Chesters, Lisa MP

CHAIR ( Ms Chesters ): I declare open this public hearing of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties for its inquiry into the Nuclear-Powered Submarine Partnership and Collaboration Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I also extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who might be joining us today. In accordance with the committee's resolution of 31 July 2025, this hearing will be broadcast and the proof and official transcripts of the proceedings will be published on the parliament's website. I remind all members of the media of the need for fair and accurate reporting of the proceedings of the committee. I now call our first witnesses. Welcome. Do you have anything to say about the capacity in which you appear? Mr Deere-Jones : I'm speaking to you from Wales, in the UK, and I am appearing in my capacity as a consultant researcher who has written a report about the AUKUS submarines for FOE Australia. Mr Sweeney : I'm joining you today from Bunurong country, in Gippsland. CHAIR: Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as the proceedings of the respective houses. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious manner and may be regarded as contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. It is the responsibility of witnesses to accurately record any questions on notice that are taken. I now invite each of you to make an opening statement before we proceed to a discussion and questions from members. Dr Green, would you like to make an opening statement, and then we'll hear from each of you in turn. Dr Green : Our first recommendation is to reject the treaty. I draw your attention in particular to two submissions that you have received which outline in graphic detail how flawed the British nuclear submarine program is and the sorts of problems that will inevitably emerge if we continue to go down this path with AUKUS. One of those submissions is from Tim Deere-Jones, who we'll hear from in a moment. Since Rear Admiral Peter Briggs is not here, I would like to mention a couple of points from his submission; he is a long-time submariner. Rear Admiral Briggs states that the treaty 'protects the UK against any claims for flaws in SSN-AUKUS design or delays in delivery'. There is a recommendation from Friends of the Earth flowing from that, which is to amend the liability provisions in the treaty to address the problem Rear Admiral Briggs has mentioned. He further states in his submission: 'The path we are on has a high risk of failure. Many of these risks are completely beyond our control. The treaty will make Australia entirely dependent on an already fragile UK submarine industry. The UK submarine capability is in a mess. The Astute SSN program is in a mess. The UK's submarine arm appears to have fallen below critical mass. Recovery will be challenging and prolonged. The project to manufacture the reactor cores for the new ballistic missile submarines and SSN-AUKUS is in serious, serious difficulties. Based on past performances and the issues set out above, the British program to deliver SSN-AUKUS cannot be fast-tracked. Indeed, it is highly likely that it will be late and over budget. Finally, the existing plan, the so-called optimal pathway, is comprised of multiple serious serial risks. I would describe it as a quagmire.' Those are the words of Rear Admiral Briggs. They're shocking, and committee members should be shocked and should be contemplating the problems very seriously. My second and final set of comments are on a recommendation to amend the treaty to ensure Australian compliance with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the clause that states that no storage or disposal of hazardous wastes shall take place on the lands of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent. This is an issue particularly with respect to nuclear waste management but also more broadly with respect to AUKUS. In support of that recommendation, I also draw your attention to the federal parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs' November 2023 report, where they recommended: … the Commonwealth Government ensure its approach to developing legislation and policy … be consistent with the Articles outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I'll leave it there, with that recommendation: that the treaty needs to be amended to protect the rights of Australia's First Nations peoples, particularly given the sordid history of atomic bomb tests and repeated attempts to dump nuclear waste on Aboriginal land without their consent over the past 25 years. I'll leave it there, Chair. CHAIR: Thank you, Dr Green. Mr Deere-Jones, did you want to add anything further on behalf of Friends of the Earth? Mr Deere-Jones : Yes, I would be grateful for the opportunity, Chair. I have 40 years of experience of working on marine radioactivity and hazardous cargo issues. During that period, I have spent a lot of time looking at nuclear submarine issues in the UK, and, as you can see from my report, a range of problems have arisen. As Jim said, our submarine program here is in extreme disarray: constant overspends; constant underperformance of production and build; many problems with actual deployment; massive problems with decommissioning of the submarines and where to put the waste and how to deal with it when you've got it out. I think the lessons that I have attempted to convey in my report for the Australian AUKUS program should be a matter of considerable concern for you. In particular, I have