Les MacDonald, chief executive of NSW Meals on Wheels, has looked at the AUKUS subs fiasco in the context of ballooning US debt, the emergence of BRICs and the massive US defence spend that needs to be debt funded.
in a piece published yesterday in Pearls & Irritations, John Menadue's public policy journal, MacDonald concluded "AUKUS could be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history."
Below are extracts from his article.
LES MACDONALD
"Much of the angst being generated by Australia’s worst foreign policy decision since joining the American invasion of Vietnam may well be misplaced.
"It is unquestionable that the former prime minister and two former foreign ministers have been correct in their assessments of the decision by the Albanese Government to proceed with the AUKUS deal, as being nothing short of disastrous for Australian sovereignty and for our economy, but the question arises, will it ever happen?
......
"The US right now outspends the next nine countries in its defence expenditure. All of that is financed by foreign debt. As it gets harder and harder to find buyers for that debt, US military expenditure, including what it spends on the more than 800 military bases it sustains around the world, will simply be impossible.
"The paltry injection of the $368 billion Australian dollars for these white elephant submarines will be a drop in the ocean of the vast reduction the US will have to make in its defense expenditure if it is to avoid national bankruptcy.
" Given that the US marine industry cannot even deliver the ships and submarines that the US navy currently has on order (neither can Britain deliver theirs), its capacity to deliver the nuclear submarines that we have been locked into by politicians, obsessed with proving that they have a bigger stick than China, is non-existent.
"What we really need to worry about is, if we have made very large down payments on these big boys’ toys with both the US and the UK, will we ever get it back when they fail to deliver?"
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