Instead of being loyally dependent on ‘great and powerful friends’, Australia will now share more of the burden of maintaining the balance of the power in the Indo-Pacific, writes Alexander Downer.
– was one thing, but it is another matter to build nuclear-powered submarines. The total cost of the program could be at least double the price of the French submarines.
Let’s stop for a minute and think about it. Between now and 2050 we are somehow going to have to make our whole economy a net-zero economy. No one knows how much that will cost, but it is likely to run into trillions of dollars – assuming it is even technically possible without plunging Australia into deprivation and poverty.The neutralist, non-aligned approach to Australian foreign policy is for all intents and purposes dead in the water.
So, paying for the nuclear-powered submarines will be a huge challenge for governments over the next few years. And while pouring money into renewables, electric vehicles, Snowy Hydro 2.0 and any manner of fancy-sounding programs designed to cool down the weather will prove popular, spending money on submarines will not shift votes one way or the other.
This is something to be proud of. When I became the foreign minister, I inherited an idea in foreign policy popular with the Keating government and with academia: that Australia should engage with its own region. That seemed to me a pretty fatuous proposition: every country engages with its own region, and Australia had done so throughout its modern history.I had another concept: to be appreciated in our own region, we had to contribute to it. And so we did.
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