00:00The AUKUS agreement for Australia to acquire nuclear submarines has been around for some
00:08time.
00:09Last year we saw the leaders sign off on a new agreement in San Diego for an optimal
00:14pathway and now we're learning that there is a revamped agreement that has been agreed
00:21to by all three partner nations and as you mentioned it does contain, we're told, some
00:28political commitments but the details of those are yet to be revealed publicly, they will
00:33be though shortly we're assured.
00:36And in this agreement the government stresses that it's important because it sets up the
00:41transfer of naval nuclear material that Australia will need to have nuclear powered submarines
00:49as well as those continuing arrangements for secrets from both the United States and the
00:55UK to be given to Australia so that it can also have a fleet of nuclear submarines operating
01:03as soon as possible.
01:05But it has prompted some questions today, there have been concerns from particularly
01:11anti-nuclear campaigners who say that the language that the US President has used about
01:17this new agreement could open the door for Australia down the track to accept high level
01:22radioactive waste from both the United States and the UK.
01:27The opposition leader is also demanding more detail, let's hear from Peter Dutton.
01:32I think the Prime Minister should provide an explanation as to what Australia is signed
01:36up to.
01:38We don't know the detail of it yet so we'll wait for that before I make further comment
01:41but as you know we negotiated AUKUS with the United States and the United Kingdom.
01:46It's an incredibly important asset for our country.
01:49The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who of course was Defence Minister when the AUKUS
01:53agreement was first announced, so he's sounding pretty positive about these developments today.
02:00The Prime Minister though has been challenged to answer what is in the political commitments
02:05that have been made to secure this latest deal and he's also hit back at suggestions
02:13that Australia could become a radioactive dumping ground.
02:18There'll be no nuclear transfer from either the US or the UK, that's the detail, that's
02:25very clear and that's not part of the arrangement.
02:28Nuclear submarines have nuclear reactors in them, that's the detail there as well.
02:35For some time now we've heard the former Prime Minister's views on AUKUS and he is perhaps
02:41the leading critic of this arrangement in Australia.
02:45The former Labor leader has again hit out at what he thinks is a growing dependence
02:52on the United States and we've seen evidence of that this week with the AUSMIN talks again
02:58agreeing to further US deployments in Australia.
03:02Paul Keating was on the 7.30 program last night and again making his arguments against
03:08the AUKUS agreement and generally the alliance with the United States.
03:14Let's hear a bit of that now.
03:18The Albanese government and their policy is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state
03:27of the United States.
03:29We're now defending the fact that we're in AUKUS.
03:32If we weren't in AUKUS we wouldn't need to defend it, let me amplify the point.
03:36That is, if we didn't have an aggressive ally like the United States, aggressive to others
03:43in the region, there'd be nobody attacking Australia.
03:47Former Prime Minister Paul Keating there speaking on the 7.30 program.
03:52Now the current Prime Minister, the other Labor leader, Anthony Albanese has said that
03:58his former colleague is welcome to his views but again, pointingly, the Prime Minister
04:05has said that Paul Keating left office almost 30 years ago in 1996 and that incidentally
04:12was the year Anthony Albanese came to Canberra as an MP.
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