Former prime minister Paul Keating has taken aim at Australia's AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal with the United States and the United Kingdom, calling it the "worst international decision" by a Labor government since conscription in World War I.
"For $368 billion, we're going to get eight submarines. It must be the worst deal in all history," Mr Keating said. And the price tag is the least of Paul's concern - although it should be added he had not been briefed on the extras, such as heated leather seats, roof-racks, sports styling, Parking Assist and a range of other dealer extras, which made the base price for the eight new submarines of $16 billion balloon to $386 billion.
I think we can all relax because, as Hugh White predicts in this article, "The multiple points of failure built into this program, coupled with the deep flaws in its underlying strategic logic, make it a very fair bet that Australia will never operate nuclear-powered submarines, while AUKUS will become an embarrassing memory, if it is remembered at all. And if Australia is to retain a submarine capability, it will have to go back to square one and look for a conventionally powered successor to Collins."
Still, there is the break fee to be considered: we paid $835 million for dumping the $90-billion French submarine deal; extrapolate that to the $386-billion AUKUS-deal and we're looking at some $3.6 BILLION.
That's a lot of hospital beds, TAFE and Uni-places, free hip- and knee-replacements, and personal carers taking extremely obese people to the public swimming pool, so we'd better crank up the old ROBODEBT again!
