Anthony Albanese squibs his Tampa 2.0 moment to stand strong
Reports emerged from London at the weekend that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been shuffling pictures on the walls of 11 Downing Street.
Winston Churchill’s portrait, which hung above the fireplace in the dining room, has been replaced with a woollen tapestry depicting the stylised multi-coloured head of an unknown woman.
Reeves’ decision to replace an image of Britain’s greatest wartime leader with a DEI pick hardly sends the reassuring message we were hoping for.
Global tensions are rising, and no Western leader seems to have a clue how to respond.
Chinese warships carry out a drive-by shooting in the Tasman Sea and then proceed to circumnavigate the continent, and our PM simply shrugs his shoulders.
China signs a comprehensive economic and diplomatic agreement with the Cook Islands right under New Zealand’s nose. Cook Islanders have NZ passports and fly the NZ flag, but successive New Zealand governments remained mute while the Chinese built a courthouse and police headquarters.
It would be fair to say that 2025 is not meeting expectations.
We hoped the inauguration of a cognitively functional US president would make the world a safer place. It hardly feels like one after Donald Trump’s performance in the Oval Office on Saturday AEDT, where he appeared to be auditioning for a remake of The Godfather.
The ill-tempered exchange between Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may indeed have been “great television”, as the President boasted, but some of us prefer diplomacy to be dull.
The test of the success of the gathering was not the ratings or who sent who away with a flea in their ear, but whether a just end to this horrible war is nearer than when the meeting began.
Who knows, Trump may still be concealing his actual hand in a devious game of poker the rest of us are too stupid to understand.
Perhaps his chief adversary is Vladimir Putin, and not the hapless president of the country Putin invaded. Perhaps Trump does accept that the US and its allies stand on one side of the axis of evil and Russia stands on the other in the company of China, Iran and North Korea.
You’d be foolish to bet your house on it after Trump’s display on Saturday.
The Russians were ecstatic at Zelensky’s humiliation. “The insolent pig has finally received a solid slap in the face,” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, posted on Telegram.
Russian diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova added: “How Trump and Vance contained themselves and didn’t slap this scumbag is a miracle of restraint.”
Moscow’s triumphant rhetoric is understandable. Trump has already acceded to one of Putin’s significant demands: that Ukraine should not join NATO.
Wherever Ukraine’s new borders are drawn in the eventual carve-up, Ukraine has been denied its best chance of defending them. The victory Putin will eventually claim will be anything but hollow.
This matters a great deal in this part of the world, particularly for Taiwan, where China intensified its war games last week 40 nautical miles offshore. On Thursday, an emboldened Chinese military spokesman warned Taipei: “We will come and get you, sooner or later.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assurance that the US is committed to preventing China from capturing Taiwan is reassuring.
Yet China will take its cue from America’s actions, not its words.
If the US refrains from playing an active role in the defence of Ukraine, why would it embrace the far more challenging task of defending Taiwan?
Set against that background, China’s gunboat diplomacy in the Tasman Sea is far from the routine incident the Albanese government wants it to be.
Anthony Albanese’s immediate response, that it was consistent with international law, might have been lifted straight from the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s talking points.
His choice of mildly evaluative words would not have reassured Australians. When passenger planes are forced to take evasive action to avoid the risk of being shot down, we expect our government to do more than “make appropriate representation through diplomatic channels”.
Was the failure to give adequate warning merely inappropriate, as the PM described it, or might it more accurately be described as reckless, provocative and aggressive?
The transcripts of the PM’s recent press conferences betray his warped priorities.
The live-fire exercise occurred at 9.30am AEST on Friday, February 21, giving Albanese plenty of time to make it the focus of his press conference in Wollongong later that morning. Yet he began by announcing a $13.6m grant for a rugby league training and community facility.
Almost 20 worthless minutes ensued before the live-fire incident was raised by an ABC reporter, prompting the PM’s limp response. Two questions and 291 words later, Albanese had said all he had to say, and returned to weightier matters.
This should have been Albanese’s Tampa moment, his opportunity to abandon his subprime election campaign with an appeal to rally around the flag.
He could have stopped the slow leak of taxpayers’ money into election sweeteners and announced he’d be using it to make a modest down payment on a batch of F-35 joint strike fighters.
Sure, the jets have their limits, but Australians would sleep more easily if another couple of dozen were sitting on the tarmac at Williamstown.
Albanese could have relegated Peter Dutton to an also-ran, just as John Howard did to Kim Beazley in 2001.
He could have seized the opportunity to revise his disastrous energy and climate policy, as many European nations did in response to the loss of Russian gas.
Above all, he could have satisfied our longing for a leader with the resolve of John Curtin, who can appeal to America’s better instincts and forge a united alliance.
As in 1942, when Curtin broadcast a memorable speech to the American people after the fall of Java, the PM must assure our US allies that we are playing our part by raising military spending from its current inadequate level.
Curtin told the Americans he was not approaching them as a mendicant but as the leader of a nation that was willing to devote its resources to defeat a common enemy. “Our people have a government that is governing with orders and not with weak-kneed suggestions,” he said. “We will pull knee to knee with you with every ounce of our weight.”
A Prime Minister across the brief would rise above tawdry politics, get himself to Washington and express similar sentiments to a President who, despite his mercurial tendencies, might just be prepared to listen.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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