AUKUS is finding public support despite its many problems. Why?

share_windows This article appeared in Crikey on November 19 2025.

Results of an annual poll, which asked the Australian public wide-ranging questions about their views on Australia-China relations, have been released. The poll was conducted by the Australia-China Relations Institute in collaboration with UTS’s Centre for Business Intelligence and Data Analytics.

One question was about public support for AUKUS. 

The percentage of respondents who agreed that acquiring nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS would help keep Australia secure from a military threat from China rose from 48 percent in 2024 to 50 percent in 2025. The poll also found that 68 percent of the 2,045 respondents supported using AUKUS to deepen Australia’s cooperation with the United States and United Kingdom on advanced technologies such as cyber, AI and quantum computing.

This figure is roughly consistent with Lowy’s 2025 poll published in June 2025, which found that 67 percent of respondents were in favour of acquiring nuclear-powered submarines.

Comparing data from previous years, both the ACRI and Lowy polls suggest that support for AUKUS has not waned and may have even strengthened slightly.

To those who are critical of AUKUS, this is not encouraging. And to those who have actively campaigned against AUKUS — the Australian Anti-AUKUS Coalition (AAAC), the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN), Labor against War (LAW), Mobilise Against AUKUS and War (MAAW), the Marrickville Peace Group, etc — these figures could be dispiriting.

Last weekend, Australian political scientist and AUKUS critic Mark Beeson launched a book he co-edited titled Search for Security: AUKUS and the New Militarism. During the launch in Sydney, he said, with a touch of self-mockery, that he didn’t believe his book would ‘transform debate in Canberra, but think how therapeutic it was doing it’.

Like a Rubik’s Cube, AUKUS reveals a different problem depending on which way you turn it.

Some see strategic risk in entangling Australia in a future US-China conflict, especially over Taiwan. Some regard it as a threat to Australia’s sovereignty, since we may not retain full operational authority over the nuclear-powered submarines dependent on US technology, intellectual property and maintenance infrastructure.

Some fear potential nuclear proliferation, believing AUKUS sets a dangerous precedent by transferring weapons-grade nuclear material to a non-nuclear-weapons state. Some focus on the opportunity costs, given that $368 billion could be used for higher-priority domestic needs, especially in housing, health and climate resilience.

Some question the timing of delivery and the consequent capability gap, knowing the nuclear submarines will not arrive until the 2030s-2050s. Some see AUKUS as likely to erode trust among Australia’s neighbours, as it could be seen as our decision to go back to ‘Mummy‘ (the UK) and Uncle Sam (the US), despite the reality of being in the Asia-Pacific region.

Some argue that AUKUS doesn’t have social licence, since the deal was hatched ‘on the back of an envelope‘, with Labor agreeing to Morrison’s deal in 24 hours. And some see it as ‘a textbook example of how to disenfranchise the community, providing almost no transparency or democracy’. 

And this is not a complete litany against AUKUS. Given all these critical responses, the obvious question to ask here is why these polls continue to indicate a considerable level of public support for AUKUS. 

There could be a number of reasons.

First, with both major parties firmly on board, AUKUS carries the weight of bipartisan consensus, giving it a sense of national inevitability. Now that Labor has been reelected with an overwhelming majority, it has little need to worry about its political detractors. 

Second, the elephant in the room, as far as AUKUS is concerned, is China. Defence Minister Richard Marles, in full agreement with former prime minister Scott Morrison, tells Australians that submarines will keep Australia safe because they are an effective deterrent to China.

Although Labor’s disciplined China rhetoric and careful diplomatic efforts have led to a relatively stable bilateral relationship with the People’s Republic of China, mainstream media in Australia have not dialled down their China threat rhetoric in the least. ‘War with China’ has become a persistent narrative trope in the television programs and newspapers of the Nine Network and News Corp — as well as the ABC. One episode of Four Corners told Australians that 

The message is clear: the People’s Liberation Army is ready for combat, and the target is Taiwan. It’s increasingly becoming a question of when — not if — China will launch an assault. Experts say it could be as early as 2025.

Public opinion and policymaking comprise a feedback loop. By moving the discussion from the unimaginable to the imaginable, from the preventable to the inevitable, and from ‘if’ to ‘when’, the media prime the public to accept their repeated narrative. This acceptance may in turn be used as evidence of voters’ support for subsequent policy decisions.

The media are powerful players in shaping public opinion on foreign policy. ACRI’s 2025 poll shows that traditional media, including newspapers, television and radio, were the most frequently-cited influences on Australians’ overall views of China (29 percent).

Notwithstanding some long-form discussions on AUKUS in the media, Australia’s news outlets generally don’t interrogate AUKUS, instead merely asking, ‘Is AUKUS on track or in jeopardy?’

The Greens have explicitly adopted an anti-AUKUS policy. Senator David Shoebridge, whose portfolios include Defence and Home Affairs, is perhaps the strongest critic among currently serving politicians.

After launching Search for Security, Shoebridge told Crikey he’d be ‘very keen’ to work with anyone, including the teals, to break down the consensus, even though he does not see the teals as having a unified political position and as still unwilling to challenge Australia’s relationship with the US. 

Shoebridge said he would also like to see AUKUS become an election issue, since AUKUS has become an element of many things the Greens fight for: 

‘I’ll do everything to make it an election issue,’ he said. ‘It now is a critical part of the environmental fight, with the most recent proposed changes to the EPBC Act, which have an underpinning in critical minerals and AUKUS. It’s now a key part of our fight for public housing.’

The Greens senator could well be ‘on the money’ by linking AUKUS with economic issues. When the US Studies Centre’s 2024 poll posed a question about AUKUS in terms of value for money, only one in four respondents (25 percent) thought it was worth the price tag. 

What does it mean when half of Australians say they support AUKUS, while only a quarter of us are prepared to stump up the taxes to pay for it? If these figures are about right, how long before our ambivalence about the pact, and our apparent antipathy towards paying for it, show up in the ballot box?