US Navy Virginia-class submarine, USS North Carolina, docks at the HMAS Stirling port in Rockingham on the outskirts of Perth on August 4, 2023. A US Navy Virginia-class submarine arrived at HMAS Stirling for a scheduled port visit as part of routine patrols in the Indo-Pacific region. (Photo by Tony McDonough / AFP) (Photo by TONY MCDONOUGH/AFP via Getty Images)

SYDNEY — Facing the enormous demands of the AUKUS submarine program, as well as a long-term doubling of the country’s surface navy, Australia today launched a formal plan to develop a military shipyard and port complex in Western Australia worth up to $20 billion, providing up to 10,000 jobs.

But there is less money than rhetoric so far, with only $127 million AUD ($85 million USD) committed for a three-year planning and feasibility study for the effort, seen as vital to the country’s naval ambitions.

The single biggest budget item in this development is likely to be a new “graving dock,” known by most as a dry dock. The Lucky Country has not built a new large dry dock since the Captain Cook dock in Sydney, which took four years to build during World War II and was the largest engineering project in the country at the time.

The new dock in Western Australia will probably be part of HMAS Stirling, where the nuclear-powered attack boats will be based and maintained. While details are scant on what the dock will look like, it’s possible Australia will model it after the new dry dock being built by the United States at Pearl Harbor. That project, with a $3.4 billion USD ($5.9 billion AUD) price tag, is built to handle Virginia-class boats for generations to come.

The dry dock attracted high-level concern in August when Rear Adm. Wendy Malcolm, the Royal Australian Navy officer in charge of readying Australia’s infrastructure for AUKUS and the expanded surface fleet, said the military and government needed to “get going” on crucial work like the dry dock and nearby shipyards or her country’s entire effort to host, build and maintain nuclear boats was “at risk.”

An image from the Australian government showing build-out plans for future naval docks. (Australian MoD)

The dry dock will be a centerpiece of the massive consolidation and expansion of shipyards and HMAS Stirling, as an illustration from the government depicts. Stirling is set to begin hosting rotations of US and UK nuclear boats from 2027, around the time the study will have been finished. Marles has said a floating dock could be leased to service the boats in the short term, but floating docks cannot sustain the depot-level maintenance submarines will need over time.

The expansion of the shipyards and the port “represents the most significant defense industry offering to Western Australia since federation (in 1901),” the defense minister said today. The new consolidated defense area will be established at the southern end of the Henderson shipyard, which is where new landing craft for the Australian army and new general purpose frigates for the Navy will be built.

It’s worth noting that Western Australia is considered crucial to Labor keeping its hold on power when the next election occurs. That will be no later than September next year and both parties are already jostling for position — so it’s no surprise that the Liberal Party’s shadow defense minister, Andrew Hastie, criticized the study as “barely enough to get works underway.

“The Albanese Government is already kicking these important works into the long grass, with ‘delivery of initiatives’ not set to commence for another nine months,” Hastie, who represents a Western Australian district in Parliament, said in a Wednesday statement. “Labor’s measly $127 million commitment to transforming Henderson is reflective of their lack of investment in the defense budget which is barely keeping up with inflation under this government.”