When the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club in March 2023 to savage the bipartisan commitment to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement, he did so only days after Anthony Albanese had stood alongside his British counterpart Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden in San Diego to announce the ‘optimal pathway’ for the agreement. Fluttering above them were the respective flags of the three nations. In the background lay berthed the USS Missouri, a Virginia class submarine lined with American sailors and festooned with its own bunting. But as Keating noted in typically pungent fashion, on that day ‘there was only one payer: the Australian prime minister … there’s three leaders standing there … [but] only one is paying … our bloke, Albo. The other two, they’ve got the band playing, happy days are here again.’

Happy days are most certainly not here again for AUKUS, especially for its Pillar One component, which envisages Australia acquiring between three and five US Virginia class submarines from the United States in the early 2030s, and then, from the early 2040s, eight new SSN-AUKUS submarines: British designed, partly Australian built, and with an American weapons and combat system. But the spectre of cost blowouts and production delays already haunts the agreement. The Australian government will hand over around $5billion to the British government over the next decade to subsidise an expansion of British submarine production capacity and a down payment on design work for the new SSN AUKUS. That comes on top of the $6.81 billion Canberra will be pay to Washington over the period 2024-33 to assist America’s submarine industrial production line