Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong too slow to back Iran strikes
Labor’s reluctant show of support for US strikes on Iran will give Donald Trump fresh cause to question Canberra’s dependability.
The Albanese government has yet again been dragged kicking and screaming to support its closest ally as it does the heavy lifting to strengthen global security.
It took a staggering 24 hours for the government to back the US’s surgical strikes on Iran to prevent the rogue state getting nuclear weapons.
On Sunday, as Australians digested the momentous news, Labor’s issued an equivocal statement calling for “de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy”, delivered via an unnamed spokesman.
Not a word from Anthony Albanese or Penny Wong.
Fast forward to Monday morning and it had finally got its act together, rolling out the Foreign Minister to voice Australia’s support for the action.
A terse nine-minute press conference followed, in which the Prime Minister suggested the government had backed the strikes all along.
“The world has long agreed that Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon, and we support action to prevent that. That is what this is,” he said.
This was inevitably where the government was going to land. Why couldn’t it have said so earlier?
“We issued a statement yesterday,” Albanese retorted, when asked about the delay.
All of this will have given the Trump administration further cause to see Australia under Labor is a less dependable ally than it once was.
Yet the government still expects the full benefits of US protection and its “crown jewels” – nuclear submarine technology.
Unlike Britain’s Keir Starmer, who was given a heads-up on the strikes by the White House, the PM indicated Australia received no prior warning.
It’s inconceivable to think any other Australian government would have been kept in the dark on such a consequential mission, at least since the dark days of the alliance under Whitlam and Nixon.
Polls show Australians overwhelmingly dislike Donald Trump, a sentiment Labor happily took advantage of to seal its landslide election victory.
But Australians also overwhelmingly support the US alliance and deserve to know where their government stands when such consequential world events are unfolding.
Australians don’t want more war and suffering in the Middle East but they are smart enough to know that the world faces an even bigger threat if Tehran obtains nuclear weapons.
The Australia-US alliance has lasted 73 years and remains solid. But it has become clear the Albanese government’s relationship with the Trump administration is not where it needs to be.
The President’s move to cancel his G7 meeting with Albanese without so much as a phone call was a clear snub for the PM and a warning over the parlous state of the relationship.
There is still no sign of when the leaders will have their first meeting, and the longer it goes the worse things will get.
Australia-US ties will be in the spotlight once again at the NATO summit in the Netherlands this week, where Richard Marles – standing in for the PM – will have to sit through fresh US calls for its allies to spend more on their own security.
Labor is stubbornly refusing to countenance lifting its defence budget from its current 2 per cent of GDP to the 3.5 per cent sought by the White House.
This is unsustainable and will blow up in the government’s face before too long.
Unless Labor gets with the program, Albanese will face the sort of bruising Oval Office encounter experienced by Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa when he finally clinches that White House sit-down.
That would be devastating for the bilateral relationship and for Albanese’s own leadership.
