Anthony Albanese’s wildly inaccurate take on John Curtin’s war would fail as an undergraduate essay.
Curtin’s defiance of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring Australian troops home from the Middle East did not win the war or create an independent Australia “engaging with the region as ourselves”.
Curtin understood, in a way Albanese doesn’t, that US air and naval power determined the fate of the Pacific war.
The Prime Minister tries to recast Curtin’s October 1941 statement that “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship to the United Kingdom”.
In Albanese’s rendering, this was not an acknowledgment that the British defence of Singapore had failed and Australia was vulnerable to attack.
Rather it was a realisation that “this was a Pacific war. It was its own conflict, which demanded its own strategy.”
But let’s be clear; the strategy that won the Pacific war was driven by Admiral Chester Nimitz working out of his Pacific Command Headquarters in Honolulu.
It was American aircraft flying off the decks of American aircraft carriers at the battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway that won the Pacific war.
Curtin understood that reality. His real wartime success – brilliantly captured by John Edwards in his 2005 book Curtin’s Gift – was to gear the Australian economy and our limited ports and airfields to support the US effort to drive Japanese military forces out of the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
Edwards makes the case that Curtin knew by mid-1942, and certainly after the battle of the Coral Sea, that Japan had little capability to invade Australia.
But Curtin worried about a post-war settlement that might leave Japan controlling Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, blocking the US Navy from nearing Japan’s home islands. An undefeated Japan controlling much of our region would have been a dire outcome for a remote, sparsely populated Australia.
Curtin tried to do what every Australian government has done since: shape American strategic policy to suit Australian interests.
What’s new, and some may say interesting, about Albanese’s approach is that he is abandoning Canberra’s usual attempts to shape American thinking in favour of what he calls “engaging with our region as ourselves”.
Repeatedly through his Curtin oration Albanese stresses Australia’s independent position. Curtin is praised for “pushing back against two of the most powerful men in the world” – no, not Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo or Joseph Stalin but Churchill and FDR.
In this rendering Australia was “to follow our own course and shape our own future”, in which “we can determine how we respond” avoiding “what Doc Evatt called ‘a great power peace’ ”.
Of course all speeches are about the present, not the past.
Albanese’s comments are widely being reported as an attack on US President Donald Trump and his administration’s view that we are failing to spend enough on our defence.
It is striking that a speech about Australia’s wartime prime minister has nothing to say about current defence or security problems. For example, there is no language about Australia facing its most difficult strategic outlook since the end of World War 11.
What was once a commonplace of government speeches has been replaced with the much more benign formulation of “in times of profound change in our region and against the backdrop of global uncertainty”. The only reference to Australia’s current military situation is Albanese’s new mantra that we are “investing in our capabilities – and investing in our relationships”.
Could Albanese even name these capabilities? Curtin surely would be dismayed by Albanese’s lack of interest or engagement in our national defence agenda.
It would be a wonderful thing to see Albanese do some pushing back against the increasing aggression of communist China.
Curtin, I feel certain, would recognise that China’s takeover of the South China Sea, its attempts to dominate Southeast Asia, its military build-up and search for basing options in the Pacific, are all warning signs of an aggressor on the march.
As our Prime Minister flies to China for an extended tour, it’s clear he has cast himself as the leader of the party of appeasement. Even as Neville Chamberlain sought to appease Hitler at Munich, Britain was doing its best to strengthen US willingness to defend Europe.
By contrast, Albanese appeases Beijing and annoys Washington.
Albanese ends his Curtin speech by highlighting four policies supposedly promoting our national interests. First, he says we are “rebuilding our standing in the Pacific”. I give him partial credit for that, but the competition with China is far from over.
We subsidise football teams while Beijing builds ports and airports and puts cash into the pockets of island elites.
Next, Albanese says he is “patiently and deliberately working to stabilise our relationship with China”. None of this vacuous diplomatic rhetoric has stopped China from its increasingly aggressive military behaviour.
The Chinese navy circumnavigated Australia, firing weapons where it pleases it to do so and Albanese’s response is to defend this behaviour.
Third, Albanese says he is “deepening our economic engagement across Southeast Asia”.
This is not true. Australian investment into Southeast Asia is stagnating. Trade is growing but at a rate far slower than trade with China. Our government says it is encouraging business to diversify markets, but actually they have given up that effort.
Finally, Albanese says he is “forging new defence and security co-operation with our nearest neighbours, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea”.
What nonsense. Jakarta is much more interested in building ties with Moscow than with us. And China has more freedom of action in Port Moresby, despite all Albanese’s blather about family and football.
The reality for Australian security interests is that there is no substitute for US military power as the ultimate stabilising force in our region. Curtin understood that reality. Albanese doesn’t. His foreign policy is a mix of appeasing China, fantasising about our declining power in the region and antagonising the US.
Albanese may yet face his darkest hour in our national life, depending on whether the US can deter China’s military ambitions.
We must hope that moment never arrives because no Australian prime minister since the war has done more to damage our defence interests than Albanese.
Peter Jennings is a director at Strategic Analysis Australia.
More Coverage
ATO methods return to pre-whistleblower days
Monday night, in my hospital bed, A Current Affair came on air, and I was struck by just how little had changed in our tax collection system over the last decade or so.
Trump’s new realism about Putin a welcome change
It took six months, but Donald Trump seems to have concluded that Putin doesn’t want peace in Ukraine; the best news is that the free world will continue to arm Kyiv against Russia’s ravages.