One of Indian Albo’s greatest policy lies is that Labor diplomacy is reaping benefits across the Indo-Pacific.
Then again, perhaps he is being truthful. There are benefits. It’s just that they are flowing to everybody other than Australia.
Let us do an inventory on the current state of affairs, travelling from west to east.
In India, Australia is bent over several egregious labour market deals that have undamned a flood of cheap foreign labour into the country. This is crushing wages, and unemployment will increase over time. With the influx will come a further decline in the calibre of public services, a more severe housing crisis, and environmental ruin. Not to mention that Delhi now has a veto over Australian border policies.
India 1, Australia 0.
If you thought that was bad, as we shift east in our review of external relations, we come to total national humiliation in China.
Since his election, Indian Albo has fallen to his knees in Beijing and become a figment of filaccionic propaganda.
This has opened the way for Labor’s junior China gobblers to trail him in.
This is enough to make the experienced international relations observer physically ill.
If the kowtowing succeeds, it will expand the breadth of Chinese immigration, narrowing foreign policy choices because no government can afford to lose the local Chinese vote.
If it fails, it projects such national weakness so widely that Indian Albo won’t be able to get a nickel for his grandma.
There is another trip underway to restore relations that makes the point well.
Then the doors closed and journalists were moved on for the private discussion. Multiple people familiar with the discussion have told me it was not long before “robust” exchanges began.
China’s behaviour around Taiwan and in the South China Sea – and the Australian government’s public concerns and actions in response – were the main topics of dispute. When it comes to the People’s Liberal Army’s behaviour in these areas, Australia strongly “disagrees where we must” – and this closed-door forum allows the country’s senior officials to do so with a directness that would be impolitic for an Australian minister.
…Canberra, for its part, believes Australia has demonstrated that it can continue its mighty trade relationship with China, all while shoring up security and defence ties with other capitals that share Canberra’s concerns about Beijing’s assertive behaviour.
“We’re the ones adjusting the dial now,” a senior Australian official told me recently.
“Australia won,” a senior diplomat from a “like-minded” country told me recently in Beijing. “What policies did Australia back down from? I score it 1-0 to Australia.”
And why is that? Because the Morrison government fought against CCP aggression with every tool at its disposal. It led to a China awakening across the developed world and garnered enormous allied support for Australia.
Is that what we are doing now?
China just circumnavigated the continent in a trial run of nuking every Australian capital city. This violation of sovereignty was every bit as profound as the Japanese baby subs in Sydney Harbour eighty years ago. Have we responded effectively? Have we responded at all?
Yes, with Chinese junkets and selfies.
Indian Albo has squandered the Morrison victory to create even greater Chinese trade dependence, and the absolute certainty that the next time Beijing wants something, its navy will return to bend Canberra over with a YJ-18 nuclear missile up the Tasman.
Diplomats are accomplished liars, but the best of them don’t stretch credibility to the point of snapping it. China 2, Australia 0.
To wit, as our diplomatic review moves further east, the real-time consequences of Australian diplomatic weakness become increasingly alarming. Penny Wong’s sojourn into the Pacific has collapsed.
Last week, the mighty imperium of Vanuatu told Indian Albo to fuck off after he expected it to sign a defence deal that excluded Chinese infrastructure. Now, there will be no defence pact, and there will be Chinese infrastructure, likely including deep-water ports that can fuel the Chinese navy on its way to sodomising Canberra with missiles. China 3, Australia 0.
By week’s end, it got even worse.
China has issued a stern warning to Papua New Guinea not to sign a new security deal with Australia that Beijing said would compromise the country’s sovereignty, in the latest sign of rising geopolitical tensions in the Pacific.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese travelled to PNG this week to sign the Pukpuk Treaty, which would have upgraded existing ties between the neighbouring countries to a full security alliance, including a mutual obligation to defend each other in the event of an attack.
However, the formal signing of the treaty was deferred, with Albanese and James Marape, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, only agreeing the terms of the full treaty. The leaders said it would be signed at a later date, which was not specified.
Once again, Albo was dry-shafted by a tiny erstwhile ally that knows weakness when it sees it.
If we can’t get a defence deal up with the former colony of PNG, then we will not get it up with anyone, and another Chinese garrison looms immediately to our north. It isn’t inconceivable that we will become a colony of our China-sponsored headhunting neighbour.
China 4, Australia 0.
For the final implosion of Albanese diplomacy, we need to jump across the Pacific.
In March 2024, months before Donald Trump claimed the presidency for a second time in an emphatic election win, he laid down a threat to Australia’s United States ambassador, Kevin Rudd.
“I heard he was a little bit nasty. I hear he’s not the brightest bulb. But I don’t know much about him,” Trump told conservative British provocateur Nigel Farage in a television interview. “But if he’s at all hostile, he will not be there long.”
Farage had just read Trump excerpts of a 2020 social media post written by Rudd, including the assessment he was “the most destructive president in history”.
It is in this prickly context that Trump may meet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese next week in New York, when both plan to attend the United Nations General Assembly. The bigger picture is that the relationship with the US – a decades-long military and economic partner – has been severely tested by differences of opinion on defence spending, trade and the lack of leader-to-leader interactions
Interviews with half a dozen sources with knowledge of Rudd’s efforts, some granted anonymity to speak frankly, suggest he has worked tirelessly to tell Australia’s story while seeking to make inroads into the Trump administration.
“May” meet Indian Albo. In other words, he won’t. Again.
Instead of discussing vital alliance business, we are all talking about Kevin Rudd. An ambassador’s job is to be invisible, especially so when s/he is dealing with glass-jawed allies. We have installed a self-aggrandising blabbermouth to openly damage the alliance.
Compare this with last week’s UK diplomatic triumph. PM Starmer and King Charles plumped Trump with regality, delivering hundreds of billions of co-investment in nuclear power, defence and AI. Areas of contention like Palestone were a non-issue. The UK/US relationship is rock solid because the former knows how to play the latter.
China 5, Australia 0.
To sum up this review, in a few short years, disastrous Labor diplomacy has so far succeeded in:
- ruining living standards at home,
- surrounding Australia with Chinese arming satraps,
- alienating the only foreign power capable of breaking the noose, and
- projecting such profound weakness that infinitesimal nations routinely ghost us.
This is an apocalyptic failure that, really, could not be a worse series of outcomes if we planned it. When we add that Labor refuses to boost defence spending, the notion that this national decline is planned cannot be discounted.
Why? Indian Albo is the weakest personality to rule Australia since Billy McMahon. Penny Wong is a snowflake poser. Richard Marles is a paper tiger. Labor greybeards are on the Chinese payroll or living in eighties fantasy land.
Looming over them all is Kevin Rudd, the principal architect of Australia’s contemporary Chinese and American relationships, a twice-scorned former PM whose motivations we should all worry about.
It is a truism that Australian diplomacy used to punch above its weight. Successive governments engaged at the forefront of the issues of the day and garnered influence beyond our scale.
In the seventies, it was the G7 and Vietnam. In the eighties, it was Asian multilateralism. In the nineties, it was global warming and the oil wars. In the noughties, it was the war on terror and shaping China.
What is it now? The utterly irrelevant pivot to Palestine.
Under Indian Albo cowardice, Australia has gone from the deputy sheriff of the South Pacific to its outstanding wimp.
