The Albanese government has emerged as an unmitigated failure, if not outright disaster, in foreign affairs, defence and national security. It’s one of the worst governments we’ve had.
The Australian military is weaker and feebler than when Labor took office. Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles talk big about the future but deliver nothing. Australia’s regional standing has declined sharply. Once we were seen as a powerful country getting stronger; now we’re seen as weak, confused, living off past riches.
Australia has little influence in the Middle East. But the Albanese government, led by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, has failed to identify principles or national interest, so policy is incoherent and ineffective. It has alienated our oldest regional friend, Israel, and joined the opposition to the US at the UN.
The government provides no rationale or narrative for its disconnected actions. Everything is spin, frequently designed to appease Greens voters and the Labor Left. As a result of the government’s moral confusion and lack of political leadership, Australia is gripped by an anti-Semitism crisis the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The government is not remotely anti-Semitic. Its failure in leadership has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, foreign policy is bitterly dividing the community, this time along sectarian, religious and ethnic lines.
Everything the government does in foreign affairs and defence is spin and small-P politics. Having told us how much at one he was with the administration of Joe Biden, the Prime Minister, demonstrating that he has kept his sense of humour, claims he is better placed than Peter Dutton to have a good relationship with the incoming Trump administration.
Because in every dimension the government’s record in substance is so poor, it’s utterly obsessed with spin and hypersensitive to any criticism. This is the only explanation of its attempt since it first came into office to intimidate, muzzle and, if possible, more or less destroy the Australian Strategic Policy Institute as we’ve known it.
ASPI was set up by John Howard to give independent analysis on national security, especially defence policy, to provide contestability of policy. Defence documents are designed to be completely impenetrable to any normal person. Typically the only place you can get proper analysis of the defence budget is at ASPI and among some ASPI alumni.
This is always disobliging to a government because resources never match objectives, execution never matches policy, and Australian defence spending is so notoriously inefficient. That’s why you want an independent think tank.
Every government before Albanese accepted this. ASPI’s defence analysis was often extremely disobliging to previous Coalition governments, especially the Morrison government The Albanese government commissioned Peter Varghese, for whom this column has the greatest respect, to produce a report on strategic think tanks. Varghese is a fine servant of Australia but his report has the effect of restoring complete bureaucratic control over what has value only if it’s independent. No modern government in my memory has had such authoritarian instincts, and such a desire not to answer but to close down criticism, as has the Albanese government.
Varghese recommends that ASPI’s funding be extended only for two years and that a fully competitive tender be set up so base funding is renewed every five years, with other organisations invited to bid for that funding. At the same time, funding would be assessed against ASPI meeting priority research guidelines to be set by the public service.
The government presumably believes that with a sword of Damocles hanging constantly over ASPI’s head every five years it will self-censor, cut out critical stuff on the defence budget or any research that might be controversial about China. Thus the value that the Howard government created in ASPI will be destroyed and the already feeble strategic debate will be vastly poorer.
What’s worse, China demanded the government muzzle ASPI. Any Australian government with a skerrick of self-respect would as a result have guaranteed ASPI’s funding for the next 20 years. Just as when Beijing told Howard, as a new prime minister, that he must not meet Tibet’s Dalai Lama, that guaranteed Howard would meet the Dalai Lama. The problem is the Albanese government does not have a skerrick of self-respect. Nor much respect for Australia. It has cravenly bent the knee to Beijing’s bullying over ASPI.
The Albanese government has done nothing creative so far to woo, understand or connect with the incoming Trump administration. Ambassador Kevin Rudd is doing a good job. But when you’ve said that you’ve said everything.
The government has two foreign policy successes. It has been energetic in countering Chinese influence in the South Pacific. And it has welcomed the US military into the Australian north so that having given up the effort to have a competent defence force of our own, we hope, as ever, that the Americans will defend us instead.
The government gets no marks over AUKUS because nothing of consequence is happening with AUKUS.
The Albanese government is not the worst since World War II. You can’t take the title from the Whitlam government. It nearly destroyed the US alliance. The US, Britain and Canada all cut off intelligence sharing with Australia for a time under Gough Whitlam. Whitlam had a shocking and ugly prejudice against Vietnamese refugees, famously telling his cabinet ministers: “I’m not having those f..king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political prejudices against us.” Whitlam, for no benefit, extended de jure recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states. Whitlam was regarded as a fool regionally. Lee Kuan Yew is devastating in his treatment of Whitlam in his memoirs, describing him as an arrogant sham. And Whitlam ended his time in office by commissioning Bill Hartley to seek secret electoral funding for the ALP from Saddam Hussein’s Baath Socialist Party in Iraq.
Albanese is not as bad as that. Lest you feel these harsh judgments of mine are excessive, consider the following testimonials. Bilahari Kausikan, former head of the Singapore Foreign Ministry, wrote in Foreign Affairs recently: “Today, the three most important US allies (in Asia) – Australia, Japan and South Korea – all have weak leaders.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, no fevered neo-conservative, recently remarked that those nations that put one-sided pressure on Israel effectively encouraged the terror group Hamas to hold out and not to release Israeli hostages. That’s the effect of Australian policy.
Howard tells this column: “The view that Penny Wong runs foreign policy is right and she’s openly anti-Israel.”
On ASPI, Howard says he strongly disagrees with making core funding subject to tender every five years: “They (the government) are obviously trying to chain it. It’s a threat. If it steps out of line it will be in trouble.”
Dutton must soon replace the effective Simon Birmingham as opposition foreign affairs spokesman. He should keep maximum pressure on this very weak government by appointing his most effective frontbencher, James Paterson, who could keep home affairs as well, or Dan Tehan could take that with immigration.
In any event, we’ve seldom seen a government this poor in such critical fields at such a dangerous time.
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