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Key events
Tory Shepherd
Australia on track to select nuclear submarine by March: Marles
The Aukus program is “on track”, defence minister Richard Marles said this morning, after a meeting with US defense secretary, Lloyd J Austin III, in Hawaii.
Australia is set to choose either a US or UK nuclear powered submarine design by March next year, amid ongoing concerns that there will be a capability gap between the retirement of the existing fleet and the acquisition of the new one.
Marles declined to commit to when those submarines are likely to be in the water. He said:
You don’t build a nuclear powered submarine quickly.
Aukus is “going along very well”, Marles said:
We are on track to making an announcement around the optimal pathway that Australia will pursue in relation to acquiring nuclear powered submarines, to make that announcement in the first part of next year.
The pair also discussed making their defence industrial bases “more seamless”.
Marles said there was “increasing pressure” on the global rules-based order in both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in China’s actions in the Pacific:
We watch China seek to shape the world around us in a way that we have not seen before.
Austin said the US and Australia were united on “enhancing deterrence and strengthening security in the Indo Pacific”:
We talked about enhancing our interoperability and expanding our operations and advancing our ongoing posture, force posture initiatives and deepening our defence industrial cooperation.
Aukus has “made tremendous progress over the past year”, Austin said.
Earlier, the two ministers had a trilateral meeting with their Japanese counterpart, Yasukazu Hamada.
Australia will not accept illegal Russian annexation in Ukraine
Tory Shepherd
Russia’s “sham referenda” have prompted the government to legally support Ukraine in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and to put financial sanctions and travel bans on another 28 “Russian-appointed separatists, ministers and senior officials”.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has announced the annexation of four regions in Ukraine after holding illegitimate referenda.
In a release, foreign affairs minister Penny Wong and attorney general Mark Dreyfus said:
The regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are sovereign Ukrainian territory. President Putin’s annexation is illegal and any claims that these territories are now part of Russia are baseless and false.
Australia has also filed an intervention in the ICJ case brought by Ukraine against Russia, supporting Ukraine’s claims Russia has violated the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (genocide convention).
Wong said the additional sanctions “reinforce Australia’s strong objection to the actions of President Putin and those carrying out his orders”. She said:
The areas of Ukraine currently occupied by Russian forces are the sovereign territory of Ukraine. No sham referendum will change this.
Dreyfus said:
Our intervention underscores our commitment to upholding fundamental rules of international law and the integrity of the genocide convention.
Overnight the occupied town of Lyman fell overnight after Ukrainian troops completed an encirclement of 4000 Russian troops who had been stationed there.
Good morning
Welcome to another Sunday morning Guardian live blog.
The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, and the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, have pledged Australia’s support to Ukraine in an application to the international court of justice (ICJ) and added sanctions on senior Russian and separatist officials. In a joint press release, Wong and Dreyfus said Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions was “illegal” and any claims they were part of Russian territory were “baseless and false”.
Former Victorian premier and the Hawthorn football club president, Jeff Kennett, has criticised three Indigenous football players who spoke about their experiences of alleged racism at the club. In a speech at the club’s best and fairest awards on Saturday night, Kennett told his audience it was “unfair” for the players to name names and denied the club was in crisis, saying it was experiencing “just a bump along the highway” albeit an important bump.
I’m Royce Kurmelovs, taking the blog through the day. With so much going on out there, it’s easy to miss something, so if you spot anything happening in Australia and think it should be in the blog, you can find me on Twitter at @RoyceRk2 where my DMs are open.
With that, let’s get started …
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