Beer-lateral relationship between Australia and the UK strengthens as treaty signed

9 hours ago 5

The close relationship between Australia and the United Kingdom was on full display on Saturday, as Defence Minister Richard Marles and UK Defence Secretary John Healey signed a bilateral agreement shoring up a 50-year partnership on nuclear submarines.

The pair signed the so-called Geelong Treaty, a bilateral commitment to defence cooperation under the first stage of AUKUS.

Defence Minister Richard Marles with his UK counterpart John Healey.

Marles, speaking at the Geelong Gallery where the treaty was signed, said the agreement would generate 20,000 jobs in Australia, the largest industrial endeavour since the Snowy Hydro Scheme.

The scheme, he said, would establish a 7000-strong workforce at the Osborne Naval Shipyard in Adelaide and between 3000 and 4000 workers at the Henderson Defence Precinct in Perth.

“In military terms, this represents the most significant leap in our military capability since the establishment of the Navy in 1913 [and] we will become just the seventh country in the world to operate nuclear-powered submarines,” Marles told reporters.

Marles would not be drawn on questions about which countries represented the biggest security threat in Australia’s region, nor whether it had been necessitated by wavering US support for AUKUS.

“This treaty has been worked on for a long time,” he said. “It is a critical milestone in the pursuit of bringing to fruition AUKUS ...

“It is putting into treaty what had already been agreed between our two countries, but it also sits under the trilateral treaty that was signed between our three countries in August of last year.”

Healey said the agreement would secure tens of thousands of jobs between the two countries.

“It is a treaty to build the most advanced, most powerful attack submarines either of our nations have ever had,” he said.

“It is a treaty that will fortify the Indo-Pacific. It will strengthen NATO ... this is a treaty that will define the relationship between our two nations and safeguard the securities of our country for our children, and our children’s children.”

This masthead reported on Saturday that the deal was struck while US President Donald Trump’s advisors were reviewing the three-way deal struck in 2021.

UK Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey and Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles signing the Geelong Treaty on Saturday.

The Geelong Treaty will include a $41 billion pledge to scale up industry in both countries to build new submarine fleets with a common design, amid fears that Trump will undercut AUKUS and leave Australia and the UK exposed.

Highlighting the warm relationship between Marles and his British counterpart was Healey’s decision to travel to Marles’ electorate of Corio to sign the agreement.

After signing the agreement Marles and Healey departed for Little Creatures Brewery in Geelong, where they toured the factory and enjoyed a pint of pale ale.

Little Creatures employee Miles Barraclough shows John Healey and Richard Marles around the Geelong brewery.

The visit echoed a trip Marles undertook to the UK last July, when Healey – a former “pub minister” under the previous Labour government – took him to a pub in Rotherham, in his electorate.

“We had our bilateral discussions and then we had our bilateral drinking,” Healey told The Times newspaper at the time.

With David Crowe