We should never have agreed to AUKUS

Australia is paying for America’s submarines and making deals with a President whose veracity we still have to fact-check. Doctor Kim Sawyer reports.

He is a MASTER Entertainer. He knows where to position the actors, where to position the cameras, where to position the lights. She knows how to spray her own makeup and other people’s makeup. Every press conference, every Cabinet meeting is the entertainer’s reality show.

US President Donald Trump He is the puppet master who pulls the apprentices’ strings. He knows how to play them. Maggie Haberman‘s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Fall of America describes the actor connected World.

“The young Donald Trump was an athlete in his youth and dreamed of a career in Hollywood. He eventually fulfilled his father’s wish to succeed the family business in real estate. But what his son really wanted was always to be a star.”

reality show Apprentice made him a star. Apprentice It was his apprenticeship. Trump knows who is willing to be fooled; He knows his prices or how to determine his price. He thinks he knows the price of everything and everyone, but in reality he doesn’t know the value of anything. He is a man of trust.

Trump is the confidence man of fiction, best understood by reading Ibsen’s Master Builder or watching 1958. section ‘The End of the World’ CBS series Follow-up In this movie there was a character who wanted to build a wall and had all the confidence of a man. Sound familiar? The fictional character’s name was Trump. In the end, he turned out to be a fraud. The imaginary Trump was finally arrested.

Trump and Albanese’s reunion was on his last reality show, Master and Apprentice. The master got what we wanted. He got the respect he was looking for. He got the deal he wanted. The apprentice got what he wanted. He received confirmation of the Trust Man’s power.

The art of agreement.

Inevitably, the agreement is a fraud. Turnbull and Keating understand. Morrison and Albanese don’t do this. We should never have accepted AUKUS. This isn’t just a 30-year, $368 billion cost; this includes $123 billion as an unexpected consequence of cost explosion risk. Risks are everywhere.

We have already paid more than $3 billion in premiums on a highly uncertain insurance policy. As Turnbull noted, submarines are currently being produced at a rate of 1.1 per year.

“They need to get to two by 2028 to meet their own requirements, and 2.33 to meet their own needs plus Australia’s. And even though they’ve spent over $10 billion in the last six or seven years, they haven’t been able to increase production rates. So they have a real problem.”

We have a bigger problem.

Governments are like portfolio managers. The government needs to understand diversification, so you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket of subs. Our defense budget is so dependent on submarines that we don’t have room to invest in emerging defense technologies, the patrol boats, frigates or amphibious landing ships we need for urgent problems such as evacuation. Instead of wiping out the $70 billion student debt facing three million young Australians, the budget is shifting to submarines, which won’t be supplied until the early 2030s. The cost of the deal.

We have become so accustomed to the scammer’s lies that we have to fact-check everything he says. When Trump said he went to Australia I thought it was another dope, but no, he visited Australia not as President, but as a spruiker at the National Merit Convention in 2011. The scammer gave the scammer’s message about how anyone can pay off their debts. This wasn’t Trump’s first visit to the antipodes. In August 1993, Trump visited Auckland as part of a consortium tender for a casino operating licence. At that time, Trump was in debt. The bid failed.

For Trump, truth and falsehood are reciprocal. He always used the mantra. “If you say something often enough, it becomes true.” Interviewed by Sydney Morning Herald In 2011, Trump criticized Obama’s business plan as doomed to failure and unlikely to have any impact. The unemployment rate at the time was nine percent, and at the end of Obama’s term, unemployment was 4.9 percent. Trump was always anti-Obama. Trump has always been misleading.

The other leading actor of the program we watched last Monday was our own Prime Minister. Albanese had a lot to thank Trump for; Maybe that’s why he wanted to meet her so badly. In February 2025 polls, the coalition was ahead 51-49, and then the Trump-Dutton factor came into play. Dutton was Albo’s trump card. No wonder he wanted to take a selfie with Trump. Perhaps he invited Trump to visit to explain why Australia is paying for America’s submarines.

Albanese wore plenty of make-up to the meeting. The real Albo shared his secrets privately, perhaps with the other actor sitting across from Trump, the Ambassador, whom Trump disliked. Albanese may regret his meeting with Trump, the deal and Trump’s endorsement. She may have underestimated the risk of kissing her Trust Man’s ring.

Risk was visible everywhere. Two days ago, 7 million people participated in the No Kings protests. Thirty years ago, when Albo was a man of principle, he might have joined the same protests, but now he was a man of compromise, a politician who traded principles for politics.

The East Room was being torn down the day Albo met with Trump at the White House. During a tour of the White House in 1984, we were asked to stand still when the President appeared. Reagan had just left the East Room, where he gave a speech and where Carter, Obama and FDR were speaking. The East Room was built by the President. Theodore Roosevelt In 1902.

There was apparently no layer of legacy, at least for Trump. Betty Ford considered the importance of this. “If the West Wing is the mind of the nation, the East Wing is its heart.” Confirmation that Trump is heartless.

Australia should have put AUKUS on hold to let the public decide whether to proceed. After all, we will pay for AUKUS, and we will also pay the salaries of the people’s representatives. But most will never see the submarines. HECS There is a debt on the tax bill. Australia has been too submissive, too sycophantic and too risk-averse in our dealings with Trump. Just as there is a price for taking risks, there is also a price for avoiding risk.

Democrats paid the price for not dealing with Trump the way they should have dealt with him. Dealing with Trump is like dealing with the devil; You must agree on your terms, not his. He is a convicted criminal, a hustler, an entertainer, the confidence man who became President.

The No Kings protests demonstrated the difference between the public and the institutions, between those who did not bow to Trump and those who did; between right and wrong. History may rewrite some stories, but not the story of Master and Apprentice.