By Eileen Darley, Convener Port Adelaide Community Opposes AUKUS (PACOA)

The Greens and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young held a public meeting on the 13th of March in Port Adelaide to inform and give residents an opportunity to express their concerns about the building of the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines and the accompanying nuclear waste at the Osborne Naval Shipyard. We reproduce the speech by Eileen Darley, one of the speakers at the community forum.

Im speaking on behalf of Port Adelaide Community Opposing AUKUS which is an entirely independent community group started last year in the wake of a series of alarming developments and announcements about the Osborne Nuclear Submarine facility.

Since it’s my job to set the scene  I’m going to take you back in time a little . It’s always hard to know how far back to go because we could start with the post WW2  world order where the US established itself as a dominant superpower by exporting their capital to every continent in the world, effectively stealing the resources of poor countries and exploiting their workers; or invading them , knocking over their democratically elected govts, establishing puppets  and generally  creating the environment where US corporations could accumulate vast profits by controlling the mining, energy and technology industries of other nations.

Australia signed on to this new order hook, line and sinker signing the ANZUS Treaty in 1951 and so began a constant stream of investment and ownership from US companies and, in the 60’s, the establishment of their Bases here, in the Northwest Cape and Pine Gap, marking an uptick in our economic, political and military dominance by the US. And basically, it’s been an uptick ever since.

They didn’t always get it their own way of course. We followed them into the Vietnam war where 3 million plus largely Vietnamese civilians were butchered, and hundreds of young Australian men, many of them conscripts, lost their lives. But concurrently a radical movement was developing in Australia with  the Aboriginal Land Rights movement,  militant trade unions, a highly active anti-war movement and a strong women’s movement making gains and pushing  the Whitlam govt into  adopting labour rights and other reforms which the US did not like. That included the intention to close Pine Gap and potentially get out of the US alliance. The rest is history, as they say, as the democratically elected Labor Govt was toppled in a coup orchestrated by US intelligence with the collusion of the British establishment and elements of the Australian elite, and the point has been made often that the subservience of Australian leaders since is in part because of the implied threat that they could do it again if they wanted to. Having “won’ in its economic and military rivalry with the Soviet Union the US, with its Western allies in tow ,reigned supreme for 30 odd years, the unipolar moment, dominating the globe as the only superpower through organisations like the  World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But like every empire before it throughout history it had already sown the seeds of its own destruction. Ongoing economic crises’ which are an inbuilt feature of the capitalist system we live in (most recently the financial crisis of 2008, but even back to the 1973 oil crisis) saw the US economy beginning its slow decline. They have accrued trillions of dollars debt due in no mean part to the obscene military budget it takes to be the bully of the world, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (which of course we also followed them into) but also the need to prop up their allies in proxy wars around the world. Perhaps most significantly US multinational companies outsourced the bulk of their manufacturing to China in search of cheap labour and the Chinese then made quick work to take advantage of this. Combined with the wealth accrued by Chinese workers from a time when they really did own the means of production the Chinese State Owned Enterprises and a plethora of private companies themselves launched an accelerated period of production with immense technological advancements, and indeed their own investments around the developing world where they are lending and building at an unprecedented rate. Enter the Obama administrations Pivot to Asia in 2011  signalling just how worried the US was about the rise of China, enthusiastically greeted by then prime minister Julia Gillard who promptly gave her favourite US President a base in the Northern Territory where they could rotate their marines in joint training with the ADF, beginning the phase of interoperability  between the US and OZ forces. (It’s interchangeability now , but what’s a word between friends).

 Abbotts Foreign Minister Julie Bishop signed the Force Posture Agreement in 2014 which stated directly “US Forces and US Contractors shall have unimpeded access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas for activities undertaken in connection with this agreement and “Australia hereby grants to the United States operational control of agreed facilities and areas”

The facilities referred to include the Tindale Air Base which now hosts 6 B52’s  some of which are nuclear capable( though we wouldn’t know because they don’t have to tell us if their military planes and vessels carry nuclear arms and our Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong thinks that’s just fine), North West Cape and Pine Gap, the RAAF bases at Curtin and Scherger, a fuel storage facility at East Arm Darwin and of course HMAS Stirling 30 kms from Fremantle in WA which now hosts US and UK nuclear subs in rotation.

