AUASIA — Australia in Asia, in place of AUKUS. The shift from a three-nation submarine pact to a self-reliant, neutral Australia inside a united Asia-Pacific, and the industrial build that gets there. The whole case on one page, each step carried by its memo.
Australia’s defence question has two answers on the table. One is AUKUS: eight nuclear submarines, arriving from the 2040s, at $368 billion and counting, usable only with American consent, built for a war with our largest trading partner.
The other is AUASIA: the same money, the same talent and the same yards building a sovereign industrial base — the subsea corridor that physically ties the region together, the manufacturing hub behind it, the energy that fills it, and the fuel and freight sovereignty underneath — making Australia impossible to strangle and building the united Asia-Pacific in which the war never starts. AUASIA is not mainly a diplomatic position. It is a build.
This page sets out what replaces the submarine pathway, and how. The companion Defence page sets out why the current plan fails; this one sets out what to do instead.
What we proposeThe proposal in short. The sections that follow are the evidence for each step.
1. Review the plan before another dollar. A full public accounting of the submarine pathway against the alternatives — the case assembled across the Cost Blowout and its companions.
2. Redirect the spend into the industrial base. The AUKUS foundation becomes a sovereign manufacturing hub: the subsea corridor network, the continental land corridor, the generation and transmission that fill them, fuel and freight sovereignty — the same money, workforce and yards, pointed at what a blockade cannot break and what earns for a century.
3. Stand as an armed, neutral friend to all. A real defence of the continent, alignment with no bloc, friendships in every direction — and Australian command of every base on Australian soil, with what is berthed there disclosable to the parliament that answers for it. The posture that takes Australia off the target list and opens the convener’s chair.
4. Found the union in the South China Sea. Share the sea under the AsiaPac Solution — the first working institution of the region acting as one.
5. Build AUASIA. Widen the union — corridors, trade, standards, energy — until every dispute has a table and the war has no venue. Nations wired to each other’s grids do not blockade each other. The destination is The Prize: a united Asia-Pacific, with Australia a nation among equals inside it, supplying the power, fuel and manufactured goods the region buys.
The case, step by step 01 — Count the billThe programme’s own headline is $368 billion to the 2050s, on a French-programme trajectory running to $480–650 billion or more. About $11 billion is already spent or committed with no boat delivered; the first sovereign Australian hull arrives in the 2040s; and a statutory clause lets a US president withhold the Virginia-class transfers altogether — a fleet contingent on a patron’s spare capacity, when US yards are building at roughly half the rate their own navy requires.
The full accounting — money, trade, sovereignty, friendships and lives — is in The AUKUS Cost Blowout — Extended, with the one-page version at the Summary.
02 — See the war clearlyThe war the submarines are bought for is not won by submarines. Between interdependent economies the contest is a blockade, and a blockade is decided by logistics — by who keeps ships moving, fuel flowing and shelves stocked. In 2026 the world ran the experiment three times: Hormuz, the Red Sea and the Black Sea each showed that no navy, including the strongest, can keep a contested sea lane open, and the US expended roughly half its Patriot inventory and more than half its THAAD in 39 days.
The Proof of the Hormuz Pudding lays out that evidence; America First, Australia Loses runs the net assessment — even if the United States wins its war, Australia loses it. The Island Castle sets three thousand years of siege history against both policies and scores them part by part.
On the measure that decides the contest, Australia is the most exposed advanced economy on earth: about 90 per cent of refined fuel imported on foreign ships, about 30 days of diesel held onshore, zero Australian-flagged tankers. The nation that endured the 2026 shock did so on two decades of built resilience — the story in How China Held the World Up. And the boat itself is a new three-nation design for a shipyard that does not yet exist — the engineering case is Building the Sub to Nowhere.
03 — Look at what is already on the groundThe pact is not a future commitment. It is already built into the coastline. HMAS Stirling, on Garden Island off Rockingham in Western Australia, is being expanded at a cost of up to $8 billion to host Submarine Rotational Force – West: from as early as 2027, one British Astute-class and up to four American Virginia-class nuclear submarines operating from Australian soil.
