The vast majority of workers and the community in the region are opposed to this. We saw evidence of that on the weekend. Some context here is important. Port Kembla is a trading port in a coal mining region. About fourteen years ago it became very clear that decarbonization was not an if but a when. We were carbon central: our steelworks alone accounted for 7 percent of all greenhouse emissions for the state of NSW.

As union leaders we decided that “saving the planet is going to take a lot of work, and we want that work to be done in Port Kembla.” We built a successful coalition of workers and unionists who agreed on one key thing: this revolution is happening. The only choice we had to make was whether we got these new green jobs or let them go offshore like almost everything else.

According to NSW government analysis, there are now expressions of interest for more than $43 billion in wind, solar, and hydrogen, centered around our port. We’re looking at eight thousand jobs in this region alone in the next decade through renewable energy projects — not including the offshore wind farms! For that to happen we have to now start building our green hydrogen capacity. This requires renewable power generation: a combination of offshore wind and terrestrial-based solar industries. Our approach to this is very pragmatic; it’s a planned and costed way forward.

The proposed nuclear submarine base screws our region’s entire renewable agenda and industrial transformation. This is at the heart of a lot of the angst here. We can’t do both. It’s not a big trading port. Any space we do have left is earmarked for our renewable sector. And even if there was room in the port, the exclusion zones around any future base will rule out the wind farms we need to drive power into the industrial area.

The nuclear issue is also causing a storm here. Port Kembla was declared a nuclear-free port and city more than forty years ago; this was reaffirmed by city hall last year. We worked very hard to educate our community and are still educating them about the nuclear issue. We put up posters explaining how each one of these proposed submarines will have enough enriched uranium to account for three Hiroshimas. We rolled out the maps so people could work out how their homes, schools, and hospitals could be affected by a nuclear accident.

They’ll call us NIMBYs. But no one’s going to believe we’re prissy about things. We’ve got steelworks and every carcinogen known to humanity in our backyard. This is different. It’s an attempt to conscript our entire community into a war machine, then put a nuclear target on our backs for our troubles. That will not happen here under our watch.

What jobs? The government says that AUKUS — which is set to cost close to half a trillion dollars — will only create twenty thousand jobs over thirty years. These claims haven’t been backed up. They’re not proposing to actually make the ships here in Port Kembla. They’re not even really proposing to service them. It’s not as if we’ll have apprentices from the steel mill allowed to work on these ships. No one believes we’ll be allowed anywhere near them.

Like the Rust Belt in America, we’ve been losing thousands of jobs for years. The steelworks used to employ twenty-three thousand people directly. It now employs three thousand directly, and we’ve got another ten thousand as contractors. Only renewables will get those jobs back and everyone knows it.

Politically this is quite an amazing moment. It’s the first time in my memory where we are not wedged in the labor movement between jobs or the environment. We’ve actually got jobs and the environment on one side. On the other side are the imperialists, United States, and Australian navy. This is why both governments might be a bit nervous about this agenda now — particularly when it comes to Port Kembla. There’s no way you’re going to convince this community that both renewables and the nuclear base are possible.

Many Australians are starting to understand that the decision of whether or not to go to war has been taken away from the Australian government and, by virtue of that, the Australian people. There’s clearly been a coup in defense policy. We’ve seen how this works in Darwin. Very quickly and methodically they extended US troop rotations. Slowly but surely they shifted the focus of our defense from defending Australia to defending US economic interest in the South China Sea.

It’s critical for people to understand how these crazy decisions are made. It starts with military figures creating consultancies that call themselves independent, but have an agenda. Former prime minister John Howard used taxpayer funds to establish the Australian Strategic Policy institute (ASPI), one of the leading so-called independent strategic think tanks for the military. It’s funded in part by arms dealers, the Department of Defense, and others. This collusion isn’t even hidden. It’s justified on the basis that it is somehow in the national interest to have defense policy manufactured by people who have the most to gain from conflict.

These are the people that drove much of the AUKUS agenda at the start, as well as Scott Morrison in his dying political days. AUKUS was really his parting gift. Morrison and these spooks took the opposition leader — the current prime minister — into a security briefing that was big, scary, and allegedly clear enough to commit them all to AUKUS within a day. Twenty-four hours to hand over $368 billion and determine that China is our enemy — even though there’s no evidence that they’re about to attack Australia.

The US navy has always wanted an east coast base in Australia and under this plan they’re going to get one. Our laws say that you can’t have foreign bases in Australia, so they’ll call it a joint military installation. But the only thing Australian in this base will be the Australian flag. And ironically it’ll probably be made in China.

