AUKUS Forum via Linkedin: What we’ve failed to understand about the AUKUS nuclear submarine project:

Minister for Defence Richard Marles and Premier of South Australia Peter Malinauskas at a worksite

Peter Malinauskas is one of the foremost advocates of what he calls our “biggest industrial undertaking in the history of the Federation” – the AUKUS project – where he speaks with two voices, as South Australian premier and as a national leader.

In an interview with Inquirer, Malinauskas says turning Australia into a nuclear-powered submarine nation represents an unprecedented whole-of-nation challenge but he delivers a warning – to this stage the country has not come to grips with “the weight or the complexity of the task”. “AUKUS is not just a big project,” Malinauskas said. “It is exceptionally complicated. It will require not just a raw intelligence but acute skills. For our interests to be realised we need the whole nation to be putting into the effort, otherwise we will compromise our ability to meet the very aggressive timelines we have in front of us. “We are going to have to acquire serious nuclear capability in terms of skills. We don’t have them at the moment but those nuclear skills are going to be important.”

“There is no more complex undertaking on the planet than building a nuclear submarine. And I don’t think the rest of the country is necessarily attuned to the scope of this task. We need to change our thinking about AUKUS and what it means for Australia. We need to think of AUKUS as placing a demand on virtually every agency you can think of – housing, education, logistics, transport, engineering, training and skills. It’s a cross-government effort, an all-in effort. He says AUKUS demands “an entire new workforce”. Change at the margins won’t work. A strong immigration intake is non-negotiable. “AUKUS is going to hoover up the domestic skills we have available now,” he said. “I look at it in the South Australian context. We’re building roads, bridges, hospitals, technical colleagues and schools and AUKUS needs these skills as well.”

South Australia’s defence sector currently employs more than 14,000 workers and it will need to add 15,000 more in defence and associated industries by the 2040s. There is a new emphasis on technical colleagues, partnership with industrial firms, TAFE enrolments aligned to the defence industry and collaboration between SA and overseas universities on nuclear education. See the full article at https://lnkd.in/gyZEAaku