Peta Credlin: New world disorder is a timely wake-up call for Australia
What President Donald Trump is doing is making America’s allies – including Australia – grow up; kicking the freeloading kids out of home, writes Peta Credlin.
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Donald Trump 1 Chris Bowen 0. By trying to save American jobs, Donald Trump has effectively blown-up Labor’s assault against jobs and industries here in Australia.
Yes, Trump’s imposition of a 25 per cent tariff on our billion-dollar-a-year steel and aluminium exports will hurt Australia and, as an ally, we are right to be disappointed (even angry), but his move to stop the loss of US sovereign manufacturing capacity is the wake-up we need to stop the same thing happening here.
And talk about hypocrisy and hyperbole from the Albanese government, given it has already slapped a carbon tax on these “emissions intensive” industries, via a requirement to buy carbon credits, so we can hardly complain when it’s another country’s decision that makes our product artificially more expensive.
In fact, what the US president is doing, in his inimitable, often brutal and chaotic style, is making America’s allies grow up; in effect, he’s kicking the kids out of home, where they’d been freeloading on a parent for far too long.
The new president has been too tough on Ukraine, which has been fighting heroically for its freedom (and the freedom of all small countries not to be bullied by a much larger neighbour) but – even here – Trump’s main point is the eminently reasonable one that the safety of Europe should first and foremost be the responsibility of European democracies and not largely delegated to the US (and its war-weary taxpayers).
For Australia, what currently looks like the new world disorder is actually a timely wake-up call: not just to take the security of Australia and our region much more seriously; but to stop the economic and cultural self-harm which is jeopardising our future as a prosperous, free and independent sovereign nation.
The current government might prefer to keep its head in the sand but Labor’s senior statesman, Kim Beazley, last week recognised the new reality when he called for our military spending to be raised swiftly to at least three per cent of GDP, a 50 per cent increase on current levels. Peter Dutton too, can read the signs of the times, as shown by his commitment to buy an extra squadron of fighter jets in response to the Chinese navy’s sail-by shooting in the Tasman Sea.
There’s little doubt that Trump’s domestic policies are what America needed after four years of politically correct incompetence. “Drill, baby, drill” will provide the cheap and secure energy required for a revival of American industry. Restoring the merit principle in hiring will revitalise American business. Border control will help ease the explosion in crime and welfare costs. And his insistence that there are only two genders should end the destruction of women’s hard-won rights, to single-sex sport and spaces, that’s currently a growing scourge here at home too.
Trump’s tariff wars are partly “shock and awe” designed to make indolent neighbours take their border responsibilities more seriously; and partly a deliberate move to onshore the heavy industry that’s been migrating to Asia for a generation and that’s turned China into the factory of the world. Trump has been the first American leader to push back against the technology theft, secret subsidies and market manipulation that’s given the commissars in Beijing such dominance over the industries that shortsighted Western governments – including ours – want us to become even more dependent upon.
At least between like-minded democracies with comparable standards of living, free trade will always be better at creating wealth than some kind of national closed shop. But why pretend that trade will ever be “free” with a China where the government can dictate terms to every business? Trump’s tariffs are essentially about ensuring American self-sufficiency in everything that really counts because, as we found during the pandemic, in a crisis, every country puts itself first.
Last week’s 9 per cent hike in the annual benchmark electricity price again exposes the fraudulence of the Albanese government claim that unreliable renewable energy is cheap in an economy that needs power 24/7. Trump’s demand we grow up and start to rebuild our military (and essential to that our manufacturing industries) makes Net Zero an unaffordable folly that’s got to end.
Likewise, the pretence that all cultures are equal. Migrants don’t generally come to Australia because they think that their culture is superior to ours. They come because they expect a better life under the broadly Anglo-Celtic traditions and Judaeo-Christian ethic that’s shaped modern Australia. Government at every level needs to stop pandering to the multicultural industry if we are to recover the self-belief needed to thrive in a world where America has given up on being the world’s policeman.
The upcoming budget will be the final act of Labor before the PM sends us to the polls, and the last thing Australia needs is the big-spending and handouts we’re almost sure to get from a desperate government. In these troubled times, Australia deserves a government focused on our future, not just its political survival.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: New world disorder is a timely wake-up call for Australia
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