21 reasons to sink AUKUS before it sinks us

Posted on 06 May 2026

By Denis Moriarty, founder and group managing director, Our Community

Shutterstock submarine — You could buy a lot of toy submarines for $386 billion, among other uses better than the AUKUS deal. Pic: Shutterstock

$386 billion is quite a chunk of change. That's how much is earmarked for the AUKUS defence deal but Our Community's founder and leader, Denis Moriarty, has a much better idea: give the money to charity.

Imagine what the for-purpose sector could do with $386 billion. It would certainly feel like a better use of the money than buying AUKUS submarines we may never even see. In fact, here are 21 reasons why leaving AUKUS would be a sensible, moderate policy.

1. Let’s start with the bill. AUKUS will cost us $386 billion over the next 30 years. Big bikkies, and they’re not even Anzacs.

2. Plannning our warfighting 30 years ahead dooms us to going into battle with tech that isn’t fit for purpose. It’d be like England going into WWII with the cloth biplane aircraft designs of 1909. Nobody’s foresight is that good.

3. Modern warfare’s changing at a dizzying rate. The leader in military tech isn’t America, it’s Ukraine. We have to think small – plastic hand-held drones, not steel leviathans.

4. Nobody’s planning to invade Australia right now. We have time to think about this. There’s no rush.

5. Nobody’s likely to find a reason to try to invade Australia. We’re not next to any rogue states or any failed states, and nobody (well, nobody but some Indigenous nations that don’t yet have their own submarines) has a historical claim on our territory.

6. Nobody’s going to try to invade Australia in the next decade. If any other nation wants what we’ve got – our gasfields, for example – they can buy it on the cheap.

7. We’re not actually going to get any submarines. America will only let us have submarines if they have spares, and their building schedule makes that virtually impossible.

8. AUKUS also relies on help from UK submarine technology. The UK program is also in diabolical trouble and it’s impossible to count on it.

9. Under any scenario, America is only going to give us any submarines if we use them to support American foreign policy, which may differ from Australia’s.

10. Now that we know America can elect someone like Trump, we might be signing up to help invade Greenland.

11. AUKUS only works if the USA and the UK work together, so we’re hostage to UK–US diplomatic relationships, as well as to our own relationship with each country, and that hasn’t been good in recent weeks.

“Imagine what the for-purpose sector could do with $386 billion.”

Denis Moriarty

12. AUKUS is in large measure a bribe to try and ensure that the US will defend us if we’re attacked. The US is going to do what it thinks is in its best interests on the day, and nothing we do now is going to influence that at all.

13. Pulling out now will irritate the US and the UK, just about as much as it irritated France when we pulled out of the last deal. Trump has the attention span of a goldfish, so that won’t last long.

14. Now that we know America can elect someone like Trump, there’s no guarantee the Americans will honour any agreement at all, from koalas for American zoos to submarines for Australian navies.

15. If we do get atomic submarines, we’ll have the devil’s own job staffing them. We can’t staff the much smaller number of submarines we have now.

16. We’d get a few jobs in South Australia out of the deal, but every job would cost as much as one of Gina Rinehart’s children.

17. If we do get atomic submarines, their main advantage is being able to stay out on patrol for a long time so that they can fight a long way away from Australia in wars that are none of our business.

18. The UK and the US have atomic submarines with atomic weapons, which at least means that the cost of the machines is comparable to the cost of the damage they can do. We’re using ordinary HE missiles, so we’re spending those billions of dollars to destroy a couple of buildings. It’s like buying drones, only a million times more expensive.

19. We’ve already spent more than $4 billion that we won’t get back, but that’s $380 billion we can save if we walk now.

20. As US president Dwight Eisenhower said, back when ‘US president’ wasn’t a swear word, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed’ … or from cancer research, or care for the elderly, or an increased Jobseeker allowance, or the NDIS, or paying down the deficit, or a faster transition to net zero and beyond, or fully funding government schools, or building more social housing, or very fast trains, or universal childcare, or whatever your own budget priorities are.

21. AUKUS wasn’t originally designed to provide a defence strategy – Scott Morrison designed it to wedge the Labor party on defence. It worked as well as all his other ideas, and it should have gone down with him.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.