One of the things our movement should do is bring the beneficiaries of war into the daylight. We should shed light on who they are, who pays them, and where they come from. Here in this region we’re very determined to tell our community on which side these people’s bread is buttered.

Obviously, the conservatives will take any opportunity they can to have a bit of a swipe. This line that unions are somehow a threat to national security is disgraceful. Proportionally more unionized seafarers died than navy sailors in World War II in Australia. That was all part of the war effort against fascism.

The conservatives have been ideologically driven to keep unionized Australian labor out of the coastal trade. They actually passed laws to stop Australians getting jobs in Australian coastal waters. They now have weaker security requirements for much of the exploited international labor working on “flag of convenience” ships than they do for Australian seafarers and maritime workers. So there’s an argument that the conservatives are the ones compromising national security.

Having unionized local seafarers on domestic coastal routes — cabotage as they call it — is an idea that our friends in the United States know all too well ever since the Jones Act. Virtually every other country around the world operates with the idea that your coastal waters are best served by your nationals. Domestic routes are highly unionized almost everywhere. Australia is a weird exception. That’s been driven politically, mostly by conservative governments.

But some of the military chiefs recognize aspects of all this, and some conservatives sort of have a foot in both camps. The current Labor government has committed to an Australian strategic cargo fleet. The maritime unions have been asking for this for a very long time. We know from numerous reports about the current state of exploitation of foreign labor around the coastal trades. It is to the benefit of everyone to have a domestic fleet, and strong, unionized labor working those routes.

The business cases are different. At the end of the day, whether it’s at sea or on land, private corporations legally have to put their shareholders in front of all other interests — including the national interest. The steelmaker here in Port Kembla is a multinational company with interests in the United States, Vietnam, and China. It’s threatened to shut down the Australian industry on more than one occasion.

Their business is making money, not making steel. Whether they make it here or elsewhere is not their primary concern. If making money for their shareholders means shutting up shop in Port Kembla, then that’s what they’ll do. That’s the reason we can’t let the market determine strategic industrial development and retention — particularly when it comes to steel. I, for one, think, and many others here would agree, that if corporations hold communities to ransom, then the government has an obligation to nationalize them.

My brief from the labor council is Port Kembla. And as a leader of the council, part of my job is to analyze how all these things relate to one another. The government says a decision hasn’t been made and won’t be made for ten years. Well, we were born at night but not last night. The notion that this government can promise us ten years — when they face federal elections every three years — is just not credible. The conservatives have already told us that if they get in power, the base is going to be here faster than you can say San Diego. So no one buys this idea that it’s been kicked down the road.

The base in Port Kembla has to be ruled out. That is our chief focus. But I can well understand that other ports around the country might feel the same way as us. Our next step is to escalate this push by creating a fraternal alliance with other central labor councils in ports around the country. We started that process on the weekend at our rally. We had representatives from other ports, from Sydney, the mountains, and elsewhere. We want to accelerate this process.

There should be a national conversation about this. It should be on the national agenda of the union movement. Our thinking is that we start with our fraternal relationships with other regions. Knowledge is very important, history is very important, analysis is very important. All this can only be done through rallies, conferences, seminars, and building alliances. Most importantly, this all has to be driven by the rank and file.

Opinion polls now tell us that despite the Sinophobic campaign of recent years, only one in five Australians sees China as an imminent threat. That’s a spectacular failure from the war hawks. Whether these four out of five people will see the situation as alarming enough to mobilize is the challenge for our movement.

Port Kembla has been a very militant port, an internationalist port, very strong on issues of social conscience. It was the site of one of the world’s first social movement strikes, the Dalfram dispute in 1938. The wharfies refused to load pig iron bound for Japan. They knew it was going to be used as bullets and bombs against the Chinese in the first instance and then against us. Everyone could see war was coming.

All of Wollongong supported the strikers. The bosses tried to get the steelworkers to scab on the wharfies but they refused. So the bosses shut down the entire steelworks as payback. We had market gardeners from Sydney — the Chinese community in particular, but also others — who fed Wollongong during that entire dispute. It ended up with Attorney General Robert Menzies from the then-government coming down to Wollongong to “sort out the communists.” He left with rotten tomato stains on his back and a nickname that lasted his entire lifetime — Pig Iron Bob.

I’m not saying the community hasn’t changed at all since then, or that history compels us or determines our policy. But it certainly gives us confidence, strength, and insight into how these things can be won. It also helps to put a bit of fear into our opponents. We have been rolling it out lately for everyone who will listen. People like what they hear. A journalist asked us, “What happens if the government keeps going?” We said they’ll have to fight Port Kembla before they even get to China. And we mean it. The mood is that strong down here — we are not going to let this happen.