By Kirsty Needham and Renju Jose
SYDNEY (Reuters) -Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles said on Thursday his government would work closely with the United States while President Donald Trump’s administration conducts a formal review of the AUKUS defence pact.
“It is natural the administration would want to examine this major undertaking including progress and delivery,” a spokesperson for Marles said in a statement.
Australia in 2023 committed to spend A$368 billion ($239.3 billion) over three decades on AUKUS, Australia’s biggest ever defence project with the United States and Britain, to acquire and build nuclear-powered submarines.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to meet Trump for the first time next week on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in Canada, where the security allies will discuss tariffs and a request from the United States for Australia to increase defence spending from 2% to 3.5% of gross domestic product.
Albanese had previously said defence spending would rise to 2.3% and has declined to commit to the U.S. target, saying Australia would focus on capability needs.
Under AUKUS, Australia was scheduled to make a $2 billion payment in 2025 to the U.S. to help boost its submarine shipyards and speed up lagging production rates of Virginia class submarines to allow the sale of up to three U.S. submarines to Australia from 2032.
Britain and Australia will jointly build a new AUKUS class submarine expected to come into service from 2040.
Britain recently completed a review of AUKUS. It has not released the results publicly, but it announced plans this month to increase the size of its nuclear-powered attack submarine fleet.
Marles’ spokesperson said AUKUS would grow the U.S. and Australian defence industries and generate thousands of manufacturing jobs.
John Lee, an Australian Indo-Pacific expert at Washington’s conservative Hudson Institute think tank, said the Pentagon review was “primarily an audit of American capability” and whether it can afford to sell up to five nuclear powered submarines when it was not meeting its own production targets.
“Relatedly, the low Australian defence spending and ambiguity as to how it might contribute to a Taiwan contingency is also a factor,” Lee said.
($1 = 1.5380 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham and Renju Jose in Sydney and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese and Jamie Freed)
