Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

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For if anything is destabilising our politics today it is not the radical fringes. Despite the noise they make on social media, there’s not much evidence that Australians are increasingly drawn to them. The story of modern Australian politics is not about the rise of something new but the decline of something old. It is one of the most important trends in Australian democracy, yet one of the least discussed: our politics is dominated by two parties that the public simply doesn’t care about.

At the 2019 election the Coalition’s primary vote was 41.4 per cent, its second-worst result since 1972. Labor was at 33.3 per cent, its poorest result since 1934.

Party membership figures are tightly held, but it is safe to say that even despite a rapidly growing population, the membership base of both major parties has been shrinking for decades. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that only 1 per cent of Australians are active in any political party today.

It is impossible to understand the political turmoil of the last ten years — marked by six prime ministerships and two periods of minority government — without considering major-party decline. It also reveals why Australian politics could actually get worse.

How bad? Major-party decline is happening in every Western democracy including Britain, where it played a big part in Brexit. Australia could be in for something just as transformative.

You might say the public mood is different here, and that voters are generally satisfied with their lives and with government. But that’s almost irrelevant. The 2016 Brexit referendum didn’t come from a groundswell of public opposition to the European Union. Opinion polling shows that Europe barely registered as a concern for the British people until late 2015, when campaigning began to gather steam.

Rather, the referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union was the result of a purely political dispute inside the Conservative Party, with Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party playing a supporting role. The once-mighty Tories, who had ruled Britain for two-thirds of the postwar period, were so spooked by UKIP and their own Eurosceptic faction that they agreed to a referendum.

Still, prime minister Cameron and his team called the vote in the firm belief that Brexit would be defeated. The pro-EU consensus in elite political circles was so strong that it was simply assumed the public shared it.

But the abiding condition of Western democratic politics is hollowness. Political parties were once the vehicle for voters to communicate with the state, but when the public began to withdraw en masse from mainstream political parties, the parties staged a withdrawal of their own, leaving a void at the centre of political life.

Parties evolved into highly professionalised election-winning machines that didn’t really need members. Modern politics is capital-intensive, not labour-intensive, so what the big parties need is money. They get it from large donors and, increasingly, from the state, which in most Western democracies has taken to funding election campaigns.

The result is a party system sealed off from the public. Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell described the party-political class as “a sort of monastic order [which has] fuelled the belief in the wider population that they are governed by a separate, out-of-touch class.”

This class comes to share certain beliefs about politics and the world. They agreed, for example, that the natural order of things was for the United Kingdom to get gradually closer to the European Union (even if both Tory and Labour governments had to genuflect to anti-European sentiment from time to time). The public, as we discovered in 2016, was far less invested in this vision of the future.

If there is a rough equivalent to Brexit in Australia, it is immigration policy.

High immigration rates are a point of consensus among our political elite, and they connect us with Asia just as EU membership connected Britain to Europe. In fact, if either major party ever broke from the pro-immigration consensus and declared that Australia is full, voters would be faced with a choice about our relationship with Asia even more momentous than the one British voters faced in regard to Europe.

Because the percentage of Asian immigrants to Australia is now so high, Australia looks more Asian with each passing year. If Australia was to suspend immigration altogether, we would be calling an indefinite pause to our demographic integration with our region.

More importantly, in a region marked by economic dynamism and emerging great powers (one of them, Indonesia, right on our doorstep), Australia would be passing up the opportunity to determine its own future. In relative economic terms, ending our immigration program would mean beginning to go backwards, becoming a smaller power among rising giants.

This is a worst-case scenario, but the hollowing out of Western democracies is producing a lot of surprises lately — not just Brexit but also Trump and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe. None of those things can be explained without factoring in the decline of traditional parties and the void that has opened up between voters and the governing class. Australia is not exempt. •

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