When Trump gets nasty, Albanese cannot afford to play nice

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are heading to the federal election with a stun grenade rolling around the floor of Australian politics. The prime minister and opposition leader cannot know when to expect a detonation of blinding light and deafening noise from Donald Trump in his second term as United States president. And neither can be sure who in Australia might suffer the worst damage.

Albanese is at heightened risk because of history. “He scares the shit out of me,” he said of Trump in a panel discussion at the Splendour in the Grass music festival in 2017. A few years later, Albanese condemned the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – the riot Trump calls a day of love. The prime minister referred directly to the way Trump incited the mob.

Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: Supplied

Trump, a uniquely volatile and vindictive leader for a Western democracy, can take a shot at Albanese at any moment. Dutton is shielded from this because he is aligned with Trump on some conservative issues and has never mouthed off about the president. More to the point, the opposition leader has a personal advocate – mining billionaire Gina Rinehart – inside the Trump tent at Mar-a-Lago. There is no way Albanese can match that.

This is not about whether the government replaces Kevin Rudd as ambassador in Washington. While Rudd is busy deleting his old remarks – such as calling Trump a “traitor to the West” – the reality is that no ambassador can unsay what Albanese has said. Replacing Rudd in a panic only looks like giving in to a bully. The key point from diplomatic hard-heads such as Dennis Richardson, a former ambassador to the US, is that playing a partisan game will only hurt Australia. He says anyone who claims to stand strong on national security should be backing the ambassador in Australia’s national interest.

Craven pandering only backfires. Australians know this from the last time Trump held power. The spectacular leak of Trump’s phone call with Malcolm Turnbull in January 2017 – exposed in full in August of that year – revealed the president berating the prime minister over the asylum seeker deal that Turnbull had struck with the previous president, Barack Obama. Trump seethed over the phone for 24 fascinating minutes. “It is a horrible deal,” he said.

But there was no political blowback in Canberra. The prime minister’s team thought it did their boss no harm at all to be holding firm against a splenetic president.

Australia decides its policies on tariffs, defence and climate change. The dangerous mistake for Albanese would be to think he must appease Trump because recent history shows that tough talk not only works better with him but plays better at home. That is a lesson for Dutton, too, when he mulls whether to goad Albanese over his differences with Trump.

The presidential election is heartening for the Coalition for one obvious reason: its compelling demonstration of the power of voters to vent anger over the cost of living and migration. Those two issues dominated the American campaign and are working for Dutton in the early stages of the Australian contest.

But the opposition leader cannot expect the same dividends if he borrows Republican culture wars over issues such as transgender rights or abortion. Dutton’s reproach to conservative colleagues in the Coalition party room on Tuesday, when he warned them that picking a fight on abortion would hurt them in the federal campaign, shows that he gets this. Some Coalition MPs might be drawn on the debate – a move Labor would instantly exploit – but they would be foolish to adopt the Trump agenda as a how-to guide for an Australian campaign.

Only 21 per cent of Australians would have voted for Trump if they had the chance, but 52 per cent told the Resolve Political Monitor two weeks ago that they would have backed Democrat candidate Kamala Harris. Mimicking Trump is not the path to victory in Australia.

Not that copying Harris would work instead. Her final campaign speech, in Philadelphia on Monday night, had the glitter of guest appearances from Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey and the high-minded rhetoric about saving liberty and democracy, but it conspicuously lacked a concrete plan to lift wages and halt inflation. And she lost on the cost of living.

Australia is exposed to severe economic and security shocks from the restoration of Trump to the presidency – and the platitudes in Canberra on Thursday could not hide this fact. Trump is on the record about withdrawing support from allies if he thinks they do not pay their way, imposing tariffs as soon as possible, and prosecuting enemies. Albanese’s response has to be just as tough on tariffs, climate, defence and more.

The first test is on the other side of the world. Trump says he will stop the war in Ukraine and can do so within 24 hours – without necessarily waiting for his inauguration on January 20. He never says he wants Ukraine to win that war, and his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin is a matter of public record.

The obvious prospect is a Trump move to starve Ukraine of support and force peace on Russian terms. “This is a huge win for Putin,” says former foreign affairs minister Bob Carr. “That will send a rocket right into all the assumptions about NATO and will have South-East Asia, for example, wondering how you can trust this America, which tears up policies with each change of president.”

This is a contested view. Former prime minister Scott Morrison says Australia can rely on Trump. Others say the AUKUS pact is safe and Australia will gain the nuclear-powered submarines it wants. In fact, there is no certainty in Trump’s second presidency. His motto is America First, which means Australia will be put in its place.

What will a Trump administration be like? The incoming president will tell anyone who listens. “It’ll be nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular,” he said at his final rally before the election. And at least 72 million Americans voted for exactly that.

Nobody can be sure if and when Nasty Trump might turn on Albanese. What we can be sure about, however, is that the worst response is to cave in to the nastiness.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.