Reality not part of PM’s foreign policy playbook
The more you read about the history of anti-Semitism, the more recognisable, and therefore distressing, is the stage that Australia seems to be in now. The Albanese government is not itself remotely anti-Semitic, but it has never grasped the scale or nature of the problem, its seriousness, or the way its own language and actions contribute to worsening a crisis.
The utterly absurd, almost nonsensical, claim by the Albanese government that its decision to formally recognise a Palestinian state when no such state exists contributed to Donald Trump’s peace proposal for the Gaza Strip is a case in point.
Then there is the broader question of Australian foreign policy, which continues to operate primarily in the realm of fantasy rather than actual, physical reality. More on this, later.
But amid the general bleak nothingness of Australian policy, there is one bit of good news. A rare exception to the characteristic vapourware policy is the military alliance Anthony Albanese signed with Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape. This is a real development and a good one. Although the treaty’s language is less binding than the famous NATO Article 5 – an attack on one is an attack on all – it is as strong as the language in our ANZUS Treaty.
Albanese deserves congratulations for bringing the agreement, strongly opposed by China, to fruition.
Tying us to PNG, and PNG to us, is a good thing. The chief strategic objective for us is that PNG deny Beijing excessive influence within the country, and particularly its security sector.
However, here are two questions no one is asking about the treaty. What extra resources will we now commit to defence to fulfil this new obligation? We’ve taken on the responsibility of defending PNG against any threats. Either the treaty is meaningless or it imposes new obligations. If the new obligation is real, it demands commensurate new resources.
Yet as this column, along with every other realistic defence analyst, has often observed, the resources we devote to defence are radically insufficient even for our current tasks. The defence budget was 2 per cent of GDP when Albanese came to office. It’s still 2 per cent of GDP. There’s been no meaningful increase in nearly four years of Labor government. Yet in that time we’ve committed to the huge expense of acquiring nuclear submarines, and now we’ve added a new defence commitment to PNG. We seem to have done all this under some psychotropic influence which allows us to make-believe that it all doesn’t need any extra money.
To slightly adapt an old saying, strategy without money is simply noise before defeat.
The second question about the alliance is this: Marape keeps saying it will mean 10,000 PNG citizens can serve in the Australian Defence Force. How can this possibly be true?
Our defence recruitment procedures are notoriously slow, byzantine, ineffective and discourage all but the most determined Australian talent. It can take the better part of a year for well-qualified Australian volunteers to join any part of the ADF. It can only be explained as part of the Defence establishment’s commitment to pacifism.
Most ADF positions require high levels of education and lots of formal qualifications. The total ADF, fewer than 60,000 people, a wildly disproportionate number of them senior officers, is smaller than half a crowd at a Taylor Swift concert. Have we severely misled the PNG PM on how many of his citizens can actually join the ADF? In five years time, when the number of PNG recruits is perhaps a dozen, how will it look? Will this lead to bitter disappointment? If not, how is this recruitment procedure meant to unfold?
The Albanese government never does detail in its grand announcements, especially regarding defence and foreign affairs. It’s world class in making announcements, but very feeble at following through and implementation.
Back to the Middle East and Albanese’s preposterous claim that Australia recognising a non-existent Palestinian state helped push towards the Trump peace proposal.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who before his current job was many years a US senator intensely involved in foreign affairs and security, said that the day France announced it would formally recognise a Palestinian state, Hamas walked away from what had looked like promising ceasefire negotiations.
That’s because Hamas saw that its terrorism, combined with its intransigence, had won it a huge political victory – French recognition of a Palestinian state. Who do you believe about the effects of such recognition? Rubio or Albanese?
Hamas famously welcomed the Albanese government’s move to follow the French with formal recognition. So on all the available credible evidence, formal diplomatic recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state made Hamas less likely to agree to a ceasefire.
Nonetheless, the Middle East uniquely suits Albanese government diplomacy. Australia has more or less zero influence in the Middle East, so the characteristic gap between announcement and failed implementation can’t ever really come back to bite Albanese.
France, Britain, Canada and Australia recognising a Palestinian state also had an effect on the Israelis. Like both Rubio and Hamas, the Israelis saw the move as a reward for terrorism. So, outraged and determined to thwart the dynamic of rewarding terrorism, the Israelis were moving towards annexing part of the West Bank.
Because the Labor government has entirely destroyed Canberra’s traditional relationship with Jerusalem, it had no influence with the Israelis at all.
In so far as the move of several left of centre Western governments to formally recognise a Palestinian state had any consequence, it was to make Hamas less likely to accept any ceasefire, and Israel more likely to annex part of the West Bank. A policy, therefore, which was not only dishonourable, but also dishonest, counter-productive and dumb.
It was Trump, and Trump alone, who stopped Israeli consideration of annexation and also produced a peace plan with half a fighting chance.
Meanwhile in Australia, where we routinely hold ritual moral panics over non-issues, we have a genuine crisis of racial, ethnic and religious prejudice against a profoundly vulnerable minority. The Albanese government, in effectively ignoring many recommendations of its own hand-picked anti-Semitism envoy, shows a characteristic disregard for this reality.
You see, it doesn’t care for reality much at all.
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The anniversary of the shocking October 7 terror atrocities carried out by Hamas against Israeli civilians should be a time of sober reflection and deep realism. It should also be a time to recognise that the federal government has deeply failed Australia’s Jewish community, which is now our nation’s most threatened and persecuted minority. In failing the Jewish community, the government has failed our whole nation.