Radio Interview, ABC RN Breakfast

SUBJECTS: AUKUS cooperation agreement; AUSMIN; US force posture; GWEO enterprise and long-range missile manufacturing; Paul Keating’s comments; Maritime Cooperative Activity; Solomon Islands cooperation. 

DAVID LIPSON, HOST: Australia has reached a new AUKUS agreement, a new milestone if you like, with the United States and United Kingdom on the transfer of nuclear material. It comes after Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles visited the United States and Canada for high level talks with his counterparts there. He joined RN Breakfast a short time ago from Vancouver. Richard Marles, thanks for being with us.

RICHARD MARLES, DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: Pleasure, David.

LIPSON: What kind of deal have you struck and how is it going to work?

MARLES: Well, the agreement that we signed earlier this week with the United Kingdom and the United States is really a foundational document which provides the legal underpinning of what we agreed with the US and the UK under the banner of AUKUS in March of last year. So, this provides Australia with the nuclear-powered submarine capability, a capability which is being provided by the United States and the United Kingdom. This agreement is the legal underpinning for that technology to be provided to Australia, for, ultimately, the nuclear equipment to be provided to Australia – so, that is both the Virginia class submarines from the United States, the nuclear reactors from Rolls Royce that will form part of the submarines that we build in Australia – but it also affirms that in walking down this path, we will meet our international obligations, our international obligations in terms of non proliferation, also our international obligations under the Rarotonga Treaty. So, this is a foundational document which is really important in terms of providing that legal underpinning and it was a significant moment signing that with the UK and US on Monday.

LIPSON: Ok. So, it does allow for nuclear material to be brought to Australia. Of course, that's what's going to fuel the nuclear submarines. And you've insisted that it won't allow for the transfer of nuclear waste to Australia. But is there any legislative assurance around that? That nuclear waste won't end up in Australia?

MARLES: Well, nuclear waste won't end up in Australia other than the waste that is generated by Australia. That is the agreement that we reached with the UK and the US back in March of last year. And so all this is doing is providing for the legal underpinning of that. So, to be completely clear, there is no circumstance in which we would be taking waste from any other country. We made clear in March of last year that we will be responsible for our own nuclear waste and that will involve the disposal of the spent nuclear reactors, and we're going through a process in respect of that. But again, to be clear, we're not going to be in a position of needing to dispose of any of those reactors until the early 2050s. What this agreement does, though, is provide for the legal underpinning of what we agreed in March of last year, and we will see a nuclear reactor come embedded in the Virginia class submarines that we procure, we will be seeing nuclear reactors come from Rolls Royce, which will form part of the submarines that we build in Australia. And in order to actually enable that requires a treaty-level agreement between our countries. And that's what we've now signed.

LIPSON: You've also attended this week the AUSMIN talks in the United States. And the kind of agreement that came out of that was for more US defence bombers, fighter jets, surveillance aircraft operating from Australia's top end. Will that include nuclear armed, long-range bombers that have the capacity to reach China?

MARLES: So, America very much respects the obligations that we have under the Treaty of Rarotonga, and that is a treaty which sees that there are not nuclear weapons that operate from Australia. Of course, America has a policy which we understand and ultimately support of not disclosing what is on any of its platforms at any given moment in time. But the way in which American force posture is operating in Australia is in a manner which absolutely respects Australia's obligations, and those obligations exist under the Treaty of Rarotonga in the terms that I've described.

LIPSON: But would we know, I mean, under that ambiguity, would Australia know if they were armed with nuclear ordnance or not?

MARLES: Well, Australia has full knowledge and concurrence in terms of the way in which America engages in all of its force posture activities in Australia and out of Australia. And so, those full knowledge and concurrence arrangements which have been detailed significantly by our government, which extend– now much more broadly than what has historically been the case, those arrangements have been in place in terms of our intelligence relationship in facilities like pine gap, they've been in place for a long time. But as we have seen an expansion of American force posture, we have in turn expanded those arrangements to cover all of that, to ensure that Australian sovereignty is respected and maintained in this process. And so the short answer to the question is we will know.

LIPSON: The AUSMIN agreement has also sort of progressed the assembly of Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems in Australia by 2025. How significant is that? And will we ultimately have long-range missiles based here that can strike at a country like China?

MARLES: Well, I'm not going to answer the last part of that question. What we have made clear is that we want to have a longer range strike capability and that forms very much part of the objectives of the National Defence Strategy to give us a capacity to engage in greater impactful projection and longer range strike is part of that. But in order to have the war stocks that we need, what's been become really clear since the war in Ukraine is that the ability to procure those stocks around the world has become much more limited and we need to be able to engage in that manufacturing in Australia. That's why we've invested heavily in the development of a Guided Weapons Explosive Ordnance enterprise in Australia. That's why we've made clear that we want to see ourselves in a position of being able to begin the manufacture of GMLRS, which is land based rockets, from next year. And the beginnings of that manufacture is on track to happen next year. But a key part of this, because we are talking about American technology, is to ensure that there is the ability for that technology to be used in Australia. And so what came out of AUSMIN this week was a commitment to sign a MoU in respect of that this year.

