Wins on the surface but problems beneath for Anthony Albanese
Anthony Albanese will have diplomatic success in Washington and Beijing, but the underlying reality is that both relationships are drifting badly against Australian interests.
Anthony Albanese will have diplomatic success in Washington and Beijing, but the underlying reality is that both relationships are drifting badly against Australian interests.
The Prime Minister’s travelling party is briefing journalists that there will be no problem with AUKUS in the US congress.
This is pure baloney, of the type that is now pervasive in all Australian security and defence announcements.
As of writing, the congress can’t even elect a new Speaker. No one has the faintest idea what the congress will do on any issue, including AUKUS.
We do know congress has already definitively rejected the biggest Australian ask – that we be granted general exemption from US defence technology export restraints because AUKUS nations are meant to form a common industrial base.
Instead, congress will consider requested exemptions one by one. Even if congress eventually does approve the legislation allowing for a possible sale of two nuclear powered submarines to Australia in a decade’s time, anyone who thinks that’s the end of the congressional story is nuts.
Similarly, this Microsoft investment of $5bn is inevitably going to turn out to be much less than meets the eye.
Michael Shoebridge in a brilliant piece online points out that the US taxpayer is paying to buy Australian industry-made counter-drone systems and give them to Ukraine. Similarly, small, very cheap Australian-made drones have also been sent to Ukraine.
The Australian government has not spent a dollar on buying these systems, either for our own use or to give to Ukraine.
Instead of underspending this year’s defence budget by nearly $700m, Canberra could have bought some of this useful kit.
US President Joe Biden is offering $US3bn to America’s own submarine industrial base as part of a broader national security package he wants congress to pass. That’s really a drop in the ocean. Canberra should hurry up and pay the $3bn it plans to contribute to the US submarine industry. At least it would show we will actually get round to spending some money on AUKUS and it would give us some moral leverage in Washington, whereas the Americans can see we are right now doing nothing.
Biden wants Israel to delay its ground operation in Gaza until more hostages are released. This is understandable but fully plays into the hands of Hamas who took hostages for just this reason. But even Biden, who has been very good overall on this crisis, has difficult politics at home.
If the Israel/Hamas conflict intensifies, as it almost certainly will, Albanese will struggle to manage Labor’s internal politics.
Ed Husic’s ministerial career so far has two highlights. He’s the minister who cancelled the program Australia had to manufacture and launch its own satellites. And he’s the minister who broke cabinet solidarity on foreign policy in what was surely a sign of Albanese’s weakened authority after the referendum loss.
Albanese will have some happy Beijing photo-ops and will claim, Whitlam-like, to have solved the problem of relations with China. But having started brilliantly well, the government is now executing China policy very poorly.
Beijing imposed a range of completely unreasonable punishments on Australia and then has slowly reversed these one by one, on the basis of satisfactory behaviour, from Beijing’s point of view, from the Albanese government.
Thus the Australian government no longer talks about Beijing’s aggression in the region, nor even its cyber espionage. Having got one wrongly imprisoned Australian free, it has little to say about the other Australian held in China on completely fraudulent grounds. It supinely decided that a Chinese company could keep ownership of the lease of the Port of Darwin. Having come into office promising new money for defence, urgent new defence capabilities and a rapid acceleration of Australian rearmament, the government in fact has done exactly the reverse.
It now spends less on defence than the Morrison government provided for in its forward estimates. No significant new capability is being acquired. And the government has even squibbed the basic decision to install Tomahawk missiles on the Collins subs, which would at least make them more formidable in any conflict.
Those of us subject to the tyranny of facts cannot escape the withering ineffectiveness and hollow man posturing of all this.
Washington, distracted by a thousand simultaneous crises, is happy enough for now with Albanese’s pro-AUKUS declarations.
Beijing is utterly delighted with the absolute lack of substance in his actions.
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