The $300 billion submarines we might never get
Samantha Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. With a wary eye on China. The government’s committed us to buying nuclear submarines worth more than $300 billion, but they’ve done it without having the workforce to operate them or anywhere to dump the nuclear waste. Today, Four Corners reporter Angus Grigg on our very high risk defence gamble.
Samantha Hawley: Angus, We’ve been speaking a lot about submarines lately because the government has committed us to spending more than $360 billion on getting some new ones. And there are just a few people who are mildly concerned at the price tag.
Angus Grigg: Yeah, it’s a crazy amount of money, isn’t it? And I guess the other way of looking at it is $32 million a day every day for the next 32 years. And at the end of that process, we’re not even really sure that what we’ve been promised we’re actually going to get.
Samantha Hawley: Well, that figure just just blows your mind. So let’s talk about these new submarines in a moment. But can we start our discussion, Angus, around what we have now there, the Collins class submarines. We’ve heard a bit about them over time and you had a bit of a look around inside one.
Angus Grigg: Yeah, that’s right. So we went to HMAS Stirling in Perth and had a look at on board. One of the submarines there. You’ve got to remember these boats were designed in 1980s and they really only sort of came into operational service in the early 2000s and they had a lot of problems to start with. The weapons systems didn’t really work. In fact, they had to scrap that and replace them. The diesel engines were too loud, but really, probably from about 2010 to about 2021, they were actually a pretty good submarine. They operated pretty well. But from about 2021 onwards, real problems began to emerge. And the first one was that in September 2021, the fleet was effectively cut in half. And the reason for that is because there was a flood on HMAS Sheean and that was at the same time as one of the other submarines. HMAS Waller was recovering from two fires and a flood that had happened earlier in the year. So both those boats were in deep maintenance, which meant that we only had two operational boats out of six.
Samantha Hawley: Flooding submarines does not sound ideal. So you spoke to a former senator and a former crew member of these submarines, Rex Patrick. He seems to liken the Collins to an ageing car.
Angus Grigg: Yeah, that’s right. So Senator Rex Patrick joined the Submarine Corps or joined the Navy at 16, but he’s also one of the first submariners to serve on the Collins class. So he’s a very experienced person in this regard. And what he was basically saying is that the Collins class is like an ageing car.
Rex Patrick, former South Australian Senator: When you first buy a car, you have a period where there are infantile failures that are covered by the warranty period. Then the car goes okay for a number of years, and after a period of time you start having things go wrong. That’s normally the time in which you might sell the car. We’re at that stage with Collins.
Angus Grigg: But we can’t sell them and we can’t trade them in. Indeed, we’re stuck with them for another ten years.
Samantha Hawley: Oh gosh. And even the Defence Minister, Richard Marles concedes that’s not ideal.
Angus Grigg: Yeah, that’s right. He concedes that it’s not a great capability, it’s not the situation that he’d wanted and he of course blames the previous government for flipping and flopping on exactly what submarine we were going to have. I mean, you should also point out that the previous Labor government, the Rudd and Gillard governments, also delayed decisions on the future submarine program. And so we’re really in a situation where we should be getting new submarines in the next couple of years. That was the plan. But the reality is we’re going to actually have to wait until at least another decade, two decades even, to get our full fleet of new submarines.
Samantha Hawley: Oh, gosh. Okay. It does sound like Angus, though, even though we have to wait. It sounds like we really need some new submarines. But it’s really also a very complicated process.
Angus Grigg: Yeah, that’s right. So if you look at the sort of three stage process we’re going through, the first stage is that we’re going to have visiting US and British nuclear submarines to Australia starting from sort of 27, 20, 28 onwards. And that is really the idea there is to train up our submariners on how to operate a nuclear submarine. Then from about the early 2030, we will start to get the first of our US nuclear submarines, the Virginia class submarine which we will buy from the Americans for an as yet undisclosed price. Now these are second hand submarines that we will buy and operate and that will really fill this capability gap between the retirement of the Collins and building our new so-called AUKUS class of submarines. So that is the submarine that will be designed by the British, but it will have a US nuclear reactor and a US weapons system. And that won’t get here until the middle of the 2040s. So we’ve got to wait at least 20 years until we get our first nuclear submarine that’s actually built in Australia.
Samantha Hawley: Gosh, okay, that’s a long time away. Let’s have a look at the barriers that we face. Angus, in achieving the three steps that you’ve just outlined, what are the biggest problems that we face around those?
Angus Grigg: Well, first of all, we don’t have enough submariners, so we need to basically triple the number of serving submariners to around 2500, 3000. And it is quite difficult to do this because life on a submarine is difficult. And historically, you know, really for the last 10 or 15 years, Australia has struggled. I mean, we’ve got very low historically low unemployment here today in Australia. And so, you know, people who are starting out on their careers, they have lots of options and you know, spending three months in a very confined space with 50 or 60 other people is probably not the most attractive thing to many young people.
Samantha Hawley: And you did speak to a former submariner who pointed out this is Brent Clark. He pointed out that it’s not actually a good idea, though, just to recruit people to do these jobs from overseas. We need to.
Brent Clark, former officer in the Royal Australian Navy: Be very, very careful. We can’t set ourselves up to wholly and solely rely on overseas people coming and commanding our submarines.
