The Anthony Albanese government is a disaster for a number of reasons.
Those reasons are interconnected under the government’s fundamental principle of governance — reversion to 19th century-style, fully-fledged colonial status, but in subservience to an imperial, increasingly authoritarian, divided and untrustworthy declining power.
Under that principle, the Albanese government has comprehensively detached the country from effective constructive engagement with its immediate neighbours Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and its main trading partner China.
The direction Labor has chosen to follow goes beyond AUKUS and the transfer of Australian territorial control — land, sea, air, cyber — to United States military forces to use at their unilateral discretion.
Australia is now locked into broader proxy roles by the erratic and destructive US military, which can use its territory and facilities, irrespective of the targets of those operations, from the western Pacific to the Mediterranean, West Asia and Russia.
We have already seen this with Australia’s direct participation in the US-Britain-Israeli bombing of Yemen earlier this year. The Pine Gap spy facility supplies information, via the “Five Eyes” intelligence network, to the Israel Defense Forces’ genocidal operations in Gaza, its attacks on the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria and, presumably, in the recent illegal attacks on Iran.
The extent of the long-term damage to Australia is difficult to gauge, but it does involve a whole range of potential adverse consequences, which Labor MPs appear unable to comprehend or have been acculturated to ignore to service their careers.
This mindset has been graphically exemplified in foreign affairs minister Penny Wong’s statements during the Quad meeting, in Washington, at the end of last month. Wong’s cringe began with her familiar refrain: “The United States is our closest ally and principal strategic partner”. Further, she said: “Our alliance contributes to the peace, prosperity and stability of our countries and the region we share.”
There is a major misinformation problem, reflecting the Albanese government’s normalisation of the fascistic elements of Trump’s administration under the heading of “democracy”.
Worse was to follow.
“I had a really good meeting with Marco Rubio, the secretary of state,” Wong said. Rubio had proposed that the Quad needed to be transformed into a more actively aggressive military posture against China. Moreover, she “was pleased” to be informed that Trump was “keen” to meet Albanese.
While Wong was being wooed by Rubio, Trump approved a further for bombs and missiles for the genocide in Gaza, the annexation of the West Bank, military operations in Lebanon and the extension of Israeli occupation in southern Syria.
Trump had also just signed orders to the US-Israeli-backed al Qaeda regime in Damascus, and provided an extra for the daily “killing fields” of starving Gazans at the four Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s (GHF) “aid” distribution centres.
Presumably, Wong would have been aware that doctors treating victims of the GHF’s thugs were reporting the distribution of food .
Running the gauntlet of death by starvation, or gunfire, was thus given another dimension of savage barbarity, as was the revelation that Israeli warplanes returning from Iran with unfired ordnance before returning to base.
That’s just unpacking a few elements of Trump’s current brutal policies of mass murder and destruction, which the Albanese government finds acceptable for its own self-serving political purposes and that betray Australia’s most important interests.
In that sense, Wong’s claim of US support for “peace, prosperity and stability of … the region we share” could not be more absurd. It is also entirely at odds with the Pentagon’s demands that ASEAN prepare for war with China.
ASEAN regards working cooperatively with China as a priority, as well as fostering mutually beneficial economic, social, diplomatic and cultural alignments. It regards Trump’s tariffs and sanctions as a direct threat to regional “peace, prosperity and stability”.
It is sickening to watch Labor officials seek public accolades for ingratiating Australia with Trump’s anti-democratic regime, which has just passed his “” that, among other things, cuts more than Medicaid, slashes food assistance for low-income households and puts rural hospitals at risk of shutting down.
has described the new laws as “Trump’s fascism in writing”, which creates a “police state” with “a standing army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and a gulag of detention facilities that will transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government”. He said it is analogous to the agencies created by the dictators “of the 1930s — Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco”.
Ultimately, the only short-term beneficiaries of a reversion to colonial subservience, especially in the service of Trump’s policies of genocide, destruction of international law, continual warfare and the establishment of an authoritarian oligarchy, will be a small section of the Australia’s political and corporate elite. It will come at huge cost to the vast majority of its people.
[Peter Henning has authored three books on Tasmanians during World War II, the last being Veils and Tin Hats about Tasmanian nurses at war.]