In deciding that Australia should adopt United States President Donald Trump’s bunker busting of international law, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has crossed a moral Rubicon into a quagmire of destroyed credibility.
Australia has now effectively, politically and diplomatically, isolated itself from east and south-east Asia after deciding to join United States’ President Donald Trump in rejecting international laws and conventions it has been a signatory to since the UN formed after World War II.
There is a supreme irony that Labor was re-elected to office in May, with a large increase in its majority, largely due to the overwhelming rejection of Peter Dutton’s overt Trumpist policies.
Now Albanese, defence minister Richard Marles and foreign affairs minister Penny Wong have unambiguously and unequivocally acted as voices for the Trump administration’s statements and actions since Israel attacked Iran on June 13.
Through their sycophantic fealty to Trump they have demonstrated they are colonial managers, based in Canberra, in service to the President.
Their endorsement of Trump’s attack on Iran’s civil nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, which closed the door on any notion the US upholds international law, sent a message that Australia had abandoned all pretences of being part of an emerging multi-polar world. Instead, it has committed to the unipolar US “rules-based order”.
Israel’s and the US’ deliberate attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities should have been condemned by Australia, for the obvious reason that bombing a nuclear facility could cause radioactive contamination of the environment, including the atmosphere.
Labor has thus indicated that, in general terms, it supports attacks by its imperial master on nuclear facilities. Australia has finally rejected internationalism for full-blown colonial status within a disintegrating imperial structure which has discarded the UN Charter, and which is in full retreat from “liberal democracy”.
Labor’s position is the culmination of a decades-long process of eroding UN convention commitments and obligations. Australia has long been in breach of UN human rights conventions, especially in relation to refugees, the rights of children and the rights of minority and Indigenous Australians.
The erosion escalated sharply with continuous breaches of international law by Australia, since October 2023, including non-compliance with International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings and advisory recommendations, failure to support decisions of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its failure to halt military, political and diplomatic support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
That is all on the public record. But we are now in different territory.
It needs to be emphasised that, since June 13, Australian officials have dutifully endorsed Trump’s gangster-like treacherous twists and turns. Everything they have said has been deceptive, designed to create a delusionary narrative and promote public ignorance of the truth.
Israel launched a well-planned attack on Iran, green-lighted by the US while it was undertaking top-level negotiations with Iran — a successful subterfuge designed to deceive Iran into believing that a diplomatic solution was possible.
Australia then declared that “Israel has a right to defend itself”. In doing so, Australia contravened articles of the 1945 UN Charter, which state: “Members must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the UN’s purposes”, and that nothing in the UN Charter “shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations”.
These were specifically written to prohibit so-called “pre-emptive” and surprise attacks, such as Israel’s attack on Iran, which targeted Iranian negotiators who were engaged in talks with the US. Trump gloated about these murders, confirmation that the US was engaged in the talks in bad faith.
Wong’s call for Iran “to return to the negotiating table” and Albanese’s follow-up declaration that Iran posed a “threat to international peace” add to the deceitful misinformation Labor is trying to sell to the public.
Israel and the US wrecked diplomacy deliberately and irrevocably, not Iran.
Wong won’t explain how diplomacy can be conducted when envoys are murdered. Nor will she explain why she has not condemned the murders of Iranian officials and scientists while these talks were occurring.
The idea that it is okay for a nation to launch a surprise attack on a neighbouring nation is a narrative which would overturn German responsibility for its attack on Belgium in World War I, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in May 1940, and exonerate Japan for attacking Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
Australia’s rejection of international law designed to prevent such events presumably makes it okay for Marles to engage with the US in planning Australian involvement in a sudden attack against China?
Albanese has also rejected Iran’s right to self-defence under the terms of the UN Charter, further confirmation of his disregard for international law. He has turned back the clock 22 years, to 2003, and followed the John Howard blueprint of lies and deception about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and responsibility for the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
But 2025 is hugely different to 2003. All of Albanese’s Trumpist-style deception and misinformation he seem happy to feed to the public shows that any threads of connection to the best Labor administrations of the 20th Century have now been broken.
[Peter Henning has authored three books on Tasmanians during World War II, the last being Veils and Tin Hats about Tasmanian nurses at war.]