Angus Grigg: One of the things we’ve found out is that Australia really lacks submarine captains. So what we’ve had to do is we’ve had to poach or recruit senior submariners from foreign navies, particularly the Canadian and the UK navies. And so four of the six most recent submarine captains serving in Australia are actually foreign trained submarine officers.
Brent Clark, former officer in the Royal Australian Navy: Ultimately, this is got to be a sovereign submarine capability for Australia. We have to develop our own people, we have to train our own people and we have to make sure that that’s what we’re doing.
Samantha Hawley: Right. Okay. So there’s a few challenges there. We have to establish by the sound of it a whole new workforce to operate these submarines. But not only that, it sounds like we have to establish a whole new industry.
Angus Grigg: Yeah, well that’s right. I mean, the first thing to say is that we are desperately short of engineers in this country already. And so to have a nuclear program or a nuclear submarine program, we’re going to need a whole new batch of nuclear engineers. And this is going to be one of the big challenges. And indeed, the head of Engineers Australia, Jane MacMaster, has likened it to building the Snowy Hydro scheme in the 1950s and 60 seconds. Indeed, she believes it’s actually a bigger challenge.
Jane MacMaster, Chief Engineer at Engineers Australia: It is a huge project that covers the entire workforce, many professions, many layers of complexity, and it’s not as simple as buying an off the shelf product from the UK or the US. So there are layers of complexity here that I’m not sure that we’ve grappled with before.
Samantha Hawley: And Angus, we’re also talking nuclear, aren’t we? We’re not that good at nuclear in this country.
Angus Grigg: No, exactly. And bear in mind, we will be the only country in the world to embark on a nuclear submarine fleet without having a civilian nuclear industry. We only have one nuclear reactor in the country today. That’s at Lucas Heights just out here in Sydney. And it is a very sort of small light water reactor. If we get this fleet of nuclear submarines, we will have 11 reactors in the country. And so that is a massive, massive change and we’re going to need a whole new industry around it. We’re going to need safety. We’re going to need regulation. And the big one here is waste. What do we do with the waste? And as it stands now, we are really, really struggling even to deal with the low level radioactive waste that is like basically the gloves and the gowns that you might use when you’re in the reactor. We can’t even find a solution to deal with that, let alone the highly enriched uranium that has a life of 20,000 years. And if you look at examples overseas of how difficult this is in Britain now, there is a floating graveyard, if you like, of 21 nuclear submarines, which the British government has no idea what to do with and has no plan to dispose of.
Samantha Hawley: Oh, God. Okay. All right. So, Angus, we’re buying these submarines, but actually buying them brings in a whole other layer of complexities. But we do have time, don’t we? Because these subs aren’t meant to go to sea until 2040. So we’ve got a fair bit of time to play with to figure this all out.
Angus Grigg: Well, I’d actually argue we don’t have a lot of time. I mean, to build a sort of nuclear regulation, it’s going to take 10 or 15 years to build up a workforce, a skilled workforce. That’s going to take a long time as well. So we’re actually starting well behind on this one. If you look at the sort of three stage process we’re going through, the second stage of that is we’re going to get these second hand us Virginia class submarines. And that actually seems like a very reasonable thing to do, even though we don’t know how much they’re going to cost. But then what we’re going to do is we’re going to step off that very well known platform and we’re going to go to a highly risky new platform designed by the British, which has not ever been in the water before. I think that is very high risk. And Rex Patrick said to us he doesn’t think we’ll actually get this third step, which is the AUKUS submarine. But the other thing to think about is that one of the really interesting things that’s going on in defence at the moment is they’re looking at doing something they’ve never really done before and that is create these unmanned underwater drones which have been very, very effective in Ukraine, mainly in the air flying drones. And the point of them is, is that they’re expendable, They’re very cheap, they’re very flexible. They use artificial intelligence to constantly feed back information to home base to be more effective when they’re in the so-called battle space. And it’s not going to replace a nuclear submarine. It doesn’t have the capability or anything like that. But what it can do, it can hold them at risk. That means that you could have ten, 15, 20 of these unmanned drones sitting outside a port and it could make it too dangerous for a nuclear submarine to leave. And so just at the time that we’re seeing this unmanned technology come into its own, we’re doing exactly the opposite and going for this very large, very expensive manned platform.
Samantha Hawley: So I guess, given all that you’ve told us, what do you think about the government’s decision? Is it making the right decision with this purchase?
Angus Grigg: Look, I guess you’ve got to really say that Australia getting nuclear submarines is going to take a long time and it’s going to cost a lot of money and there’s no guarantee at the end of it that we’re going to end up with the capability that we’ve been promised. But the other thing to think about is. That just at the age of we’re starting to see uncrewed unmanned technology really sort of start to assert themselves in warfare. We are doing exactly the opposite. And it really feels a little bit like a newspaper company building the world’s best printing press at the start of the digital age. You know, I was there for that and I saw that company do it. And let me tell you, it didn’t work out very well.
Samantha Hawley: Angus Grigg is a reporter with Four Corners. Watch his investigation on ABC TV tonight at 8.30 or catch it on iView. This episode was produced by Flint Duxfield, Veronica Apap, Chris Dengate and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. I’m Sam Hawley. You can find all our episodes of the podcast on the ABC Listen app. Thanks for listening.