problems about, as I said, the manufacture and deployment of nuclear powered attack submarines, and the abandonment of the naval test reactor, which we had in the UK, which has been referred to in my report. It is a major issue here now, because we are now moving into a program of building submarine reactors with no pre-test to them. So they're going to be built and slapped straight into boats—and that includes the AUKUS boats—whereas, previously, we had a long period in the UK where the submarine reactors would be tested for at least two or three years before actual deployment in the naval program. So there's that. Then there's the issue of the disposal of the waste. Any form of maintenance in UK submarine docks and repair yards has always involved discharges of radioactive waste to air and to the marine environment, to the detriment of the environment and local communities. Finally, one of the major issues which is very little talked about in the issues of nuclear submarines is the interactions between nuclear submarines and civilian vessels, which, in the UK, have been lethal in a number of circumstances for fishermen and sea-users and have cost a considerable amount of money to fishing communities by way of lost boats and lost gear. I will stop there. There are many more issues, but I think that will do to go on with. Thank you for your time. CHAIR: Thank you. We'll now go to Mr Philip White from Friends of the Earth Adelaide. Mr White : Thank you for the opportunity to present my views on behalf of Friends of the Earth Adelaide. Both the trilateral AUKUS agreement and the bilateral AUK agreement are problematic for many reasons, as discussed in our written submission. Today I'll just focus on the security dimension. These agreements are not in Australia's security interests. They don't make Australia safer. Rather, they make Australians less safe while compromising Australia's sovereignty. This is not just the view of so-called radical leftie-greenie peaceniks. It's a view shared by many people whose careers were deeply embedded within the Australian political and military establishment—for example, former deputy secretary of Defence and author of the 2000 Defence white paper, Professor Hugh White; retired Australian Army major general Michael Smith; former prime ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull; former foreign ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr; and former Liberal Party leader John Hewson. And former Australian defence chief and admiral Chris Barrie—who, in the early 2000s, argued for nuclear powered submarines—now questions whether AUKUS submarines are a strategic priority; you can refer for that to a report released recently by the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, of which he is a member. These are not people whose opinions can be dismissed as naive and ill informed. They are people who, having been liberated from the constraints of office, are sounding the alarm. It's incumbent on committees like this to take note. Sam Roggeveen is director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute. He believes that AUKUS is undermining our diplomacy in the Pacific. It gets in the way of our goal of maintaining our influence in the Pacific and at the same time preventing China from getting a foothold. It actually incentivises China to try to acquire bases in the Pacific. He points out that AUKUS makes us less safe by turning Australian submarine ports into targets. Why? Because the best time to target a nuclear powered submarine is before it submerges. That is when it is in port. So AUKUS turns our submarine ports into targets. AUKUS compromises Australia's sovereignty. The Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, claims that Australia will make its own decisions about the use of our nuclear powered submarines. This is not credible. Whatever Mr Marles might say, there is no chance that the 'America first' administration of Donald Trump would allow Australia to acquire Virginia class submarines unless we first commit to making them available in support of US operations when requested. If the US went to war with China over Taiwan, it would be the height of folly to believe that Australia could refuse to send our nuclear powered submarines. So AUKUS would drag us into a war which is against our national interests. Let us be clear-eyed about the US part of AUKUS. The US is no longer the country that it was. We might still have a shared language, but our values have diverged. The values of Trump-led America frighten most Australians. President Trump's actions are straight out of the playbook of other authoritarians around the world. He has no respect for the rule of law either nationally or internationally. He has no compunction about making previously unimaginable threats to close allies. Trump's America is not a country that Australia should rely on for its national security. Major General Michael Smith and Admiral Chris Barrie are calling for a broader view of national security. Climate change is the biggest single threat to our security, but the focus on AUKUS and the so-called China threat obscures the fact that our security is threatened by many other things that should be assessed in a proper national security assessment. It also skews the allocation of scarce resources. That applies to the allocation of resources within defence and to the broader spectrum of issues affecting the security of Australians. Our wider national security considerations need to be seen through a lens broader than simply defence. Due to