Fremantle, Cockburn, Melville mayors and CEOs return from AUKUS delegation in America

Local governments are simply “playing the hand they’ve been dealt” when preparing for AUKUS impacts, representatives say. Mayors and chief executives from six local governments have returned from the US in their bid to prepare local communities for the arrival of US and UK submarines at Perth’s naval base, Garden Island’s HMAS Stirling. The heads of the Perth South West Metropolitan Alliance’s member councils jetted off to Los Angeles, San Diego and other US cities over a 12-day trip. The trip focused on learning ways to support incoming US Navy personnel and their families when submarines are stationed at HMAS Stirling from 2027. But councils faced intense scrutiny earlier this year by ratepayers, some of whom called on elected members to justify the about $14,000 spend per person, given the Alliance derived funds from ratepayers. The City of Fremantle was faced with anti-AUKUS protestors at a council meeting in August, while the Town of East Fremantle narrowly voted down a bid to cancel the trip for their own representatives the following week. Returning in mid-September, PSWMA director Warwick Carter said this week trip was about preparing communities. “Our job as local government is to play the hand that we’ve been dealt,” he said. “We have four US submarines and one UK submarine beginning to rotate through here from 2027 and it’s our job to prepare the community and get the best social, economic and environmental outcomes that we can for our region.” He said the biggest takeaway from US defence was an “open and explorative” style of communication with their communities. “The US approach is to demystify things, whether it’s how submarines work or how they recruit their people and how they select people for overseas deployments,” he said. Mr Carter said traffic was raised as the biggest issue by defence bases and cities such as San Diego used carpool programs as one of the ways to move people on and off bases. Two reports from the trip are in the works by the Alliance, one of which will cover findings and implications for Perth and is scheduled for release early next year. The second will explore social license and the relationship between the US Navy, Government and communities. “They invest in what we call defence communities over here, so communities with a high number of defence personnel,” Mr Carter said. “They were investing in improving stormwater mitigation because they knew that in an emergency, they would rather that their people not be worried about their families, or not be diverted into managing climate-related emergency (and) they should otherwise be prepared to be engaged as part of their jobs in defence.” Mr Carter said defence bases often worked as “little cities”, with base commanders dealing with the same day-to-day issues of parking, rubbish removal and roads that local governments were engaged in. This made for a “tight” relationship with the district mayor and in one case the pair would text each other at least weekly to check in. “We saw a number of programs where they bring people on to the base to what one of the base commanders described as ‘demystifying Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory’,” Mr Carter said. “To be able to just explain; it’s not all secretive. We can explain exactly how it works.” Amid billion-dollar projects such as the State Government’s Westport program, ongoing ship-building at the Henderson-based Australian Marine Complex and a new women and babies hospital planned for Murdoch, Mr Carter said he wanted to see an agreement across all tiers of Government to co-ordinate benefits. “We’ve got a convergence of mega projects happening in this region; we’ve never seen this many projects trying to be undertaken,” he said. “We don’t want to look back at this in 20 years time and look at all these projects we’ve done and have left parts of our community behind.” He said such an agreement would ensure land, community centres, construction of roads and funding was available and correctly coordinated by Government. AUKUS reached a historic milestone in August when Australian sailors carried out works on the nuclear-powered submarine USS Hawaii for the first time since World War II. In a visit to HMAS Stirling last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spruiked a training program for 200 young West Australians to work on nuclear-powered submarines, dubbed a “jobs for subs” program.