AUKUS Defence Deal Reshapes Perth Economy, Divides Western Australia Communities

The cranes are already going up along Rockingham Road. At HMAS Stirling on Garden Island, security fencing has been extended twice in the past eighteen months. And in the suburb of Henderson, where Australia's future nuclear-powered submarine maintenance facilities are being built, real estate agents say a three-bedroom house that sold for $480,000 in early 2024 is now pushing $680,000. The AUKUS defence pact is no longer an abstraction in Canberra briefing rooms. It is rewriting daily life in Perth's south.

Australia is committed to hosting and eventually building Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS Pillar I, with the Federal Government allocating more than $368 billion across the program's lifetime. Western Australia holds the largest share of the physical infrastructure investment, centred on Henderson and Garden Island. The WA Labor government has welcomed the spending as a jobs bonanza, pointing to projections of up to 8,500 direct defence and defence-industry jobs created in the state by 2035. But for people who live in Rockingham, Kwinana and Cockburn Sound communities, the transformation is more complicated than a press release.

Windfall or Displacement?

In Rockingham's Waikiki neighbourhood, residents describe a suburb being outpaced by its own growth. The Rockingham Beach foreshore, once a quiet strip of cafes and families on weekends, now sees a steady stream of American and British defence personnel and contractors on temporary postings. Local services, GP clinics, childcare centres along Patterson Road, the Rockingham Regional TAFE campus, are under measurable strain. The TAFE campus enrolled an additional 340 students in defence-related trades courses in the twelve months to March 2026, according to figures tabled in the WA Legislative Assembly in May.

Community members at a public meeting convened by the City of Rockingham in June raised concerns about infrastructure keeping pace with the influx. Speakers pointed to delays on the Thornlie-Cockburn Link, a Metronet project that has faced revised timelines, and argued that connecting outer southern suburbs to the broader network was essential before the submarine workforce scaled up further. Others questioned what happens to housing affordability for low-income families already squeezed along Safety Bay Road and Dixon Road.

Not all the sentiment is sceptical. Workers at the Australian Marine Complex in Henderson, an existing hub of roughly 5,000 employees, describe a facility that has been running near-capacity for two years. Apprenticeships in marine engineering and electrical trades, once hard to fill, now carry waitlists. BAE Systems Australia and Austal, both operating at Henderson, have been recruiting heavily from interstate and from TAFE pipelines statewide. For a generation of young workers in Perth's south who grew up watching their parents drive to mines in the Pilbara, the idea of a skilled, permanent, locally based defence career carries real weight.

What Comes Next for Communities

The Federal Government's Naval Shipbuilding College, headquartered in Adelaide but running a Perth stream through the Henderson Maritime Precinct, is expanding its WA intake to 600 trainees annually from 2027. The WA government's own Defence and Space Industry Advocate office has flagged a community infrastructure fund, details still being finalised as of July 2026, intended to direct a portion of AUKUS-linked revenues toward local hospitals, schools and roads in the Rockingham and Kwinana local government areas.

Whether that fund materialises with meaningful dollar figures before the next state election, due by early 2029, will determine how much goodwill the government retains in communities bearing the loudest disruption. Residents in Baldivis, the fastest-growing suburb in WA, sitting just inland from the Garden Island corridor, are already watching land rezoning applications with suspicion, worried that defence-industry expansion will consume green buffers that once separated residential streets from industrial activity.

For now, the cranes keep rising, the rents keep climbing, and the community meetings keep filling up. Perth's southern corridor is not simply hosting a defence program. It is being remade by one, and the people who live there are increasingly determined to have a say in what it looks like when the dust settles.