Strong start for Labor in defence of liberal democratic order

Anthony Albanese and US President Joe Biden in Tokyo on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

This has been quite a week in Australian politics and international geopolitics. We have seen a remarkable reshaping of the Australian political landscape through wholly peaceful, legitimate and impeccably conducted electoral processes.

We have seen the incoming government take power and at once declare that among its core commitments is alignment with the US and the Quadrilateral Strategic Dialogue to keep China honest and rebalance trade. And we have seen our ingrained commitments to freedom of speech and the press have served us well.

This last point is worth amplifying with regard to this newspaper. As a regular contributor to these pages I am constantly confronted by the rhetoric of those who assert the “Murdoch media” distorts our politics and has undue political influence. Yet throughout the election campaign this newspaper covered the issues and debates thoroughly, conducted polling that turned out to be accurate, and manifestly did not determine the outcome of the election.

As Claire Lehmann observed on this page before the election, we have a splendid democratic system, which we should celebrate. We also have, it turns out, a free press and public square.

This is striking in the current geopolitical context. A brutal animus against liberal democratic principles in Russia and China presents a growing and serious challenge to what’s left of the liberal democratic global order created and sustained at great cost, since 1945, by the US. In such dialogue as we have with the People’s Republic of China (which should be rebadged the Party’s Republic of China), we should make one of the key talking points the remarkable political process just conducted in this country. It is something to be proud of.

I write this conscious that several MPs for whom I had the highest regard, such as Josh Frydenberg, Tim Wilson and Katie Allen, have lost their seats and that my friend Keith Wolahan has just snuck over the line in Menzies. It’s not all the specific outcomes one need delight in, but the awe-inspiring legitimacy and integrity of the process. We have been reanimated as a polity by what has just happened. The debates now, involving teals and extra Greens, a sensible-seeming ALP government and a Coalition that has been rocked to its foundations and must reinvent itself, will be bracing.

And right at the starting gate, Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong, my old friend and Defence Intelligence Organisation colleague Greg Moriarty (now secretary of the Department of Defence after an outstanding career in the diplomatic service) and Office of National Intelligence director Andrew Shearer are in Tokyo for the Quad summit, hosted by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, along with India’s Narendra Modi, US President Joe Biden and their key advisers

After suggestions, in the months before the election, that Beijing would like to see an ALP government in Canberra, our newly inaugurated Prime Minister has gone out of his way to declare that his model in terms of national security will be Bob Hawke and that he is committed to the alliance with the US and to measures to keep overweening Chinese ambitions in check.

Just as Sweden and Finland are pressing for admission to NATO, South Korea, under newly elected President Yoon Suk-yeol, is expressing interest in joining the Quad. If it does so, given how advanced and prosperous a democratic state South Korea is, we might have to rename the body the Quint. It would be a clear signal to Beijing that its abrasiveness and presumption are losing it trust and credibility across Asia.

All this also ought be a clear signal to those benighted pseudo-progressives who think Australia is seeking security “from Asia, instead of within Asia” that we are siding with all the major states of Asia in seeking security in Asia from Chinese aspirations to dictatorial hegemony. We’re not running scared. Quite the contrary. We have been stepping up.

In the domestic political arena, we are certain to see the demands of reconfiguring our national security strategy, our force structure, our foreign aid policy and our diplomatic capacities competing with other budgetary and policy priorities for the ALP. They will also encounter resistance from the Greens in the Senate and from the teal wing of parliament.

Monique Ryan, in capturing Kooyong from Frydenberg, not only trumpeted her commitment to climate action but spoke of the need for “better relations with China”. The progressives in general, urged on by well-placed figures, fancy themselves as China policy wonks. Parliamentary debates should be lively. And the Chinese ambassador will keep disseminating Beijing’s talking points as he and his master seek to shift this country away from its Quad alignment and closer to being a client state of Beijing.

A Labor figure in the spotlight on all this is Richard Marles, who is likely to be the new defence minister. He has spent a significant amount of time in opposition going to the Chinese embassy to discuss its talking points. One would like to think he will be somewhat less given to tugging the forelock (to use an expression favoured by Paul Keating) in this manner as defence minister. There will now be a great deal he must not discuss with them.

Paul Monk was head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation in the mid-1990s. He is the author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018), among other books. His illustrated book of poetry, The Three Graces: Companionship, Discretion, Passion, will be released soon.