Albanese’s formulas aren’t enough to handle a president like Trump

Less than a month after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the Albanese government’s ability to advance Australia’s interests while defending its values is already coming under intense strain.

Especially when talking about foreign affairs, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is notably cautious and likes to fall back on tried-and-tested formulas.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Since Labor came to power, questions about relations with China have been reliably met with the answer that “we will co-operate where we can, disagree where we must and engage in the national interest”.

With Trump, Albanese had adopted the formula that he will not adopt a “running commentary” on the US president’s remarks – even when he is proposing something as remarkable as the US taking control of Gaza and turning it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.

When Albanese stood up at Parliament House for a press conference on hospital funding on Wednesday, he was predictably bombarded with questions about Trump’s Gaza proposal, and whether he agreed with the idea of relocating Palestinians to neighbouring Arab countries.

Albanese refused to engage with the idea in detail, saying only that he would not adopt a running commentary on Trump and insisting that Australia continued to support a two-state solution.

Albanese, understandably, does not want to get into a daily slanging match with Trump, or to respond in depth to every thought bubble he releases into the atmosphere.

The prime minister’s primary job is to advance Australia’s national interest, and it is clearly in our interest to have a healthy relationship with the United States.

It would be nutty to seek out fights with Trump when he is wielding tariffs as weapons of economic warfare and when we are so reliant upon the US for our national defence, including the promised AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines.

It would be especially pointless given Trump’s volatile nature and his tendency to float ideas that never become reality. Trump’s Gaza plan would face immense hurdles to put into practice, and it is unclear how committed he is to pursuing it. The task of responding diplomatically to such haphazard policymaking is not an easy one.

Already on Thursday, Trump’s cabinet secretaries and top advisers were walking back key aspects of the radical, and in many ways alarming, vision he had sketched a day earlier. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump was simply offering to step in and clear up the debris in Gaza so that Palestinians could move back in, a far less dramatic idea than Trump’s bid to “take over” Gaza.

At the same time, the prime minister has a role to speak up for Australian values and promote our view of global affairs. Being a close ally of the US does not mean we have to be so slavish that we abandon independent thinking. Albanese inched forward on Thursday morning by saying that Trump’s Gaza proposal was “quite clearly” at odds with Australia’s longstanding position on a two-state solution. He could have added that the government supports Palestinians’ right to live in their homeland, that it opposes the expulsion of anyone from Gaza and that the enclave will be an essential element of any Palestinian state. Furthermore, that Australia supports international law and the principles of territorial integrity.

British Prime Minister Keith Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday that Palestinians “must be allowed home ... They must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution.” It was not a denunciation of Trump but offered a clear expression of British values that went beyond rote talking points. It’s a model for Albanese to follow.

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