What comes with them is a foreign command, not a visit. On 30 May 2026 the United States established Naval Support Activity Stirling — a US Navy shore command on the base, run under Navy Region Japan — and reactivated Submarine Squadron 3, decommissioned at Pearl Harbor in 2012, to operate the American boats rotating through. A Pearl Harbor shipyard detachment provides intermediate-level maintenance from mid-2026.
The population figure moved sharply on 7 August 2026. Australian accounts had described several hundred US personnel; a US Navy spokesman then put it at about 2,300 Americans by 2030 — sailors, civilian employees, contractors and their family members — in Western Australia supporting the mission. For scale, HMAS Stirling’s entire Australian complement is roughly 2,300 service members. The American presence is being sized to match the Australian one at Australia’s largest naval base. Crews and families are housed at Garden Island and around Rockingham.
The Australian government maintains that this is a rotational presence and will not become a US base. A shore command established at Australia’s invitation, a reactivated submarine squadron, a foreign maintenance organisation, and 2,300 Americans including families are the constituent parts of a base. What is rotational is the hulls, not the establishment.
The sovereignty question is what sits underneath it. Australia’s stated protection is the doctrine of “full knowledge and concurrence” — that nothing happens on Australian soil without Australian knowledge and agreement. It is paired, in the same breath, with Australia’s undertaking to respect the American policy of neither confirming nor denying what its submarines carry. The two cannot both be fully honoured: a country that has agreed not to say what is on the boats cannot demonstrate that it knew, and a parliament that cannot be told cannot concur on the public’s behalf. Concurrence that cannot be evidenced is not a control; it is an assurance.
The consequences are not abstract. A foreign operational command on Australian territory makes that territory part of the targeting picture of any power the United States fights — the argument set out in America First, Australia Loses. Australia carries the risk of a base it does not command, in a war it does not choose, over a question it cannot be told the answer to.
Regional partners read it the same way: Indonesia and Malaysia both registered concern at nuclear submarines operating out of Perth, which is the diplomatic cost counted in The AUKUS Cost Blowout. Sovereignty is not lost by treaty here. It is handed over in increments, each one reasonable on its own.
04 — Redirect the build: the industrial baseThe shift is redirection, not cancellation. Nothing already committed is wasted — the yards at Osborne and Henderson, the undersea trades, the systems integrators, the nuclear-grade quality systems and the bilateral relationships all stay. What changes is the output mix. Defence Through Nation Building sets out the doctrine: continental geography and an economy that lives by sea trade make nation building, not distant naval projection, the smarter defence policy.
The AUKUS commitment is the foundation of a sovereign manufacturing hub, not the end use of one. The Subsea Industrial Base maps it stream by stream — eight capability streams, each with its existing or AUKUS-committed source named, the marginal addition the civilian programme commissions, and the consortium partners who supply the technology. One hub, multiple programmes: defence outputs continue, the continental land corridor adds domestic load, and the subsea corridor adds Asia-Pacific load to the same production lines. The same facility that draws subsea HVDC cable draws the land transmission cable the continental backbone needs.
04.1 — The subsea corridor: the physical unionThis is where AUASIA stops being a posture and becomes hardware. The Asia-Pacific Subsea Corridor Network proposes seven multi-service corridors radiating from Australia — about 32,500 km combined — each carrying HVDC electricity and fibre by default, with gas, hydrogen or water added where the destination nation needs them, laid as one vessel operation per route.
What it builds is the Asia-Pacific equivalent of ENTSO-E, the European grid that has traded power across borders commercially since the 1950s. The starter network connects Australia to around 600 million people across seven economies; as destination nations’ own grids pool onward, it serves 2–3 billion by 2050, with Australia the largest generator and the central node. Grids that import and export continuously are more stable than grids alone: reserve requirements fall, and renewable surplus sells into another country’s deficit instead of being curtailed.