its enormous cost, AUKUS detracts from our security by robbing these other important areas of much-needed funding. What I have said so far assumes that the US and the UK have the capacity to actually deliver the proposed nuclear powered submarines. That is a very dubious assumption, as Jim Green mentioned by quoting Peter Briggs. The records of both countries in constructing nuclear powered submarines suggest that they don't have the industrial capacity to deliver submarines to Australia on time and on budget, if at all. But if we wait for the project to fail there will be a huge opportunity cost. To minimise this opportunity cost, the government should immediately suspend AUKUS and begin a broad based review of Australia's national security, as suggested by Major General Michael Smith and Admiral Chris Barrie. JSCOT should recommend such a review be undertaken before the AUK agreement is signed and before proceeding with AUKUS. Mr Sweeney : ACF welcomes this opportunity to speak because it believes there has been limited scrutiny around AUKUS. We believe there has been undue secrecy from day one. It was announced by former prime minister Scott Morrison by surprise. There was no white paper, no green paper, no discussion papers, no independent review of the rationale or the assumptions. It was speedily agreed to by Labor in opposition in a highly politicised context. It's been prosecuted by Labor in government without caveats or a lot of scrutiny, and that's been highlighted in the national interest assessment to this proposed treaty action which says: No public, industry and non-governmental consultation has been undertaken as the Agreement relates to national security … We believe that there are legitimate national security considerations but, equally or even more importantly, there are legitimate national scrutiny considerations with AUKUS. In September 2021, when it was announced, the Chief of Navy said that this was a decision that will 'no doubt change the shape of our nation'. A key ACF call through this has been for an independent review, not a segmented modular assessment of component parts of the project. We need a holistic, comprehensive independent review that examines the assumptions in the rationale. This hasn't happened and it needs to. ACF strongly supports the call from the crossbench and the Greens for an independent assessment. We have extensive concerns about the AUKUS plan, and these have been discussed in our submission, previous parliamentary and legislative interventions, and they've been raised publicly and in media comment—some of these include nuclear safety and waste concerns. As an environment organisation, they're a key core concern for us. On 1 November this year, less than a month from today, there's going to be a dedicated naval nuclear regulator that will take control of regulation of AUKUS-related nuclear issues. We have raised detailed concerns over this new office—its lack of functional separation and independence from the AUKUS proponent, its lack of public reporting mechanisms, the fact that it can be directed by the Minister of Defence and is housed in Defence and more. We believe that our coast, our waters, our ports and our port communities deserve better assurance than this mechanism provides. We have deep concerns that the approach being taken will continue to prioritise military confidentiality over community confidence, and it'll continue to prioritise the military's needs over environmental stewardship and nuclear responsibility and accountability. We're really worried about that in relation to radioactive waste. As many in the committee will be aware, radioactive waste is a long-running and highly contested public policy arena in Australia. On the domestic front, there's no reason to think it'll be any different in relation to high-level military waste, especially if the government maintains a top-down centralised approach. We support the call made by Dr Jim Green. We urge JSCOT to circuit break this issue and seek to address widespread community concern by calling for the formal adoption of free, prior and informed consent as a foundation principle in radioactive waste siting and management. That would be consistent with international best practice, the UN special rapporteur's 2024 report on Australian toxics and the 2023 Senate inquiry. It would also recognise really deep community concern. We've made a number of recommendations in our submission. I commend them to you, and, in closing my introductory remarks, I want to highlight one of these key recommendations. We're very concerned about mission creep with AUKUS, including a future expansion from facilitating, hosting and servicing nuclear powered vessels to potentially accepting nuclear armed ones. This is a deep concern, especially given that both of our AUKUS partners are nuclear weapon states. ACF welcomes the repeated statements that AUKUS involves nuclear power and does not involve nuclear weapons, but we want to see this formalised and codified. We want to see two clear actions to give operation and affect to these assurances. The first one is the recognition that Australians have the right to know and the right to say no. We must not accept, in our nation, nuclear ambiguity from our AUKUS partners. We must not accept 'neither confirm nor deny'. We need to know if their vessels, planes and other platforms are carrying nuclear weapons. Finally, and vitally, we must set clear nuclear guardrails and guidelines, and, in particular, this is done by advancing signature and ratification