LIPSON: The reason I'm asking such sort of specific questions about one country in particular is because of the spray that Paul Keating, the former Labor Prime Minister, has given – what is happening, what this government is doing and previous governments – he says Australia is losing its strategic authority, putting a bigger target on our backs as we seek to defend, not ourselves per se, according to Paul Keating, but the AUKUs partnership itself. He says AUKUS and this build up, if you like, is actually what we're now having to defend ourselves on. What's your response to that?

MARLES: Well, I mean, obviously Paul Keating is entitled to his view and to express it, and I'm not about to respond to that. I'd simply say that we have gone through an extensive exercise of assessing our strategic landscape in a context where we really are facing a very fragile world, where the rules-based order is under as much pressure as it has been since the end of the Second World War, and where that in turn gives rise to the most complex strategic circumstances that we've had to deal with since the end of the Second World War. Now, in assessing that, what is clear to us is that our strategic objective lies in the maintenance of that rules-based order given that freedom of navigation on the high seas, as an example, is utterly fundamental to Australia's national prosperity and national security when we see a much greater proportion of our national income derived from trade, the physical manifestation of which is our sea lines of communication–

LIPSON: I will get to freedom of navigation. Go on.

MARLES: –I just want to finish, David. So, what we are doing is seeking to protect that. What we are doing is seeking to make our contribution to the collective security of the region in which we live, and that is the Indo-Pacific. And what that requires is an ability for us to engage in much greater protection. Now that is why we are pursuing the capability of a long-range capable submarine. It is why we are pursuing the capabilities of longer range strike missiles. Why we're looking at having a much more mobile Army. All of these are about ensuring that we are able to make a contribution when we see that the geography of our national security lies well beyond our borders.

LIPSON: But by tying ourselves to what Paul Keating describes as an aggressive partner, are we increasing the threat to Australia?

MARLES: Australia has been in an alliance with the United States since the 1950s – 

LIPSON: Not like this, though?

MARLES: –well before that. Well, absolutely like this. I mean–

LIPSON: We haven't seen this sort of military buildup that we're seeing now with US bases planned to open all over Australia with more bombers, planes, troops coming to Australia, with us building missiles here in Australia as part of this partnership. That's all new.

MARLES: Well, firstly, we're not talking about any bases at all. That is simply wrong. We are talking about a growing force posture which reflects a growing cooperation between Australia and America. We are talking about a greater defence industrial capability of Australia so that we can meet our own national interests and our own needs. And that's what we are doing. And yes, we are working in partnership with the United States in respect of that. But this is a partnership that we've been involved in, including during the period of Mr Keating's Prime Ministership, it is a partnership that we've been involved in for the better part of a century. And so none of that is new. But we do face a world which is very complex, where the rules-based order is under threat. And in that context it is absolutely essential that we are working with our partners in order to assert it. And I'd make one other point, David. American activity in Australia, such as the Marine Rotation in Darwin, which represents the heart of American force posture in Australia today, I mean, that rotation is an enormous opportunity seen by our neighbours to work with Australia and work with the United States. It is affording real opportunities to do more training, more exercise with our neighbours in the region. This is something which is fundamentally welcomed by the region because they see it as contributing to the collective security of our region.

LIPSON: On the multilateral cooperative activity, the freedom of overflight and navigation exercise that we undertook with Canada, the US and the Philippines this week, why didn't we send a warship to that?

MARLES: Well, our frigates and our destroyers have participated in freedom of navigation activities routinely, including in the West Philippine Sea, but in the South China Sea, the East China Sea. Not every activity is the same and we have a range of assets that we can bring to different activities in different moments. On this occasion, what we're contributing is a P‑8 aircraft. So, it's simply a function of what assets we have available and how we can best contribute to any given activity.

LIPSON: So, we didn't have assets available in the form of a warship. Is that the issue?

MARLES: Well, the asset which best suited this activity was a P-8. That is the issue. You can take any given exercise and ask, why wasn't a particular asset a part of it? I mean, the answer is we look at how we can best contribute to all the activities that we face and sometimes that is with ships, sometimes that is with planes. On this occasion, it's with a plane.

LIPSON: Just one final question. The Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manele wants Australia to fund the salaries of more than 3000 additional police over the next decade. Is that something you'd be willing to do and is that the best use of Australian resources?

MARLES: Well, we've been working very closely with the new prime minister, with the new Manele administration government in Solomon Islands. And doing more cooperation on policing is certainly something that we are interested in doing. I'm not going to go into the specifics of that now, but we are looking at ways in which we can contribute more to Solomon Islands national security and that very much includes its policing activities. It is definitely a key challenge that Solomon Islands faces and one of the key asks that they've had in dialogue that we've had with them. And we certainly think that in terms of making a contribution to Solomon Island's development, contributing to their national security is front and centre in respect of that. We actually feel pretty optimistic about where we're going in terms of security cooperation with Solomon Islands under Prime Minister Manele. In terms of taxpayer money, I think that Australians absolutely understand that we need to be placing a focus on the Pacific and greater engagement with the Pacific is in fact the most cost effective thing we can do in terms of the promotion of our own national security.

LIPSON: Richard Marles is the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister. Thank you so much for your time this morning.

MARLES: Thanks, David. Pleasure.

ENDS