Boys & their toys: The patriarchy of AUKUS is drinking Perth dry

by gwenaël velge

Virginia Woolf once wrote that “war is a man’s game”. Nearly a century later, looking at the sheer, destructive hubris of the AUKUS pact, it’s hard to disagree, writes academic and Mineral Policy Institute researcher, gwenaël velge.

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Photo by Daniil Zameshaev on Unsplash

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“War is a man’s game — the killing machine has a gender and it is male.”

Virginia Woolf wrote these words in Three Guineas in 1938. Nearly a century later, looking at the sheer, destructive hubris of the AUKUS pact, it’s hard to disagree. While the boys’ club in Canberra and Washington are busy measuring their geopolitical statures, it’s the rest of us — and our drinking water — footing the bill.

Perth has become ground zero for an experiment in what happens when national security rhetoric — and it is just rhetoric — overrides ecological, hydrological, and democratic reality.

Let’s look at the “wins” our leaders are boasting about. In February 2026, the WA government slapped mining giant Alcoa with a $55 million fine for illegally clearing 2,100 hectares of the Northern Jarrah Forest. It made for a great headline. But read the fine print: that penalty was depicted as “locking the future of bauxite mining in WA” by industry and it represents less than 0.5% of Alcoa’s 2025 revenue. Even worse, it was immediately followed by a “national interest exemption” allowing the company to keep clearing another 1,200 hectares while a “review” is conducted.

Why the free pass? Because of gallium and AUKUS Pillar III.

Gallium is a trace metal recovered during bauxite refining, and it is essential for modern defence electronics—think F-35 fighter jets and missile guidance systems. Through the US Defense Production Act, the Pentagon essentially treats Australia as a domestic supply depot. Our state and federal governments are so eager to appease the US military-industrial complex that they are overriding their own environmental laws to keep the gallium flowing.

Consider the rooms in which these decisions get made. Cross-country research shows that greater female representation in government correlates with lower corruption and stronger delivery of public goods — water, health, education. But — and this matters — researchers are careful to note these results may say less about female nature than about power itself. Researchers suggest this pattern may reflect proximity to entrenched power, not innate difference — women newer to political systems simply haven’t yet been absorbed into the old arrangements. The difference isn’t biology, it’s what the room rewards.

The science points that way. A landmark longitudinal study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that testosterone levels in men dropped significantly when they took on active caregiving roles — and the more hours of childcare, the steeper the decline. Separate research found that wielding power raises testosterone in women just as it does in men.

Anthropologist Barry Hewlett’s cross-cultural research further found that societies with the highest levels of paternal caregiving — most notably the Aka of central Africa, where fathers are in physical contact with infants nearly half the time — tend also to be among the least violent, with strong egalitarian norms and near-absence of warfare.

The biology follows the role, at least in part. Build institutions that route fighters into war rooms and caregivers out of them, and you will literally produce — at a hormonal level — the decision-makers most inclined toward competition and aggression over care. AUKUS isn’t an expression of male nature. It’s what patriarchal institutional design biochemically selects for. So what rooms do we want to build?

Back to Canberra. Here in the “civilised” West, state-sanctioned corruption operates at a terrifying scale — and the room in question is almost entirely male. A network of politicians, defence contractors, and mining CEOs are quietly signing away the shared ecological and hydrological security of 2.3 million people. The community provides the resource; the profit flows to distant shareholders.

And what a resource it is. The Northern Jarrah Forest isn’t just pretty scenery; it is the catchment for Perth’s dams. In a city where dam inflows have plummeted from an historical average of 420 gigalitres to just 75 gigalitres today, this forest is critical national infrastructure. Yet, despite 59,000 public submissions opposing the expansion, and internal warnings from the Water Corporation that contamination of the Serpentine dam will impact well over 100,000 customers near instantly, the clearing continues.

So, what are we destroying our drinking water for?

Under AUKUS Pillar I, we are spending up to $368 billion on nuclear-powered submarines. Yet, top defence analysts and the Pentagon’s own policy advisers openly admit the US doesn’t even have the industrial capacity to build enough submarines for itself, let alone us. We are sacrificing a vital forest for hardware that may never even arrive.

Further, AUKUS may be making us less safe, not more. Security scholars including Hugh White and Emma Shortis have argued that hosting US military infrastructure doesn’t just deter adversaries — it designates Australia as a target. Washington’s alliances are transactional; there is no guarantee the US fights alongside us if we’re drawn into a conflict partly of AUKUS’s own making.

Some notable US neoconservative voices have conceded that the military arms race with China is effectively lost – the US simply does not have the industrial capacity to match. Nor is the threat itself a given. China’s gallium export restrictions — the very trigger for the Perth mining logic — were themselves a response to US semiconductor controls. Each escalation justifies the next. We are not securing ourselves. We are buying into a feedback loop, handing over our forest, our water, and our sovereignty, and calling it defence.

As if to confirm the direction of travel, Premier Roger Cook this week announced that WA would seek expressions of interest to become a missiles and weapons manufacturing hub — proposing to use the Collie transition package, originally designed to move a coal community away from fossil fuels, to fund it.

But the extractivism doesn’t stop at the shoreline.

A Greenpeace report released this week found that the frenzied rollout of AI data centres in Australia is set to derail the renewable energy transition, entrench gas, and turbocharge climate pollution — calling for an urgent moratorium on approvals.

While Pillar I guts our forests for physical hardware, Pillar II demands we sacrifice our power grid for a new set of algorithmic toys — ushering in a massive boom of AI, quantum, and cyber data centres right across Perth. These facilities, vaunted as “strategic assets” and explicitly marketed as “AUKUS-ready,” claim to use “closed-loop” cooling systems with “zero water consumption for primary cooling”. But of course, there is no closed loop in physical terms.

The heat has to go somewhere — in Perth’s case, into air that already regularly exceeds 40°C in summer, where heat rejection becomes progressively less efficient the hotter it gets. The system works harder, draws more energy, generates more waste heat (and more emissions), and dumps it into an urban environment already under heat stress. The 200MW CDC Maddington campus alone represents around 10% of the entire Southwest Interconnected System average demand, and 17% of base demand. “Zero water consumption” is a marketing claim. The laws of physics are not.

It’s extractivism at its most absurd. We are stripping a forest to build submarines that don’t exist, and draining our energy reserves to cool servers for a manufactured arms race.

Woolf was right. War, and the extractive greed that fuels it, is currently a man’s game. But as the research shows, this is a political choice, not a social or even biological inevitability. And regardless, the environmental and climate catastrophe this mindset produces won’t discriminate.

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About the author

gwenaël velge is an Australian-based academic and Research Associate with the Mineral Policy Institute at Murdoch University. He writes on the energy transition, extraction, justice, public policy, and the politics of knowledge production. He is a regular contributor to The Mining Monitor.