of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—our best way to control and abolish our worst weapons. Signing this would send a message, from Birdsville to Beijing and from Wagga to Washington, that Australia stands on the side of the international rules-based order and stands against the use of inhumane, unlawful weapons of mass murder. Thanks for your time. I look forward to any questions. CHAIR: Thank you for those opening statements. I will ask questions first, then we'll go to Senator Whish-Wilson, and then we'll go to the member for Sturt, so we'll just try to alternate it a bit. And then I reckon the member for Makin has some questions too. I seek clarification on the nuclear waste issue. Mr Deere-Jones, in your opening statement, you made a comment about the discharge of nuclear waste into oceans and seas. Did I mishear that? Can you expand a bit on your understanding of, when it comes to this program, the impact or what is nuclear waste and how it will be disposed of? I might have misheard it, but please clarify that for me. Mr Deere-Jones : You didn't mishear. The UK experience is that, once you've got nuclear powered submarines deployed off the stocks and in the sea, they will always require some form of maintenance. We have had a series of reactor types put into the UK boats, some of which were supposed to be lifetime reactors—that is, to supposedly function without repair or removal and replacement for the lifetime of the boat—but some of them of a particular reactor class have always required some form of maintenance. Once you open up a PWR, you've got to deal with quite a lot of radioactivity. In particular, there are three or four nuclides which are a major issue for the environment. Once you open them up, you can't avoid having discharges to the atmosphere and discharges to water—sometimes purposeful, but very often as a result of accidents in the handling and management of the process. We have an attack nuclear submarine based at Devonport in the south-west of the UK, where they have done regular maintenance on attack submarines powered by PWRs, and discharges of tritium and cobalt-60 in particular are of particular concern. You can find tritium and cobalt-60 cropping up many miles downstream—by marine current and tidal action is what I meant by downstream—along the coast. Because we now know that marine radioactivity can transfer from the sea to the land in detectable quantities, people have now begun to realise that we are getting marine radioactivity into the terrestrial coastal zone. It's blowing in conditions of storm and bubble break in waves. It's blowing ashore over the coastline. I think the nearest that it has technically been proved is that you can find the stuff 10 miles inland in pasture grass and agricultural produce, which people are then going to be consuming, so that's a major concern. The other concern is: what do you do with reactors and their used fuel when the boat has exceeded its lifetime and has been laid up and you've got to decommission it? This is a major problem because then you have your radioactive fuel, being uranium based fuel. As a result of burning the stuff, you've got plutonium and americium and these radionuclides, which are alpha emitters which can have a half-life of hundreds of thousands of years. The reactor itself is hugely radioactive. It's a large lump of material. It's certainly the size of a car. It may be, depending on the particular design and make and its function, larger than that. You've got to get it out safely from the boat. You've got to transport it to a dump site. If you haven't got a geological disposal facility, as we haven't got in the UK, then you've got to find an above-ground storage site to keep it where you can keep it safe. You've got to be able to monitor it. You've got to be able to condition it if it has any particular problems and looks like some form of runaway corrosion and leak potential. All of this costs an enormous amount of money because you've got to be watching the stuff. You've got to build the facilities to remove it out of the boats. You've got to build the facilities to keep it safe from the public and the environment while it's waiting to be transported to its intermediate-period dump site. Then you've got to be looking for a long-term, hopefully perpetual, dump site for it. We have not managed to do any of this in the UK, despite having many decades of nuclear submarines. Our reactors are still either stored in the boats, which are now rotting afloat, at a place called Sellafield, above ground. The cost of these facilities keeps ballooning. The expense of maintaining them and manning them keeps ballooning. Meanwhile, you've got this heavily radioactive material, which sits in various above-ground sites. I heard the word 'targets' in the event of nuclear war being mentioned earlier on. Of course these above-ground dump sites are prime targets for an enemy, who can hit them, not necessarily with a nuclear missile but with a cruise missile, and it will create the effect of a dirty nuclear bomb. So the waste problem is a live issue in the UK. It's ongoing, it's getting worse and so far I've seen no sign from the Australian government's nuclear program, or AUKUS program, that they've really begun any form of work on that. It'll take at least the time scale between now and when those boats are supposed to be delivered to you for you to be able to get a decent way on with that program of finding the facilities to manage, store and eventually dispose of these nuclear wastes. So yes, it's a big problem.