‘Don’t blow this opportunity’: Labor legends split over AUKUS

Labor’s longest serving foreign and defence ministers have clashed over whether Australia should abandon the AUKUS pact, highlighting profound divisions within the party over the merits of the nuclear-powered submarine plan.

Gareth Evans, who served as foreign minister from 1988 to 1996, used the first day of hearings at a public inquiry into AUKUS to savage the nuclear-powered submarine plan as “misconceived from the outset”, arguing it has made Australia a “compliant cash cow” to the United States and United Kingdom.

He argued the AUKUS submarine plan is likely to be regarded as one of the country’s worst foreign policy and defence mistakes, as he called for the Albanese government to quickly develop a back-up plan in case the pact falls over.

Evans’ view was rejected by former cabinet colleague Kim Beazley who argued it would be a colossal mistake for Australia to abandon AUKUS in favour of a less capable type of submarine.

“Those who deny, or ignore, the loss of Australian sovereign independence that is necessarily involved in our commitment to the AUKUS project are simply defying reality,” Evans said in a submission to the inquiry.

“And those who accept the reality of our loss of sovereign agency but actually applaud it as a price worth paying for our protection ... seem to have lost not only any sense of national pride, but of Australia’s national interest.”

Evans, a longtime AUKUS critic, said his “regretful conclusion” is that the bipartisan embrace of the submarine plan “is more likely than not to prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions our country has made, not only putting at profound risk our sovereign independence, but generating more risk than reward for the very national security it promises to protect”.

“I cannot imagine this decision being made by any of the Hawke-Keating governments of which I was part for thirteen years. Times have changed,” he said.

The crowd-funded public inquiry, which is holding its first hearings in Melbourne on Thursday, is chaired by former Labor minister and anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Garrett, another AUKUS sceptic.

Only a couple of Labor MPs - Ed Husic and Josh Wilson - have publicly questioned the wisdom of the AUKUS pact, and it was strongly endorsed at Labor’s most recent national conference.

Evans said it required “heroic levels of optimism” to believe the US would deliver three Virginia-class submarines to Australia as planned, and that Australia and the United Kingdom would successfully develop a new model of nuclear-powered submarine known as SSN-AUKUS.

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