Bob Carr: Aukus is a lie and Australia will never get US subs

Bob Carr says the fix is already in. The former Labor foreign affairs minister told Guardian Australia's Australian Politics podcast that officials in both Canberra and Washington know the United States will never hand over nuclear submarines under the $368bn Aukus deal, and that Australia will end up with something else entirely.

Carr's prediction: American-operated vessels will be stationed at bases on Australian soil instead. He argues a future US president will conclude that China's military strength makes it too risky to transfer three or more Virginia-class nuclear submarines, and called that view the new consensus on both sides of the Pacific.

He didn't dress it up. Carr, who ran foreign affairs under Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, branded the 2021 agreement a diplomatic fiction, saying both countries were pretending submarines would arrive at the end of the process. He also said people inside Australia's own defence establishment doubt the deal has served the country well, pointing to the cash being shovelled into a single platform at the expense of everything else — a platform he says the Ukraine war's lessons may render obsolete.

The Albanese government isn't budging, saying Aukus is proceeding as intended and pointing to Donald Trump's pledge of full support. Defence minister Richard Marles said this week the pact was absolutely happening, describing it as the biggest industrial project in Australia's history and the biggest leap in military capability since the navy was founded more than a century ago.

The money is already moving. Australia has paid more than $3bn toward US submarine manufacturing, part of roughly $4.6bn promised across the deal's lifetime, with billions more going to infrastructure and workforce construction. Under the current schedule the first Virginia-class boat arrives in 2032, another follows every four years, and the bespoke SSN Aukus model comes online in 2042 — but delays and cost blowouts in US Navy production have fuelled doubt that in-service boats will ever be handed over, and the agreement requires a US president to sign off on any transfer.

Carr's remarks land weeks after a crowdfunded public inquiry led by former Labor MP and Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett and former defence chief Chris Barrie called Aukus the worst, riskiest and most costly defence decision ever made by an Australian government, and urged its immediate termination. The inquiry, which heard from Carr, former Labor minister Gareth Evans and former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, warned Australia risked being dragged into conflict with China. The government dismissed the report, while Aukus supporters including former defence ministers Linda Reynolds and Christopher Pyne argued in its favour.