Did Australia really reject Trumpism at the federal election?
If so, someone should tell the prime minister
Somehow I had missed the fact that one of the first things the newly elected Anthony Albanese did after his thumping seats victory last week was to take a phone call from Mein President, Donald Trump.
I’m a little confused.
Not that an Australia PM would take a call from an American President after an election win, but that this particular prime minister would respond to this particular President under these particular circumstances in this particular way.
I mean, this was the election where we-the-people of Australia rejected Trumpism, right? That’s the narrative? Peter Dutton aligned himself too closely with the Orange Hitler and we weren’t going to stand for it. Senator Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price wrecked Dutton’s campaign when she uttered the make-Australia-great-again catchphrase, reminding us just how Trumpy Dutton would be. No dodgy DOGE for us, right?
And yet, here are Trump and Albanese moments after the result is in:
The prime minister told reporters that he raised both AUKUS and the Trump administration's sweeping tariffs with the US president during a "very warm" exchange.
"We talked about AUKUS and tariffs and will continue to engage, we'll engage with each other on a face-to-face basis at some time in the future," [Albanese] said.
"But it was very warm … I thank him for reaching out in such a positive way as well."
[Mr Albanese] would not be drawn on any detail of the phone call, or say whether he'd secured any commitments from the US president on trade.
…The prime minister also suggested the president lavished praise on him during the call.
"It was very generous in his personal warmth and praise towards myself. He was fully aware of the outcome and he expressed the desire to continue to work with me in the future."
Doesn’t sound very reject-y to me.
I’m sure a lot of people will tell me that this is just part of the Albanese plan, some sort of genius diplomatic strategy to not antagonise the petulant Trump while quietly arguing our corner on tariffs or whatever else; that this is just what “grown up” politics really is and that this is how “serious” people do business. That the alternative is the “extremism” of those like the Greens and look what happened to them.
Well, whatever gets you through the night, I guess.
And look, sure, there are always tradeoffs in politics and the exercise of power leaves no-one’s hands entirely clean. But in the end, you are what you pretend to be, and the whole argument about “realism” falls apart once you factor in the medium-to-long term risks that arise in closely aligning us with an anti-democratic force like the Trump Administration.
No amount of centrist waffle can extricate us from the fact that AUKUS connects us at an absolutely molecular level with an Administration proving by the day that they are run by amongst the worst people on earth, a cadre who have little regard for the rule of law in their own country, let alone elsewhere in the world.
Albanese’s realism—if that’s what you want to rationalise it as—risks taking us into the realms of tacit approval for this sort of fascism, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t vote for that.
The government’s continued embrace of AUKUS is particularly problematic. We might have rejected Dutton and the Liberals on May 3, but Labor is still delivering this key plank of their defence policy. Far from being something they signed off on merely as a way of neutralising an election issue in the run up to the 2022 election, Labor is all in.
As a recent (sympathetic) analyst noted, “Support for the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) security partnership was bipartisan in the campaign. Defense spending is set to rise, even if modestly, and the alliance remains core to Australian strategy. One of the key features of Labor’s last terms in office were advances in US force posture in Australia and the alignment of strategic posture around denial and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, which will continue to be a core focus over the next three years.”
But AUKUS remains bad policy. It locks us into hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure for dubious and unguaranteed returns, only made worse by the fact that it deepens our ties with a state that can no longer make any serious claim to being an open democracy. It’s a circle that can’t be squared by any amount of real politick blather about diplomatic niceties, and it risks dragging us down into the sort of appeasement that leaves us vulnerable and compromised.
Realism, you say.
Albanese famously embraced incrementalism during his first term but incrementalism is ultimately what got the frog boiled.
At the moment we are sitting in Trump’s beaker, cosying up to an authoritarian regime via a defence partnership that allies us with a regime that, on the balance of probabilities, is going to be more authoritarian, more fascist adjacent as time goes on. Even if the hapless Democrats do manage over the next term—or even two terms—to wrest back control and set the democratic ship to rights, they are not going to thank us for having given succour to Trump and his cronies.
I’m sure the Australian people were swayed by Dutton’s embrace of Trumpism and did reject him at least partly on that basis, though the truth is, their rejection of him goes much deeper than that. Australians didn’t like Dutton or trust him and the campaign proper exposed just how unprepared he and his party were for government. It raised massive concerns amongst voters about what a prime minister Dutton would do in office.
As Redbridge’s Senior Insights Adviser, Alex Fein, said to me the other day when I asked her about it, people despised Scott Morrison and were eager to get rid of him. They were terrified of Peter Dutton.
It just makes Albanese’s continued “warmth”—the prime minister’s own word—towards Donald Trump even more objectionable, at least to my way of thinking. Labor played on our concerns about Dutton’s closeness to Trump—or Trumpism—only to turn around and publicly embrace Trump himself once the election was over.
I guess that’s what they call clever politics. At least for one extra term.
The ejection of Ed Husic from Cabinet, apparently as part of a grubby factional deal involving Deputy PM Richard Marles (Washington’s man in Australia by all accounts), says a lot about what is really going on. Of course, the ALP rusted-ons say this is just another routine balancing-of-the-factional-books exercise as happens after every election. Nothing to see here. But I find it hard to believe this is not a sign of who is really running things in the ALP - the same old US defence establishment, the arms industry, the fossil fuel giants and the usual rent-seekers. Labor got there with a little over a third of the first preference vote and to a large extent from the preferences of voters of the left who were truly terrified at the thought of a Dutton prime ministership. Now they are going and rubbing progressive voters’ noses in it, and within five minutes of the election, cosying up to Trump again. Once again, who is prosecuting the substantial case against the AUKUS debacle - a wedge that Albo signed up to in a flash and which former prime ministers of both persuasions and independent defence analysts like Paul White represents a selling out of our sovereignty. That both major parties are at one on this is truly sinister.
It's not entirely Albanese's fault. Australian public attitudes to the US are complex, to put it politely. On the one hand, views of Donald Trump are overwhelmingly negative, a fact that contributed to the scale of the LNP defeat. On the other hand, there has been little challenge to the general belief that our alliance with the US is both necessary and beneficial.
During Trump’s first term in office, these apparently contradictory views could be reconciled. Trump’s election was seen as an aberration. When he was defeated, Biden claimed "America is back"
That America is gone for good, but neither the political class nor the public in general has managed to process this fact so far.
I'll have a longer piece soon, arguing that we need to throw in our lot with ASEAN