SA Premier Peter Malinauskas used his appearance at the 50th Labor national conference in Adelaide to make two arguments that rubbed against the usual Labor grain: that progressives should stop talking down to Pauline Hanson's voters, and that dumping the AUKUS submarine pact would be riskier than the pact's very real problems.

Speaking to The Guardian's political editor Tom McIlroy and chief political correspondent Dan Jervis-Bardy in a podcast episode published on 25 July 2026, Malinauskas talked about his state-level fight with One Nation and had a pointed message for his own side: don't speak down to Hanson's supporters. That sounds harmless enough until you think about where he said it. A Labor national conference is not a place where people usually sympathise with One Nation voters. Malinauskas has to win seats where One Nation polls in double digits, so he is making a practical electoral calculation and asking the rest of the party to do the same.

The AUKUS discussion was more immediately about policy. In the same week the podcast went public, the United States admitted that it is still not building Virginia-class submarines any faster. This matters because the AUKUS deal depends on the US building enough of these submarines to spare at least three for Australia in the 2030s. So far, the US has not come close to the build rate needed to make that happen.

The numbers are not encouraging. The US Navy's top officer, Adm. James Caudle, said in May 2026 that the Virginia-class delivery rate is about 1.3 submarines a year, and that the target of two per year will not be met until the 2030s (USNI News). The Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan research body that advises the US Congress, has reported that production has never actually reached two boats per year and has been stuck at roughly 1.1 to 1.2 since 2022. A senior Pentagon official confirmed the rate is still below 1.2 per year despite huge amounts of extra funding, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. By June 2026, the hoped-for recovery had slipped further, with the rate still at 1.2 (1945).

Against that backdrop, Malinauskas argued that walking away from AUKUS would be even riskier than the agreement's problems. He is not defending AUKUS as flawless. Instead, he is framing the choice as a calculation: you weigh the known problems of the pact against the unknown consequences of scrapping it. For a Labor premier whose state hosts the Osborne shipyard and stands to gain the most from the next stage of the submarine build, that position is not surprising. But it matters because he is saying it at a national conference where doubts about AUKUS on the left of the party have not gone away.

The broader context here is that every new set of production figures makes the AUKUS plan, officially called the "optimal pathway," look less optimal. If the US Navy cannot get to two submarines a year, it cannot meet its own needs, let alone hand some over to Australia. The Congressional Research Service's finding that the rate has never hit two is not a prediction; it is a matter of record. And Caudle's admission that the 2030s is the earliest the two-per-year target can be reached means the timeline for Australia's first submarine transfer, pencilled in for the early 2030s, is running into the reality that the US has not shown it can meet that schedule.

Malinauskas is not the Prime Minister, and a podcast interview at a conference is not a policy announcement. But he is the premier of the state most invested in AUKUS, and his argument, that the alternative is worse, is the one the federal government will increasingly need to make as the production data keeps underwhelming. A joint appearance by the Prime Minister and Malinauskas in Adelaide is recorded in an official PM Transcripts release from February 2026 (PM Transcripts), suggesting the two have been coordinating their public positioning on AUKUS and South Australia's role for months.

The One Nation remarks add a second layer. Malinauskas is telling the conference that voters drawn to Hanson are not people to be lectured but a group to be engaged. Whether that message gets through to party members who have spent a decade treating One Nation as a moral failing rather than an electoral reality is another question entirely. What is clear is that Malinauskas is positioning himself as a premier who deals in political reality, not ideological comfort, on both AUKUS and the One Nation threat. The substance of his arguments will be tested against the production numbers coming out of the US shipyards that build these submarines, and against One Nation's vote count at the next state election, sooner than anyone at the Adelaide conference might like.