Peter Garrett will lead a crowd-funded independent inquiry into the Aukus submarine deal, placing Australia’s biggest defence project under a public review that starts now and ends with a report due in October. The five-month inquiry will hold public hearings and is being organised by the not-for-profit Australian Peace and Security Forum.
Garrett, who served as Australia’s environment minister from 2007 to 2010, called the review “long overdue”. He will head it with four other commissioners, including Admiral Chris Barrie, Carmen Lawrence and Karen Lester, as supporters including independent MPs David Pocock and Andrew Wilkie back the push for scrutiny. For readers following the deal, this is the first clear sign of a formal challenge to how the pact has been handled.
The timing matters because Canberra has only just detailed changes to the arrangement, including a plan to buy three second-hand submarines from the US under a revised deal that replaces an earlier promise of at least one new vessel. Aukus was first announced in September 2021, and it remains a A$368bn commitment that will shape the navy for decades.
The inquiry will not be narrow. It will ask whether nuclear-powered attack submarines will make Australia safer, what effect the deal will have on the country’s standing in regional peace and security, whether Australia will actually receive the submarines it will pay for, where and how the nuclear waste will be stored, whether sovereignty is being undermined and how the pact will affect relations with China. It will also look at a further shift set for 2027, when the agreement will allow both the US and UK to base a small number of nuclear submarines in Perth, Western Australia.
That wider examination lands at a moment when the politics around Aukus are already exposed. The government said it welcomed “appropriate oversight and transparency”, even as Garrett said the public and parliament had been removed from the decision, arguing that the right to “question, debate and decide” had been taken out of their hands. The deal has also been reviewed by the UK in 2024 and by the US last June, showing that the contest over Aukus is now running in more than one capital.
For now, the practical question is whether this inquiry changes anything beyond the argument itself. It has a timetable, named commissioners and public hearings, and it will speak in October. If it moves the debate, the pressure will be on the government to explain why a project of this scale should stay on its current course without any adjustment.
