(Reuters) -Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said on Sunday that the United States would be able to use planned defence facilities in Western Australia to help deliver submarines under the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal.
The government on Saturday said it would spend A$12 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 AUKUS pact, agreed upon by Australia, Britain and the U.S. in 2021, aims to provide Australia with nuclear-powered 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.
When 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 U.S.”
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.
The Republican and Democratic heads of a U.S. congressional committee for strategic competition with China in July stressed their strong support for AUKUS, amid the review of the deal by Elbridge Colby, a top Pentagon policy official and public critic of the pact.
Australia, which the same month signed a treaty with Britain to bolster cooperation over the next 50 years on AUKUS, has maintained it is confident the pact will proceed.
(Reporting by Sam McKeith in Sydney; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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