Commentary The new strategic alliance between three of the Anglosphere powers, the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia—AUKUS—is a magnificent achievement. It is likely that Defence Minister Peter Dutton and probably Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie played a significant role in the conception and realisation of this project. The immediate and practical question for Australia is whether it will bring to an end four decades of gross mismanagement of the defence acquisition budget, which has seen successive governments push to establish a domestic submarine industry linked to naked electoral advantage. There was an added factor that was always extremely risky. Rather than relying on a proven off-the-shelf submarine design, politicians tasked a foreign submarine builder from France—never one of our closest allies—to design something new and radical. First, it was the Labor Party’s Collins-class submarine in the early 1990s, which was hardly a success and was acquired and maintained at enormous cost. But then in …