, there is a lot of activity that occurs in South Australia and Western Australia, but we don't get this done without engaging the entire national industrial base. And at the end of the day, what we get from this, a future nuclear-powered submarine is a military capability which is there to keep every Australian safe.”
