Washington will not be impressed by Anthony Albanese’s Curtin call ... but Beijing will lap it up
Is Anthony Albanese actually trying, intentionally, for reasons best known to himself, to diminish, if not undermine, the US-Australia alliance?
How else to explain his bizarre “look away from America” speech about John Curtin, and the lesson for contemporary Australia to keep its distance from the US?
What byzantine thought processes in the PM’s office produced this astonishingly ahistorical, if not slightly dotty, speech about Curtin, misinterpreting the wartime leader – who placed all Australian troops under the command of US General Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to make Australia “a second Britannia in the Antipodes”, who in his own words feared “the teeming millions of coloured races” to Australia’s north and who therefore argued for re-establishing imperial defence centred on Britain once the war ended – into a modern identity politics kumbaya Asianist?
Of course, it’s not the misrepresentation of Curtin’s historical record in this speech that is so perplexing. It’s the dangerous rhetorical and political purposes to which Albanese seeks to put this misinterpretation that is worrying. Who on earth is Albanese messaging in this speech? Because it implies greater Australian strategic distance from the US, it will be welcomed in Beijing. But the Prime Minister is surely overdoing things here. There’s already been enough sucking up to Beijing to ensure a favourable reception in his forthcoming extended trip to China.
What does the speech say to Washington? That Australia knows better than the Americans? Surely that’s the implication of the tired, tedious, droolingly unspecific tacit call for greater independence within the alliance. Greater independence and self-reliance would obviously require a vastly increased defence budget. What price logic in this speech?
It’s worth noting that as the PM prepares for his fourth meeting with Xi Jinping but apparently won’t go to Washington to meet Donald Trump, he’s now making strategic speeches more welcome in Beijing than in Washington.
Back to Curtin. In the 1930s, a decade of comprehensive bipartisan defence failure by Australia, which led to the nation being wholly unprepared for World War II, Curtin at least notionally supported defence self-reliance.
Albanese would say he promotes Australian defence self-reliance, too, and also supports the US alliance. But here’s the most basic of the countless contradictions. You cannot do defence self-reliance while failing to produce a formidable Australian Defence Force. And you can’t have a formidable ADF with our current pathetic defence budget.
Defence expenditure was 2 per cent of GDP when Albanese came to office in 2022, it’s 2.05 per cent of GDP now. The dollar increase in the defence budget is a result mainly of inflation and population growth. The real increase in defence spending is minuscule.
The Albanese government has embarked on a program to acquire nuclear submarines, which eats up vast amounts of money without substantially increasing defence spending. As a result, we are weaker militarily now than when Albanese was elected. That’s not independence or self-reliance, it’s national irresponsibility of the kind Curtin fought against. Washington has noticed that Albanese is not remotely funding even the capabilities identified as urgent in his government’s own Defence Strategic Review.
The historical interpretations and weight given to various different episodes in Albanese’s speech are a kind of undergraduate-level partisan myth-making that distorts Curtin into an unrecognisable caricature born out of a wilful misinterpretation of a single episode.
Famously, Britain’s Winston Churchill wanted Australian troops sent to Burma. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t oppose Churchill. Curtin rightly overruled Churchill and brought the troops back to Australia. Robert Menzies would have made the same decision.
Two of the three military chiefs of staff in Australia at that time were British officers on loan. With their chairman, Vernon Sturdee, they unanimously urged Curtin to bring the Australian troops home. Jeffrey Grey, in his definitive military history of Australia, makes clear Churchill was high-handed and dishonest with Curtin, as he had been with Menzies over the deployment of Australian troops to Greece.
Curtin deserves credit for his leadership in this episode and throughout the war. But for Albanese to single out this one case of Australia disagreeing with Britain and the US, as Menzies himself had often done, as the high point of Curtin’s whole career, and the main strategic lesson to take from his wartime prime ministership, is bizarre and historically obtuse, if not downright dishonest.
Curtin moved mountains to keep first Britain, then the US, involved in Australian security. Indeed, Curtin said Australia had to be “harnessed” to other nations, meaning Britain and the US.
In fact, Curtin reversed Labor policy of appointing an Australian-born governor-general to appoint, instead, a British royal, substantially in the hope this would lead to Britain stationing troops in Australia. Within Labor, Curtin stared down the pacifists and isolationists to produce military and alliance capability. Albanese should try channelling that Curtin.
Curtin understood profoundly something that seems to have passed Albanese by, that Australia’s strategic circumstances are such that its survival as an independent, sovereign nation was not guaranteed by history.
Therefore Australia needed formidable military capability and dynamic, committed alliances with its closest political, ethical and strategic partners, the US and Britain. Of course, it also needed the best Asia policy it could manage.
Far from bravely promoting the national interest in the face of Anglo-American bullying, the undergraduate myth at the heart of so much Labor posturing, Albanese seems to have lost sight of what our enduring national interests at play here are.
Australia has two key interests with Trump: preserving the US-Australia alliance and maintaining the deepest possible US involvement in our region. A third interest, which we control more independently of the Americans, is building a militarily powerful ADF.
Nor did Curtin found the US alliance, as Albanese wrongly claims. In the late 1940s the US had no interest in a formal alliance with the Labor government. The ANZUS alliance was founded in 1951 by the Menzies government.
So far, Albanese is performing badly on all three key national interests. This silly speech will do nothing to convince Washington there is a serious government in Canberra. The argument for the Americans taking nuclear submarines out of their own order of battle to provide them to us, in 2032, is thus weakened.
This speech would play well to a Fabian Society meeting circa 1976. It has no upside today at all.
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