SA Premier Peter Malinauskas used his appearance at the 50th Labor national conference in Adelaide to make two arguments that cut against the grain of comfortable Labor sentiment: that progressives should stop patronising Pauline Hanson's voters, and that abandoning AUKUS would be riskier than the pact's very real delivery 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 discussed his state-level contest with One Nation and offered a pointed message to the progressive side of politics: avoid speaking down to Pauline Hanson's supporters. It is the kind of line that sounds unremarkable until you consider the venue. A national ALP conference is not a forum where the default instinct is to empathise with One Nation's base. Malinauskas, who has to win seats where One Nation polls in double digits, is making a cold electoral calculation and inviting the broader party to share it.

The AUKUS discussion carried more immediate policy weight. In the same week as the podcast's publication, the United States admitted that the production rate of Virginia-class submarines has not increased. That admission lands directly on the most vulnerable point in the AUKUS architecture: the transfer of at least three Virginia-class boats to the Royal Australian Navy in the 2030s, which depends entirely on the US industrial base hitting a build rate it has not come close to sustaining.

The figures are sobering. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Caudle stated in May 2026 that the Virginia-class delivery rate sits at about 1.3 boats per year and that the two-per-year build rate will not be reached until the 2030s (USNI News). The Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan research arm of the US Congress, has reported that actual production has never reached 2.0 boats per year and has been stuck at roughly 1.1 to 1.2 since 2022. A top Pentagon official confirmed the rate remains below 1.2 per year despite massive funding injections, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. By June 2026, the recovery date for reaching two boats per year had slipped further, with the production rate still mired at 1.2 (1945).

Against that backdrop, Malinauskas argued that abandoning AUKUS would pose an even greater risk than the agreement's potential problems. Rather than defending AUKUS on its merits, the Premier is framing the choice as a risk calculus: the known problems of the pact versus the unknown consequences of walking away. For a Labor premier whose state hosts the Osborne shipyard and stands to be the principal beneficiary of the SSN-AUKUS build, that position is not surprising. But it matters because it is being articulated at a national conference where AUKUS scepticism on the left of the party has not gone away.

The broader context here is that every piece of new data on Virginia-class production makes the "optimal pathway" — the name given to the AUKUS plan for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines — look less optimal. If the US Navy cannot get to two boats per year, it cannot meet its own force-structure requirements, let alone free up hulls for Australia. The Congressional Research Service's finding that the rate has never hit 2.0 is not a projection; it is a historical record. And Caudle's admission that the 2030s is the earliest window for the two-per-year target means the timeline for the first Australian Virginia transfer, nominally pencilled in for the early 2030s, is colliding with the reality that the US industrial base 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 framing, that the alternative is worse, is the argument the federal government will increasingly need to make as the production data keeps disappointing. 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 dimension. Malinauskas is telling the conference that the voters flirting with Hanson are not a constituency to be lectured but one to be engaged. Whether that message lands with party members who have spent a decade treating One Nation as a moral category rather than an electoral one 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 crossbench threat. The substance of his arguments will be tested against the production numbers coming out of Newport News and Groton — the two US shipyards that build Virginia-class submarines — and against One Nation's vote count at the next state contest, sooner than anyone at the Adelaide conference might like.