Why Labor is ready to build on John Curtin’s ambition

Anthony Albanese speaks at Australia's Economic Outlook 2025 hosted by Sky News and The Australian. Picture: Jane Dempster

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John Curtin restored in Labor what he revived in Australia. Unity and purpose in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ambition and co-operation in pursuit of opportunity. And, above all, the confidence and determination to follow our own course and shape our own future.

Eight decades after his death, we rightly honour our Labor wartime prime minister as the founder of Australia’s alliance with the United States. It is a pillar of our foreign policy and our most important defence and security partnership. It is a relationship that commands bipartisan support, respect and affection in both our nations.

Yet our alliance with the US ought to be remembered as a product of Curtin’s leadership in defence and foreign policy, not the extent of it. Curtin’s famous statement that Australia “looked to America” rather than Britain was much more than the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another. It was a recognition that Australia’s fate would be decided in our region. It followed the decision Curtin had made in 1941 that Australia would issue its own declaration of war with Japan.

Robert Menzies had said because Britain was at war with Germany, Australia was also at war. Under Labor, Curtin said Australia was at war “because our vital interests are imperilled and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed”.

That’s what Curtin recognised – it was a Pacific war; its own conflict demanding its own strategy. Our security could not be outsourced to London. We needed an Australian foreign policy dealing with the world as it was, not as we wanted it to be.

John Curtin.

As Paul Keating put it in his John Curtin Memorial Lecture: “Curtin began us thinking in our own terms.” So we remember Curtin not just because he looked to America. We honour him because he spoke for Australia.

For Australia, and for Labor, that independence has never meant isolationism. Choosing our own way doesn’t mean going it alone. It was the Curtin and Chifley governments that brought Australia into the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at the outset.

Australia did not just join the institutions that created the international rules-based order, we helped shape them because we did not want our region’s future to rest on what Doc Evatt called a “great-power peace”.

Then, as now, we championed the rights and the role of middle powers and smaller nations. We recognised our region’s security depends on collective responsibility. We strove for a world where the sovereignty of every nation was respected, the dignity of every individual upheld. And we backed our words with deeds.

Eighty years ago, Australia under Chifley was one of the first countries in the world to publicly support the people of Indonesia in their independence struggle. And we were part of the first-ever UN peacekeeping mission to help secure Indonesian sovereignty.

Ever since, Labor governments have understood Australia’s security and our prosperity depend on engaging with our region as ourselves, investing in our capabilities, and investing in our relationships.

In times of global uncertainty and profound change in our region, Australia under Labor has always had the courage and imagination to play a constructive and creative role.

That’s the approach our government has taken from day one. Rebuilding our standing as a leader and partner in the Pacific. Patiently and deliberately working to stabilise our relationship with China. Deepening our economic engagement across Southeast Asia; forging new defence and security co-operation with our nearest neighbours, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. And giving our security and trade and energy partnership with India the long overdue attention it deserves.

The great creative tension of Labor is while we love our history, we are not shackled to our past. We draw from it, we build on it and we learn from it.

As a junior member of the Scullin government, Curtin had watched in dismay as the hopes invested in that Labor government fell victim to events, its ambitions crushed by the Great Depression, its fate sealed by foreign banks and the state premiers.

Ben Chifley signs an autograph book.

For Curtin, who lost his seat in the landslide defeat that followed, the hard lesson was that Labor could never again be seen as ineffectual in times of economic crisis.

That’s part of what drove Curtin and Chifley to put the commonwealth at the centre of tax and revenue. They understood that Australia could not meet the twin challenges of mobilisation and reconstruction as a disparate collection of states pulling in different directions.

Consider the big challenges and opportunities facing Australia today: building the new homes and infrastructure our suburbs and regions need; securing the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme; powering new jobs and industries through the energy transition; training our workforce and workplaces so that artificial intelligence is a creator of good jobs – not a threat to them.

None of these can be realised by one level of government on its own, or indeed by government alone. It depends – as ever – on mobilising the talents and capacity of all Australians.

The world Curtin knew belongs to history now – yet the lessons of his life and legacy endure, as does this fundamental truth: Australia cannot predict or control the challenges we will face, but we can determine how we respond.

We can choose the way we engage with our region and deal with the world. The stability and prosperity we build and defend with our partners, the peace and security we seek for ourselves.

Above all, we can choose the nation we strive to build. An economy that rewards hard work and creates opportunity. A society true to the values of fairness and aspiration that Australians voted for. And a government worthy of the people we serve, repaying the trust Australians have placed in us, and living up to the example of courage and kindness Australians set for us every day. That is the Labor way. That is the Australian way. That is our way forward for the future.

Anthony Albanese is Prime Minister of Australia. This is an edited extract of his John Curtin Oration, which he delivered in Sydney on Saturday night.