He might have dropped 15kg, straightened his teeth and changed out of his cheap suits, but that’s all window dressing because fundamentally Anthony Albanese remains the same hard-left activist he’s always been, and his thumping parliamentary majority means he’s no longer trying to hide it.
And yet this is the man now in charge of our national fortunes at a time that’s the most dangerous and challenging since the end of World War II.
If Albanese had his way, Australia would be the Switzerland of the South Pacific, only without the compulsory national service.
At heart he’s a pacifist – just look at his remaking of John Curtin’s wartime legacy in his recent speech that ricocheted all the way to Washington.
Couple that with his decision to prioritise a six-day visit to China over a visit to the Oval Office, and you can see why so many in the Trump administration and the Pentagon are questioning the once-reliable Australians in these troubling times.
The most important document in a prime minister’s office is the diary. It’s often misunderstood and handed off to administrative staff to operate, but how leaders schedule their time says everything about their government and priorities.
So the fact that, post-election, Albanese and his senior staff sat down with his department and scheduled this multi-city, week-long visit to the country that’s our biggest strategic challenge knowing there was no such visit to the country that’s our biggest strategic ally says everything.
When pushed by the press pack in Shanghai this week, the PM said there’s nothing to see here, even Tony Abbott went to China before Washington. Yes, but as Liberal leader Abbott had already had several interactions and a face-to-face meeting with president Barack Obama, and as prime minister he promptly made his way to the Oval Office.
He also made sure that on his first official visit to China he visited Japan and South Korea, to send a clear signal to Beijing.
Not so the student radical from Marrickville who has almost gone out of his way to avoid the one ally we will need in times of trouble.
Meaning there’s only one conclusion possible from the Prime Minister’s extended pilgrimage to China: that Albanese wants Australia to be more closely aligned with China and more distant from the US, even though the Chinese President has reportedly warned his people to “prepare for war”.
This is a truly startling development, given the communist giant is on a self-declared mission to be the world’s No.1 power within 25 years, in the process displacing Australia’s great protector with whom we share a language, a deep set of values and a big chunk of history.
It’s all the more remarkable given Australia’s previous self-perception as the US’s closest and most reliable ally, based on the fact that only Australia has fought alongside the US in every one of its conflicts since the Great War – when, as it happened, US troops saw action for the first time at the Battle of Le Hamel under the command of our own (proudly Jewish) Sir John Monash.
This was the serendipity behind the “hundred years of mateship” initiative of our former ambassador to the US Joe Hockey, which did so much to sustain the US-Australia relationship during the first Trump administration.
Things could hardly be more different under Trump mark II.
On his eighth visit to China, Albanese has just had his fourth substantial meeting with the Chinese communist leader, while he’s not yet had his first in-person meeting with the leader of the free world, of whom our PM said “he scares the shit out of me” during Trump’s first administration.
When Australia’s senior officials briefed the PM after his May election win, they would have been well aware of the importance of an Oval Office meeting for a transactional and self-promoting president.
And their advice would have been that the Washington visit that wasn’t a high priority pre-election had become a very high priority post-election, and that a brief pull-aside on the margins of an international conference would not substitute for the respect involved in a specific official visit to the US’s capital.
Yet plainly Albanese thought otherwise. Why? There are three possible explanations.
First, our Prime Minister could have a visceral distaste for the current US President and an anxiety about being subjected to an Oval Office dressing-down about our defence spending, similar to the experience of the Ukrainian and South African leaders, who’d incurred presidential displeasure.
Second, Albanese could think that a prompt visit to Beijing would please the Chinese-Australian voters who’d strongly supported him in the election.
Or third, he really does want to signal a new identity for an Australia that won’t let its security relationship with the US interfere with an economic relationship with China, even one that China has recently weaponised against us, reflecting his lifelong left-winger’s instinctive dislike of military alliances and the commitment of the armed forces to anything other than humanitarian relief.
Let’s dismiss the first possibility because surely no credible PM would put a potential public embarrassment ahead of pursuing a vital national interest; and if he really does think our current defence spending is adequate, he should be able to justify it even to the US President.
And it’s hard to imagine a PM, however electorally canny, letting marginal seat considerations drive our foreign policy, albeit that China expert John Lee has recently highlighted Beijing’s efforts to recruit the local diaspora to barrack for China ahead of Australia.
By far the most credible rationale is that Albanese is deliberately detaching Australia from the broader Western alliance of which we’ve always been part, partly because of his distaste for military entanglements and partly because of his instinctive reluctance to think ill of people, even communist dictators threatening to take over their neighbours by force.
Given foreign policy was barely in Albanese’s lexicon before he secured the Labor leadership, it’s worth looking more clearly at the PM’s new “progressive patriotism”.
Just before leaving for China, he delivered the annual John Curtin Oration in honour of our great wartime leader.
But what the PM noted about Curtin was not the latter’s famous declaration that “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional kinship with the United Kingdom”; nor the World War I pacifist’s wrenching conversion to the need to conscript young Australians to fight beyond our shores; but Curtin’s commitment to the post-war reconstruction ultimately undertaken by his successor, Ben Chifley.
The “progressive patriotism” Albanese invoked in his Curtin oration runs to “securing the NDIS”, “powering new jobs through the energy transition” and creating a “society true to the values of fairness and aspiration that Australians voted for” – not to spending the 3 per cent or more on national defence that these perilous times demand.
These are the clues to our current Prime Minister’s view of the great power rivalry now inevitably sweeping up Australia.
Like Gough Whitlam, he’s more emotionally connected to China’s liberation struggle and quest for developmental justice than he is to the US as a bastion of market capitalism and the world’s policeman.
Like Curtin, Albanese’s real interest is in social equality, not strategic national leadership.
But what he plainly has trouble grasping is Curtin’s understanding that in a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, Australia must take a side.
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