Peta Credlin: Australia will lose US security blanket without Albo increasing military spending
Without a swift boost to military spending, the charge that will haunt Anthony Albanese is that he would prefer us to be an economic colony of China than a military ally of the United States, writes Peta Credlin.
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If Anthony Albanese persists in his refusal to lift spending on our armed forces, the US alliance – that’s been our security blanket for the past seven decades – will effectively be dead.
Forget help from the US marines rotating through Darwin, forget intelligence from the joint Space Facility at Pine Gap, and certainly forget the promised delivery of Virginia-class nuclear subs.
If we don’t lift military spending to the 3.5 per cent of GDP, that the Trump administration demands as a minimum of all US allies, we can still expect to be a potential target but we can’t expect any help to defend Australia.
Put yourself in US shoes for a moment. Why should their sons and daughters put their lives on the line to defend Australia when we’re refusing to help ourselves? And, whatever you think about their patriotism, which tends to be more demonstrative than ours, at least they’re less at risk of raising a whole generation of young people who are taught to hate their history, their flag and their country as we are here.
After years of increasingly strident badgering, America’s NATO allies have just agreed to lift their military spending to 3.5 per cent and to lift all defence-related spending to 5 per cent of GDP. This was in response to President Donald Trump’s expressed reluctance to commit to NATO’s “one-in, all-in” Article 5 security guarantee.
Partly, this was to placate an unpredictable and transactional president. And partly, it’s apprehension that an America that’s tired of being the world’s policeman might just leave them in the lurch should Russia broaden its aggression after finishing off Ukraine.
But if this is how Trump treats France, a nuclear power; and Germany, Europe’s economic titan, how do we think he would treat us? Especially as the Albanese government has shown zero willingness to offer the military help that the US thinks it has a right to expect and that Australia has always given in the past.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the extent to which the Albanese government has misread the signals out of Washington and the strategic isolation to which we are now exposed. Turning down the December 2023 request to send a frigate to the Red Sea was perhaps the Albanese government’s most egregious mistake.
It was first time Australia had refused an American request for military help since the ANZUS treaty in 1951. Naturally, it was almost unnoticed here but it was seismic in a Washington.
It was, after all, the Hawke government that sent clearance divers to help the US-led liberation of Kuwait; the Howard government that sent special forces, strike planes and a frigate to help the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein; plus special forces, a mentoring task force and a reconstruction team to help the US-led campaign against the Taliban; a military effort that the Rudd and Gillard governments amply continued; and the Abbott government that sent special forces, strike planes and military trainers to help the US-led campaign against Islamic State.
Not only has the Albanese government ostentatiously declined to give credible military help; it’s consistently voted against the US at the UN on Israel; it’s appeased China on trade; and it took 24 hours before it tepidly and half-heartedly backed last weekend’s attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons facility.
But the fundamental problem is the Albanese government’s repeated and obstinate refusal to entertain any increase at all in Australia’s military spending.
The Prime Minister was at it again on Friday, blathering that taking a decade to lift defence spending to 2.3 per cent is sacrosanct because “we put forward our budget, we took it to an election and received overwhelming support”.
As JM Keynes famously said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” And the facts have changed, as even the UK Labour government has recognised.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, in every other respect our PM’s green-left ideological soulmate, rushed to Washington in February and pledged to lift British defence spending to 2.7 per cent now and 3.5 per cent by the early 2030s.
Sooner or later, Albanese won’t be able to keep shirking a face-to-face meeting with the leader of the free world – despite a personal distaste for Trump that’s becoming only-too-obvious. When a Labor frontbencher in 2017, he said of the then first-term president: “He scares the shit out of me”; and plainly he meant it.
Eventually, he’ll have to face up to a meeting with our main ally but is almost certain to get an Oval Office blast in the absence of the defence boost that’s so plainly needed. And, yes, we do need to get much better value for our defence dollar too, noting that Australia spends more on defence than Israel but has nothing remotely approaching the Israeli armed forces’ capabilities.
Without a swift boost to military spending and capability, the charge that will haunt this PM is that he would prefer us to be an economic colony of China than a military ally of the United States.
THUMBS UP
B-2 bomber pilots – With two pilots per aircraft, in a single mission last Sunday, these brave Americans made the world safer and deserve our heartfelt gratitude.
THUMBS DOWN
Jacinta Allan – Victorian Labor’s new draft laws to fine farmers $12,000-plus if they refuse to allow new transmission lines on their land are criminal. This is what Net Zero really means!
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