Then along comes Pentecostal Pete Scott Morrison himself and he thinks to himself “how can I make my mark on Australian history, all these other leaders have had their moment in the sun performing their loyalty to the Emperor, what about me!?” So, there are concurrently , according to the Washington Post in 2022 , two retired US admirals and 3 navy civilian leaders working in secretive roles as advisers to the Aust govt on how to acquire top-secret nuclear submarine technology from the US and Britain ,and between them and Morrison they cook up the AUKUS agreement, whereby the perfectly workable deal with the French to acquire conventional submarines  to replace the Collins Class ones (which suffice for the *actual* defence of the Australian coast according to most experts) ,gets ditched, and instead we are told to spend over $400b on a few  second-hand US Virginia Class Nuclear Subs followed by building 5 British-designed AUKUS submarines at Osborne. Let me shift the scene now to a place I and many people here love. It’s called the Le Fevre Peninsula. Sometimes we refer to it simply as the Port because it’s all bound up in the history of the area. An area that Aunty Veronica Brodie told us her grandmother was born on the banks of the river where the old CSR factory used to be. How her grandmother told her of the camps all the way down to Outer Harbor from Glanville, lit up like a fairyland with fires at night; of how people lived off the mangroves, catching lobsters and mussels and oysters, birds and fish in the river. It’s a place that still carries the memories of the 1930’s Depression when the families of  wharfies and merchant seaman starved and died of preventable diseases because the bosses and the govt of the day refused them decent wages and conditions; a place where a militant union culture fought for those wages and conditions in the long and bitter  1928 strike and when turfed on the unemployment line they took their demand for rations that weren’t green with mould  to the city in the famous Beef March of 1931 getting attacked and imprisoned by mounted police in the process. A place where Paul Robeson came to sing to workers and their families in 1960 in the Wharfies Hall and later for hours in the British Hotel not long after the US govt returned his passport. It’s a place where we fought for and won Nuclear-free status in the 80’s and had those mounted police ride their horses over us again when we tried to stop the shipments of yellowcake. It’s a place where people are still struggling against the ABC and their routine releasing of dust which covers cars and homes and children’s lungs. Where we have a disproportionate amount of poverty in the upper reaches of the peninsula where the Osborne facility is (And if there’s anything which makes me furious with anger it’s watching the money which belongs to the Australian people haemorrhaging to the US and Britain while people in this country, including on the Le Fevre Peninsula, are living in poverty and struggling through a ‘cost of living’ crisis). Where the developers have ridden rough-shod over our history and the real estate industry has gentrified so many of the suburbs  that the people whose people have lived here for generations can’t afford it any more.

Into this scenario comes the news from our elected representatives that they have passed legislation that allows them to store AUKUS nuclear waste, bring nuclear reactors, and turn us effectively into a base for US war preparations against China, here in our community, without a single warning, an ounce of prior consultation or a skerrick of respect. Many of you will have heard our MP Mark Butler, the Fed Health Minister no less, on the 7.30 Report tell the whole country that they will consult, yes, but it was going to happen anyway. When the journalist, unusually for the ABC these days, suggested that that wasn’t a consultation he just looked like a deer caught in the headlights or was it that he was just confused that anyone would think that the people most affected by a decision should have the greatest say.

Theres more, but I’m going to leave it that for now . Perhaps later we’ll get to talk about how we’re not even going to get the Virginia Class nuclear submarines as insider after insider spills the beans that the US programme is so far behind they will renege on the deal and instead ,as one of their congressional reports has suggested, they will just bring their subs here in greater numbers, effectively using us as a launching pad. Or that the Rolls Royce facility in the UK charged with building the nuclear reactors for the AUKUS submarines are similarly unviable…. And does this mean no nuclear waste at Osborne after all, or does it mean Osborne will be repurposed as the gateway to a dump for all those submarines’ waste? If it’s not for building nuke submarines, what is it for? And why are we handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to the US in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis for subs that are unlikely to arrive? So many questions, so few answers from our representatives?