9 months ago
60
Anthony Albanese to stare down union and grassroots Labor dissent against the nuclear submarine project, instead talking up nonproliferation. Follow the latest developments at Labor’s 49th conference
Earlier this morning, Richard Marles did his regular segment with the Nine network, where he and Peter Dutton “debate” the week’s issues.
Which included the Labor conference position on Aukus and the “statement in detail”.
Firstly, these were announcements that we made back in March. In fact, what this is going to do is create 20,000 jobs around the country, direct jobs around the country, a point that we made back in March, because this is going to be one of the great industrial endeavours of our country, to have us constructing nuclear-powered submarines in Australia. And there will be jobs in South Australia.
There’ll be jobs in Western Australia as well. But we’re going to be reliant on a supply chain which actually goes into the industrial base of the whole country, into places like Queensland, NSW, Victoria. So, these are points that we made back in March. But we’re not afraid of a difficult debate.
When Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border last February, everyone expected that the conflict would last weeks, if not days. No one imagined that 18 months later Ukraine would be standing defiant and proud.
That the war in Ukraine has defied all predictions tells us that our world and indeed our region is uncertain, but that we do have agency. It tells us that we live in serious times requiring serious people and that the narrow-minded, gratuitous way in which the former Liberal government was running defence and foreign policy is hopelessly inadequate for the times that we now face.
Continue reading...
