ONLY FRAN: Think NDIS is wasting taxpayer dollars? Meet AUKUS
6/12/202618 min
This week Jan looks at the mammoth trilateral security pact known as AUKUS and asks how much are those submarines costing us again? Be warned, there’s not a clear answer to that question because even those in charge don't really know.
Let’s just say hundreds of billions of dollars for deliverables that just keep changing??
That’s a lot of tax payer dollars at stake - not to mention the billions of dollars we’ve already thrown away on quite literally nothing. You’d think that would incense the media as much as other government spending but not so.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJan Fran· Host0:00
I'm guessing that you all know the acronym AUKUS, the defense partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I'm sure that you have heard rumblings, AUKUS this, AUKUS that. AUKUS is always in the headlines. What is more synonymous with that acronym is submarines. Okay? We need submarines to ward off the threat in the Pacific, apparently, which is just a vague way of saying China. Under the AUKUS deal, we're meant to be getting three US-built nuclear-powered submarines, two used, one new, and building a bunch ourselves. But as of, uh, two weeks ago, all three of the nuclear submarines that we are getting from the Americans will now be secondhand. There was a revised plan. Now, look, I know that you will be very surprised to hear this, but I am not a defense expert. I know, shock horror. In fact, I'm one of those people who routinely thinks that quite a lot of this money could be spent on other things such as schools and hospitals and roads. But whatever. Let us just accept that we are in dire need of submarines. Even I can see that this revised plan is not a better plan for Australia, and that is because we are now getting a lesser thing for the same amount of money, and that amount of money is $368 billion, three