‘That fella down under’: Joe Biden needs Scott Morrison

Despite not even bothering to remember our Prime Minister’s name last week, the US President wants Australia’s friendship to help repair his international reputation.

Joe Biden came to New York this week to tell the United Nations that “America is back”.

He has more front than Myer – or, as they say in America: chutzpah.

Amid widespread dismay among allies at the president’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan and other foreign policy missteps, it’s a declaration ripe for mockery at a fraught time for America’s leadership of the free world.

However, it does give Prime Minister Scott Morrison an opportunity to forge a closer partnership with a president who has an aversion to anyone he believes was close to his detested predecessor Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison scrapped a multi-billion dollar submarine purchase from France in favour of a new security pact with the US and UK. Picture: AAP

Morrison was loved by Trump, who boasted that he predicted his election win and honoured him with one of the few White House state dinners of his presidency in 2019.

Biden, by contrast, was cool and dismissive. When Australia asked for a small share of the vast oversupply of Covid-19 vaccine stockpiled in the US, thanks to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program, Biden reportedly refused.

After the unilateral Afghanistan debacle which left Australia and other allies scrambling to evacuate their citizens, Biden didn’t even give Morrison the courtesy of a phone call.

Australia was by America’s side in the Afghanistan invasion as early as October 2011, in solidarity, just one month after the 9/11 attacks. But Biden called the leaders of every other nation that sent troops - except Australia.

Last week, Biden couldn’t be bothered remembering Morrison’s name, calling him “That fella down under”.

But now Biden needs Morrison to help repair his foreign affairs credibility.

US President Joe Biden makes the announcment flnaked by displays of the Australian and British prime ministers. Picture: AFP

The new AUKUS alliance with Australia and the UK announced last week is just the reset Biden needs to show his resolve to stand up to Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Although it has ruffled the feathers of the French, who are aggrieved that Australia cancelled a $90 billion submarine contract to get nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK, it should be popular with Americans alarmed by Chinese aggression.

Standing up to China would be a change for Biden, who was sycophantic to President Xi Jinping when he was vice-president in the Obama administration and his son Hunter was cashing in on his influence. Biden was point man in the region and did nothing to stop China militarizing islands in disputed waters of the South China Sea, one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints.

China has been bullying Australia since Morrison began demanding answers about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China.

The submarines deal follows escalating tension in the South China Sea.. Picture: Reuters

When Morrison popped in to the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June, he was criticized for not securing a one-on-one meeting with Biden. It was reported as a snub that he had to share the meeting with UK prime minister Boris Johnson. In fact, the trilateral turned out to have been a crucial discussion, spearheaded by Morrison, to move forward with a forceful alliance to counter China’s growing belligerence, and AUKUS was born.

As the immigration minister who famously “stopped the boats” under the Abbott government when Australia was suffering from its own self-inflicted border crisis, perhaps Morrison could use his visit to Washington this week to tell Biden how to secure his southern border with Mexico.

Just as Kevin Rudd arrived in office and arrogantly dismantled all the hard-won Howard era border protection measures, so, too, did Joe Biden on the first day of his presidency, sign a slew of executive orders unwinding Trump’s immigration policies which had slowed the flow of illegal migrants at the southern border to a trickle.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison arrives in New York ahead of meetings with US President Biden and other world leaders. Picture: Adam Taylor

The result, as Australia found, was inevitable. Already this year more than a million illegal migrants have been apprehended crossing the southern border, with no signs of slowing. There are estimates that the same number have entered the country unnoticed as so-called “gotaways”.

For a president who based his campaign around pandemic paranoia, Biden has been remarkably blasé about all the super spreader events he’s enabled at the border.

As many as 20 per cent of migrants have tested positive to Covid-19, and yet they are not quarantined, but placed on buses and planes to be dispersed around the country.

The latest calamity last week was a shanty town of 15,000 migrants, mainly from Haiti which had grown up under a concrete overpass in Del Rio, Texas.

The border crisis is a big reason why the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to an all-time low, even with a slavishly devoted media which usually covers up or at least downplays his missteps.

Just 46 per cent of voters say they have a favourable view of Biden in a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. That puts him in a statistical tie with former President Trump, believe it or not, according to a report by The Hill.

Morrison has been there. Maybe he could also give the older man tips on how to come back from opinion poll oblivion.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph