The success of Australia’s nuclear submarine program will depend on whether workforce, education and migration policy can keep pace with defence ambition.
AUKUS, especially its submarine element, Pillar One, has become much more than a defence capability program. It is now a national undertaking that will reshape Australia’s industrial base.
‘AUKUS is housing policy. AUKUS is education and skills policy. AUKUS is migration policy.’ South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’s remarks at the opening session of ASPI’s 2026 Defence Conference last month captured the challenge facing Australia’s largest and most ambitious defence project. If AUKUS is genuinely a national endeavour, then its success will depend as much on education, migration and workforce policy as it does on defence planning.
The political foundations are stronger than many anticipated. Since AUKUS was announced, all three partner nations have changed governments or leaders. Each has reviewed the agreement and reaffirmed its commitment. As Malinauskas observed, ‘every country has thoroughly scrutinised politically the AUKUS proposition and endorsed it’.
Australia cannot simply buy this capability; it must build the workforce and industrial base needed to sustain it.
‘We can offer all the money in the world, and no country is going to sell us a submarine, because they’re too busy making them for themselves. So, if we want this capability, we have to build it for ourselves,’ Malinauskas said.
The political foundations of AUKUS are proving remarkably resilient. The harder task is delivering it. The greatest constraint is no longer funding or strategy – it’s workforce.
Malinauskas identified his greatest concern not as South Australia’s preparedness, but ‘whether or not the rest of the nation is throwing everything at workforce in the way that we are’. His observation highlights a persistent misconception that Pillar One is an issue of state industry policy rather than a national industrial undertaking. That perception reflects debates from more than a decade ago, when the (diesel) Future Submarine Program coincided with the decline of automotive manufacturing in South Australia and was often framed as economic stimulus.
That context has changed. South Australia is no longer seeking defence investment to offset industrial decline. Submarines are being built in Adelaide because the state has the industrial capability to deliver them, not because it needs the work. The scale of Pillar One, however, means it cannot be delivered by South Australia alone.
As Malinauskas put it, the era in which states competed against one another for defence projects is over. South Australia is expected to operate at capacity for decades, meaning the other states and territories will need to play a central role in building the workforce, suppliers and industrial capacity required.
The workforce challenge explains why. AUKUS will not just create new jobs; it will also redistribute skilled Australians throughout the economy. The nuclear enterprise requires Australian citizens capable of obtaining high-level security clearances. Many will come from existing defence industries, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure and engineering sectors.
Skilled migration remains essential, but largely to backfill the roles vacated as Australian workers move into the nuclear enterprise rather than filling highly classified positions directly. The competition for talent is already intense. The same engineers, electricians, welders, fitters, project managers and construction trades needed for AUKUS are also required across national infrastructure sectors around energy and mining projects as well as the workforce pipeline required to deliver the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games infrastructure.
Security standards cannot be relaxed. As Malinauskas warned, that would be the quickest way to lose access to the technological crown jewels of the partnership. Governments should continue to invest in faster and more efficient clearance processes while maintaining the standards on which the partnership depends. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 2023, which centralised the highest-level vetting under ASIO and introduced the Top Secret-Privileged Access clearance, shows this balance is achievable. But the same discipline should now extend to the Negative Vetting tiers, where most of the AUKUS workforce will sit. There is no surplus workforce waiting to be mobilised for AUKUS, making education and training a strategic policy priority. South Australia is drawing on lessons from Britain’s submarine enterprise at Barrow-in-Furness, where workforce development has been central to sustaining the program. Degree apprenticeships, additional federally supported university places, technical education apprenticeships and technical colleges linked to secondary schools all form part of the solution.
No single initiative will solve the workforce challenge. AUKUS requires a pipeline that develops the full range of skills needed to sustain the enterprise. As Malinauskas said, ‘we have to do it all’. The program needs nuclear engineers, tradespeople, technicians, project managers and countless support staff. A weakness in any part of that pipeline becomes a constraint on the whole program.
Britain has spent decades building a national culture around its nuclear submarine enterprise. Governments, industry, education providers and local communities all understand their role in sustaining capability over generations. Australia is attempting to compress that process into little more than a decade.
This is the practical meaning of AUKUS as a national endeavour. Over the next 30 years, projections show that some 20,000 new jobs could be required, but the actual number is expected to be higher. It demands that all levels of government, beyond Defence, test whether their existing systems are aligned with the demands of a decades-long industrial program. How are our education systems producing the workforce the enterprise requires? Are our migration settings supporting industries that will lose skilled workers to AUKUS? Are security clearance processes aligned with the build schedule?
As shipbuilding operations at Osborne and Henderson ramp up simultaneously, every jurisdiction will compete for the same finite pool of skilled workers. The measure of commitment to AUKUS will no longer be political support, but whether the federal government has the policies, systems and workforce pipelines required to enable the states and territories to deliver the additional training, skilling and education programs for the AUKUS workforce
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