Mr Albanese goes to Tokyo to face his first big security test

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra on Monday. Picture: Getty Images

Anthony Albanese has been handed a golden opportunity to establish his foreign policy and security credentials three days after a remarkable election win.

At the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue leaders summit in Tokyo, Albanese will meet three of Australia’s most significant partners in US President Joe Biden and prime ministers Fumio Kishida of Japan and Narendra Modi of India. First impressions matter. Albanese can make it clear a Labor government will remain a steady security partner during troubling strategic times.

The line about Labor’s bipartisanship on defence and security policy achieved its political aim to stifle a defence debate during the election campaign. Now is the time for Albanese to show our key partners he will drive a creative foreign policy designed to strengthen the rule of law in the Indo-Pacific, push back against the threatening behaviour of China and Russia, and help Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands resist Beijing’s co-option and undermining.

Our new Prime Minister was right to say on Monday, before leaving for the summit, that Australia’s relationship with China would remain “a difficult one”. Beijing’s Global Times editorialises that this is solely Australia’s fault. So much for olive branches. Albanese needs to accept that the relationship won’t improve easily. Hence the need to shore up ties with the Quad partners.

Albanese should expect to be welcomed by all three leaders, perhaps most warmly by Biden, who will embrace a fellow social democrat and no doubt warm to Albanese’s public support for international action on climate change. Rest assured, though, that the Quad leaders will be carrying briefing books that raise some doubts about the direction of the Albanese government.

Biden will be looking for assurance that Labor will be fully committed to the AUKUS security arrangement and will press on with plans to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. His advisers will know that elements of Labor have reservations about nuclear power and are concerned about the impact of AUKUS on nuclear non-proliferation.

Then there is the cost of the project. Defence will be getting a clear sense of the total cost, which will be presented to Albanese in about March next year – the end of the 18-month activity to design Australia’s optimum path to nuclear propulsion. It will be a huge amount of money, enough to lift Australian defence spending from 2 per cent to 3 per cent of gross national product.

This will be the real test of Labor’s commitment to national security, and in Tokyo Biden will have his first opportunity to test Albanese’s appetite for courageous decision-making on defence and security.

Managing AUKUS alone is going to be a major test of Labor. It seems Labor has secured an absolute majority, but wafer-thin majorities can be lost if an MP resigns, dies or changes party. If Labor is forced to rely on Greens or teal votes to stay in power, there is a risk the crossbench could pressure the government on defence policy priorities.

The Green’s policy is to scrap AUKUS and halve Defence spending. The Teals are an unknown quantity on any security issue but hardly inspire confidence that they will be defence hawks.

Albanese needs to assure Biden he will be as solid on the alliance as Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley were in the 1980s. The alliance agenda is, in effect, the AUKUS agenda. Biden took a consequential decision to give Australia access to nuclear propulsion. If Labor goes cold on nuclear-powered submarines for reasons of ideology, cost or placating the crossbench this will have damaging consequences.

Albanese will remind Biden that the Gillard government designed with Barack Obama’s administration the “enhanced co-operation” framework bringing US marines to northern Australia along with increased air force and navy co-operation. That was a good policy move. Now, it is clear the US is thinking through a strategy of how to disperse its forces from Guam, Japan and South Korea in the event of a crisis with Beijing. The US military is spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a fuel farm near Darwin and the last Coalition budget anticipated $1.6bn being spent on “new port infrastructure” in northern Australia. Albanese’s incoming government brief hopefully alerts him to the reality that northern Australia is growing as a vital strategic asset in the Indo-Pacific’s new cold war.

The leaders of Japan, India and the US also may be looking for some reassurance that Albanese is fully committed to the Quad relationship. They will remember the last time Labor was in government a decision was taken not to pursue the Quad.

Speaking next to his Chinese counterpart in February 2008, then foreign minister Stephen Smith noted that “China expressed some concern” with the first Quad senior officials meeting held in May 2007:

Smith continued: “I indicated when I was in Japan, that Australia would not be proposing to have a dialogue of that nature. When I first became foreign minister, I made the point that we have a good relationship with India, but we need to take that relationship as well to a higher level, but we’re not proposing to have a dialogue along the lines as occurred last year.”

Labor recognises that the world has changed profoundly since then. China has changed and the threat from authoritarian regimes presents a clear and present danger to global stability.

As prime minister in January 2013, Julia Gillard released a national security statement entitled Strong and Secure. It said: “An assessment of the strategic environment suggests that the outlook for Australia’s national security over the next decade is largely positive. Major conflict is unlikely and we have a proactive, effective and adaptive national security capability to respond to challenges as they unfold.”

It is doubtful an Australian policy statement on security has ever been more spectacularly wrong. The task falls to Albanese to set a new course for Labor defence and national security policy. A necessary first step would be to re-create the position of national security adviser, which for unworthy bureaucratic reasons ceased to exist when Tony Abbott became prime minister.

Albanese would do well to produce a new national security policy statement as a precursor to the AUKUS pathway “reveal” in March next year. It’s a mystery why Scott Morrison so vigorously resisted producing a national security statement. It would have shown the huge amount of good work done by the Coalition government on strengthening Australia’s resistance to Beijing’s undermining of regional security.

This is another opportunity for Albanese. An NSA working at the level of secretary and a new national security statement could help shape the government’s defence and foreign policy agenda, educate the backbench, reassure allies and provide new policy drive.

Albanese may not want or expect to be first and foremost a national security prime minister but he most surely will be because of our worsening strategic outlook. In these dire times he needs all our support to strengthen Australia’s position.