Scott Morrison says Donald Trump and allies must reclaim global institutions

Scott Morrison says Donald Trump should work with allies to reclaim global institutions, as he blasts the WHO for failing to investigate China over the Covid outbreak.

Scott Morrison with Donald Trump in New York. Picture: X.

Scott Morrison says Donald Trump’s win is a chance to better defend global bodies like the World Trade Organisation and World Health Organisation from attempts by autocratic rivals to blunt their effectiveness from within, while also holding domestic elites in the US to a new level of accountability.

In a key speech to the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations on Thursday (Friday AEDT), Mr Morrison warned there was a critical battle for institutions playing out both domestically in the US as well as on the world stage.

Mr Morrison took aim at China for flouting World Trade Organisation rules and, in relation to the outbreak of the pandemic, the failure of the World Health Organisation to “properly investigate, to demand information from China.” He said this “cost the lives and livelihoods of millions, and could do so again.”

“There has never been any accountability, let alone an apology or even acknowledgment by the Chinese government for their likely misadventure in the Wuhan laboratory,” he said.

“The WHO is no better able today to stand up to the coercion and control that it was clearly subjected to back in December 2019 and January 2020, when China worked to cover its tracks.”

Mr Morrison argued for America and its allies to work together to reclaim global institutions from autocratic rivals seeking to corrupt their foundational values in a bid to protect themselves and their own regimes.

“We cannot walk away,” he said. “We cannot allow those who seek to invert these organisations in favour of their agendas to prevail as a result of our yielding to frustration, impatience and disillusionment. Their intent is to wait us out. We need to get back in the game.”

Incoming US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made clear in October that “a newly energised muscular Trump 2.0” would take a different approach towards the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the OECD to “advance the aim of Americans rather than accept the gradual encroachment of US interest.”

Mr Morrison said this echoed his own call in 2019 when he outlined the need to push back

“against what I described as the negative globalism and infection of global institutions with

political and moral relativism.”

“The effectiveness of … international institutions matters,” he said. “The dysfunction of the WTO and its inability to enforce trade rules, of which western nations are complicit, enables nations to disregard such rules.”

“In Australia’s case, China’s actions to impose illegal trade sanctions against Australia,

when we challenged them over COVID 19, foreign interference, and their incursions in the

South China Sea, showed a contempt for global trade rules and the WTO,” he said.

“Even more galling was the suggestion upon removal of these illegal sanctions, that it was an act of benevolence to the relationship, only secured after Australia dropped the actions we instigated against China in the WTO.

“You should never thank an adversary for ceasing to strike you in the face. They learn from your behaviour.”

Mr Morrison promoted the need for the US and its partners to work in smaller more agile groups like the Quad and AUKUS to achieve shared economic and security interests, while aligning private sector institutions with these efforts.

Central to these efforts was a need for the US to “be clear and consistent about their expectations of allies and partners going forward” to create certainty and “provide a more durable platform for engagement.”

The former prime minister also used his speech to defend Mr Trump from criticism he was seeking to skirt checks on his power by stacking courts, intimidating journalists and revamping the bureaucracy to more fully implement his wishes.

Mr Morrison said there was a growing disconnect between liberal democratic institutions and mainstream society which had undermined trust in government. Attempts to hold the media, corporations, academia, bureaucracies to account for their actions did not constitute an attack on liberal democracy.

These institutions should not be “sanctified as untouchable.”

“We can no more have blind confidence in the inerrancy of courts, journalists and

bureaucrats, than we can in our elected officials,” Mr Morrison said.

Trump was not attacking liberal democratic institutions, but challenging the unaccountable elites who were controlling them with Mr Morrison saying they had accrued “significant cultural, corporate and political power over the past fifty years.”

“The visceral and hysterical reaction to Trump … by the elite class is an acknowledgment of the genuine threat posed to their authority and the potential for the norms they have enshrined being reset,” he said. “This is not a threat to democracy, as they would protest.”

“It is in fact the opposite. It is actually a triumph of liberal democracy in action.”

He argued the rebalancing of institutions pursued by Trump was in favour of private property rights, personal responsibility, law and order, an entrepreneurial economy, affordable and reliable energy, respect for Judaeo-Christian values and sovereignty in all its forms.