UK and Australia sign 50-year AUKUS defence partnership treaty
Australia and the UK have signed a fresh AUKUS defence treaty to develop and sustain nuclear-powered submarine programmes in both countries until 2075.
The Geelong Treaty – named after the Australian city in which it was signed on 26 July – will support the construction, operation and long-term sustainment of next-generation nuclear powered submarines.
The UK Ministry of Defence said the treaty would be worth up to £20bn (US$26.4bn) in British exports over the next 25 years, and create over 7,000 new jobs in UK shipyards and across the supply chain. Further details of the treaty are yet to be announced.
John Healey, the UK’s defence secretary, said that the treaty would support “high-skilled, well-paid jobs for tens of thousands of people in both the UK and Australia”, and that it reaffirmed the two countries’ “deep defence relationship”, which includes “vital” intelligence sharing and work to develop innovative technology.
The treaty was announced in Sydney by Australia’s foreign affairs minister Penny Wong, Healey, the UK’s defence minister Richard Marles, and UK foreign secretary David Lammy.
“In our increasingly volatile and dangerous world, our anchoring friendship has real impact in the protection of global peace and prosperity,” Lammy said.
AUKUS is a trilateral security alliance between Australia, the UK and the US agreed in 2021 to provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. The UK government described it as “our most strategically significant new defence partnership in a generation”.
The Pentagon is currently reviewing whether the US’s involvement in the pact aligns with president Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda, and is not party to the Geelong Treaty.
Read more: UK government defence review pledges to ‘accelerate innovation to a wartime pace’
Filling the war chest
National security has shot up the list of priorities for all three AUKUS members since the war in Ukraine began in 2022.
The Trump administration has applied pressure to NATO members to increase their defence expenditure to 5% of GDP per member or face losing US military support.
In a bid to boost national security, the UK announced in June that it would move its armed forces to a warfighting readiness and accelerate innovation, following a defence review commissioned by prime minister Keir Starmer.
Starmer said the UK faced a new era of threats. “We face war in Europe, new nuclear risks, daily cyber attacks [and] growing Russian aggression in our waters, menacing our skies,” he said.
Among the areas of investment set out in the review are a plan to build at least six new munitions factories, and up to 12 attack submarines.
Read more: UK government readies launch of defence innovation unit after 2.5% spending pledge
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As the UK government looks to improve its structures to drive defence innovation, these sessions will look at how the UK defence innovation ecosystem can help drive more effective and agile national defence and security.
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About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
