US will have access to Western Australia nuclear submarine shipyard, minister says

SYDNEY: The United States will be able to use planned defence facilities in Western Australia that are to help deliver nuclear-powered submarines under the trilateral AUKUS nuclear submarine deal, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said on Sunday.

Australia will spend A$12 billion ($8 billion) to upgrade facilities at the Henderson shipyard near Perth, as part of a 20-year plan to transform it into the maintenance hub for its AUKUS submarine fleet, the government said on Saturday.

The AUKUS pact, sealed by Australia, Britain and the U.S. in 2021, aims to provide Australia with attack submarines from the next decade to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region.

President Donald Trump’s administration is undertaking a formal review of the pact led by Elbridge Colby, a top Pentagon policy official and public critic of the agreement.

Asked on Sunday if the U.S. would be able to use dry docks at the facility for its nuclear-powered submarines, Marles said, “This is an AUKUS facility and so I would expect so.”

“This is about being able to sustain and maintain Australia’s future submarines but it is very much a facility that is being built in the context of AUKUS,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation television. “I would expect that in the future this would be available to the US.”

The centre-left Labor government made an initial investment of A$127 million last year to upgrade facilities at the shipyard, which will also build the new landing craft for the Australian army and the new general-purpose frigates for the navy, supporting around 10,000 local jobs.

Under AUKUS - worth hundreds of billions of dollars - Washington will sell several Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, while Britain and Australia will later build a new AUKUS-class submarine.

Before the Virginia-class submarines, the facility will receive “a rotation of U.S. and UK vessels”, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday.

“This will provide for a significant benefit for our allies, which is part of the AUKUS arrangement,” Albanese told a press conference in Perth.

The Republican and Democratic heads of a U.S. congressional committee for strategic competition with China expressed strong support for AUKUS in July.

Marles said he remained “really confident about the proceeding of AUKUS under the Trump administration”, after a visit to Washington last month, during which he met with Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and other officials.

“We did speak about AUKUS in the meetings that I had in Washington a couple of weeks ago, and there was a positive sentiment there about how we’re proceeding,” he told Sky News television, according to a transcript.

Australia, which in July signed a treaty with Britain to bolster cooperation over the next 50 years on AUKUS, has previously maintained it is confident the pact will proceed.