The strategic point is the one the submarines cannot deliver. Cables running both ways make the region mutually dependent in the most literal sense — nations that keep each other’s lights on do not blockade each other. This is mutually assured dependence with a physical asset base, and it is the same shift the pact’s workforce is already trained for: laying, tending and repairing things on the seabed.
04.2 — Manufacturing: quarry to factoryThe submarine programme draws down a workforce Australia does not have spare. Pointed the other way, the same draw becomes re-industrialisation. The Sovereign Manufacturing Multiplier puts the programme at 95 per cent sovereign content, 58,000 direct jobs and 400–600 new Tier-2 and Tier-3 businesses on a 20-year order book — infrastructure as the disguise, national re-industrialisation as the product. It answers a problem AUKUS does not touch: manufacturing has fallen from 14 per cent of GDP in 1995 to under 5 per cent, and multifactor productivity has run at roughly a quarter of its 1990s rate since 2010, the case set out in Productive Growth at Continental Scale.
04.3 — Energy and net zero: the export the region actually needsThe corridor is only worth building if there is power to put in it, and that is the same build. The Net Zero System and How the Grid Works set out where the carbon money currently goes and how the grid is actually priced; Three Plans, One Grid and The Power Imperative set out the generation and transmission task. Exported through the corridors, Australian renewable power decarbonises the region as well as the continent — a net zero contribution measured in other nations’ emissions, not just our own, and paid for by the buyer.
Fuel sovereignty sits underneath all of it: a country that imports 90 per cent of its refined fuel cannot run a corridor programme, or a war, through a blockade. The situation is in Australia’s Fuel Security — Part 1: The Position and the Government’s Response and the build-out in Australia’s Fuel Security — Part 2: Every Method of Domestic Production.
04.4 — What the money buys either wayThe comparison is already costed. MMA Return on Investment puts the programme’s mature return at roughly $264–403 billion a year in directly defensible monetised value, payback in three to four years of mature operation. Without MMA costs the counterfactual: Australia is committed to spending roughly $2.7–4.4 trillion over twenty years on the do-nothing-different path across water, energy, transport and defence — the money is being spent either way.
The submarines are second-hand Block IV hulls, arriving with six to fifteen years of a 33-year life already spent and a reactor that cannot be refuelled. Cable, rail, generation and factories compound, and they earn for as long as they stand — the full comparison is run in The Island Castle.
05 — Settle the seaThe union starts where the war would. The South China Sea dispute — six claimants, US$3.36 trillion of trade a year, the region’s most probable flashpoint — is set out impartially in The AsiaPac Predicament.
The proposal in The AsiaPac Solution resolves it by sharing rather than dividing: every nation keeps full sovereignty within 150 km of its coast, every producing field is grandfathered, and the ~1.65 million km² beyond becomes a shared Union Zone developed jointly — benefits split by frontage, governed one nation one vote, grounded in UNCLOS, with China and Taiwan holding one combined seat under the One-China framework. The sovereignty question is set aside, not answered. It is the founding act of the union.
06 — Build the unionAUASIA is that act carried to its conclusion: an Asia-Pacific of sovereign nations bound the way Europe bound itself after 1945 — economies interlocked until war among members became materially impossible. The region is already there in structure: globalisation has made a war between its economies negative-sum, which leaves the table as the only rational venue for every dispute.
The Prize: A Unified AsiaPac makes the full case — mutually assured dependence, logistics over firepower, what Australia brings (energy, education, a working multicultural society, a neutral chair), and the peace dividend of a region that stops spending US$2.9 trillion a year preparing to fight itself — with the case in brief at the Summary. A neutral, self-reliant Australia is the one nation positioned to convene it; Division or Unity shows the same choice already live in the Pacific treaties.
07 — Keep the door openThe shift expels no one. The United States faces the same arithmetic — the war cannot be won, and primacy through division buys less security every year missiles get cheaper. AUASIA holds the door open to a distant power willing to join a peaceful, prosperous Asia-Pacific as a partner in its trade rather than the manager of its divisions. That choice is Washington’s; the door stays open either way.