AUKUS: What Else Could Australia Buy for $368 Billion?

Pardon the pun, but Anthony Albanese’s Government is clearly rusted on to spending $368 billion on AUKUS. Second-hand nuclear-powered submarines from the United States with no warranty, no guaranteed delivery, and no guarantee of sovereign control. We’re told they’re necessary to keep us safe in an increasingly uncertain strategic environment.

I don’t buy it. AUKUS is not about making Australia safer. It risks making our region more unstable, deepens our dependence on the United States, and ties us even more tightly to the Trump Regime's recklessnes and hence potential conflict with China. In other words, AUKUS does not just come with an enormous price tag. It comes with a strategic cost too.

But there’s another question that’s receiving far less attention: what else could Australia do with the $368 billion? Economists call this opportunity cost. It’s the value of the alternatives we give up when we choose one option over another. When governments spend money, they make choices. Every dollar spent in one area is a dollar that can’t be spent elsewhere. That doesn’t mean defence spending is automatically wrong. It is a legitimate responsibility of government.

But this is the same Government that has just announced shelving of the Melbourne-to-Brisbane Inland Rail project because the costs are too high. Apparently Australia can’t afford a freight rail project that would would cost one-eighth of the AUKUS price tag, reduce business costs, cut emissions and make our roads safer by shifting long-haul freight off highways. But we can afford $368 billion for AUKUS.

So for roughly the same amount of money, what else could Australia build or support instead of AUKUS? I did some maths. Here are some examples.

• We could build around 180 major hospitals.

• We could employ more than 300,000 nurses or teachers for a decade.

• We could fund dental care through Medicare for decades.

• We could fund residential aged-care postions for 3.4 million elderly Australians.

• We could provide seven million young Aussies with $50,000 towards a housing deposit.

• We could build high-speed rail between Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane.

• We could fully fund the Melbourne-to-Brisbane Inland Rail freight line eight times over.

  
  

The scale of AUKUS is extraordinary. $368 billion is hard to visualise. Translating it into hospitals, nurses, teachers, dental care, housing, aged care, and high-speed rail helps bring the figure back into the real world. The opportunity cost becomes tangible.

Why is AUKUS more important than fixing the housing crisis?

Why is it more important than universal dental care?

Why is it more important than reducing hospital waiting lists?

Why is it more important than aged care?

Why is it more important than preventing species extinctions?

Why is it more important than modernising Australia’s transport infrastructure?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re exactly the questions the Government should be answering when proposing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our money. The irony is that many of the greatest threats facing Australians today are not military. The average Australian is far more likely to be affected by an unaffordable home, a delayed medical procedure, inadequate aged care, climate change, biodiversity loss, extreme weather or rising living costs than by an enemy submarine.

Yet we’re gaslighted and told there’s not enough money available to address these challenges. But clearly, there is. The money exists. The issue is priorities.

AUKUS isn’t just a defence decision. It’s a decision about what kind of country Australia wants to be: an anxious middle power locked into Trump's war mongering, or a confident, independent nation investing in real security for its people, communities, environment and future. Before we spend $368 billion on second-hand submarines, we should by asking a much more honest question. What are we giving up in return?

The whopping $368 billion AUKUS price tag could buy Australia a lot of other things.