In May 2026, documents tabled in the New South Wales parliament revealed that Port Kembla, 75 kilometres south of Sydney, is the preferred east coast location to base the AUKUS nuclear submarine fleet. AUKUS is a security partnership between Australia, the UK and the U.S. Plans are already well developed on the west coast of the continent. The government has earmarked $37 billion to the Henderson military precinct in Perth’s southern fringe to provide maintenance to nuclear subs using the nearby Stirling base.
The community in the Illawarra is vehemently opposed to the submarine base, arguing that it would make their community a military target. There have been very large protest marches to oppose it. Unions are leading the charge. South Coast Labor Council Secretary Arthur Rorris told WAVE FM News, “Port Kembla is about making steel, not about making enemies, and we’re not about to surrender Port Kembla to Trump’s Navy.”
In September last year, 40 organisations signed the Port Kembla Declaration demanding that the federal government rejects an AUKUS base at Port Kembla. The declaration was launched at a memorial paying tribute to a famous 1938 anti-war strike, when unionists on the wharf refused to load raw iron on ships headed for Japan, which was then preparing an imperialist expansion into the Pacific. This history, which shows the power that workers organising collectively can wield, provides important lessons for how to fight back today.
Many locals focus narrowly on opposing a base in Port Kembla, and have nothing to say about other east coast sites such as Newcastle or Brisbane. The “no AUKUS subs” campaign needs to be broadened beyond opposition the Port Kembla site. It needs to aim squarely at the longstanding alliance between the ruling classes of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
That alliance was forged from a shared imperialist history based on capitalist expansion and European domination of the planet.
So it is quite bizarre that some still raise calls for Australia to adopt “an independent foreign policy,” as if Australian capitalism is somehow less oppressive or more benign, or can be differentiated from the foreign version. This idea is ridiculous: Australian capital has its own imperialist interests, particularly in the western Pacific.
Australian companies plunder the region, extracting minerals, timber, fish and other resources. The supposedly sovereign Fijian economy, for example, is almost entirely controlled by Australian capital. Australian foreign policy is aimed squarely at protecting Australian capitalist interests from growing Chinese competition. Calls for “an independent foreign policy” simply brush off the reality of Australian imperialism
The struggle against submarine bases cannot be conducted in a vacuum. The fightback must be built around calls to scrap AUKUS, for money to be redirected to public services not war, for the immediate closure of Pine Gap and an end to the U.S. alliance now. The campaign to defeat the AUKUS facility in Port Kembla is important. But we agree with the position of anti-nuclear campaigner, Gem Romuld: “not here, not anywhere.” This fight must be inextricably linked with relentless opposition to imperialist plunder everywhere — regardless of its accent or flag.
