The Prime Minister remains an advocate of free trade, low tariff barriers, a rules-based international order and all the rest, but in a powerful address to the Lowy Institute he has set out his conviction that effective international action on big global issues comes from nation states co-operating freely.
As he puts it, “individual, like-minded sovereign nations acting together with enlightened self-interest”.
As opposed to this, he rejects the arrogance of a “new variant of globalism that seeks to elevate global institutions above the authority of nation states to direct national policies”.
This kind of globalism, Morrison rightly argues, leads to “elite opinion and attitudes” that “become disconnected from the mainstream” in their societies.
This in turn produces an alienating era of “insiders and outsiders”.
This is powerful and novel rhetoric from the Prime Minister.
It would be absurd to equate Morrison with US President Donald Trump, but these ideas have some resonance with Trump’s recent speech to the UN and with the proud but moderate nationalism that Boris Johnson is championing in Britain.
It is worth remembering Trump won the US election and Johnson is more than 10 per cent ahead of the Labour opposition in Britain.
Morrison is not championing a heedless beggar-thy-neighbour nationalism. Rather, with admirable realism, he is sketching the only kind of international co-operation that ever really works, that of strong nations pursuing enlightened self-interest and co-operating on shared projects arising from shared interests and shared values. If Morrison had been making this speech in Britain, it would sound like a pro-Brexit speech.
In Australia’s context, the criticism he makes is more directed at the plethora of UN agencies, most of which have no public profile in Australia, which criticise Canberra policy on secure borders, refugee flows, climate change, aid budgets and the many weird contortions and inversions of human rights that UN agencies and their dependent NGOs promote.
The UN agencies take special delight in criticising nations such as Australia while avoiding criticism of the nations that routinely commit crimes against humanity.
Morrison will be criticised for this speech by those who will see it as embracing the road of populism. The Economist magazine, representing much elite, but not popular, European opinion has already labelled the Morrison government populist because of its support for the Adani coalmine in Queensland.
Morrison has effectively armed himself against such criticism by channelling the Liberal Party’s modern hero, John Howard, to the effect we will determine this nation’s interests and how they are pursued.
This important speech contains other serious matters.
Morrison again rightly rejects the binary that suggests Australia must in most if not all things choose between the US and China. He deftly summarises our relations with both.
He also draws attention to an important development in recent days that went mostly unnoticed, the elevation of the Quadrilateral Dialogue to ministerial level, which took place on the sidelines of the UN.
Morrison also announced he would visit India in January. If he can take the India relationship to its potential, he will have made a massive contribution to our economic, strategic and cultural future.
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