“AUKUS is a win, win, win. AUKUS is a win for the United States, which gets more maintenance days and investments into its industrial base now and into the future and also gets another Indian Ocean Port capability. It’s a win for Australia, and it’s a win for the United Kingdom. It’s a win for Australia because we gain a capability that enables us to contribute to the strategic balance that I’ve talked about...” — Foreign minister Penny Wong, July 22.
“We, of course, are a sovereign nation. And John Curtin, certainly, when he chose to stand up to the British and assert Australia’s right to defend ourself and to bring home our troops, was an assertion of that. And he looked to America, of course – was an important part of that as well. Now since then, the US alliance … has been our most important, it remains our most important alliance. That is a critical relationship that we have for our defence and security. But that doesn't abrogate the need for Australia to have a say in our own defence and security relationships...
“What we’ve done is invest in our capability, but also invest in our relationships. When it comes to our capability, the getting, obtaining, by Australia of nuclear powered submarines has a number of advantages over other pieces of military equipment. The fact that a nuclear powered submarine can stay under, submerged, for longer, that it can travel further, that it’s quieter, that it's less detectable, means that it’s an investment, which my Government agreed with the former government was in Australia's national interest.” — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, July 20.
The PM used his recent visit to China to bolster Labor’s claim to be advancing Australian national interests in its foreign policy.
But that claim is in tatters after nearly two years of marching almost lockstep with the United States to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and Labor’s desperate championing of the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal.
Israel has decisively lost the global battle for hearts and minds. A recent Pew Research poll found that in “20 of the 24 countries surveyed, around half of adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel. Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey”.
A YouGov poll in April, commissioned by The Australian Institute, found that 65.9% thought the Donald Trump administration was bad for the world and 54.2% wanted Australia to have a more independent foreign policy.
The poll also found 56.8% support for a parliamentary inquiry into the AUKUS agreement.
Is Australia an independent nation pursuing its national interests, as the PM argues, or is it reverting to “19th century-style, fully-fledged colonial status” as Peter Henning and others have argued?
Neither is true.
Albanese is right that the Australian state has been sovereign for more than a century, and the close military alliances it developed with Britain and the US were not just struck freely, but enthusiastically, by the Australian governments of the time. Historian Humphrey McQueen pointed this out in his 1970 book A New Britannia.
But Albanese’s big deceit is his assertion that this is being done in our common interest.
The Australian “national interest” has always been a facade for the interests of the ruling elite which, in this country, began as a British colonial settler state outpost that violently dispossessed and attempted to wipe out First Nations peoples.
The ruling elite that emerged from a class of big landlords and bankers, enriched from the 19th century gold rushes, always recognised its interest in having the military support of bigger imperial powers, like Britain and the US, especially to protect its own colonies and neo-colonies in the South Pacific.
These alliances were based on shared a white supremacist and imperial interest in keeping the region’s non-white majority subjugated.
Of course, in forming such military and political alliances, Australian governments have willingly sacrificed some control to more powerful imperial allies. In World War II, Australia served as a base of the US military and operated under the command of US General Douglas MacArthur.
Today, Australia hosts numerous US military bases, including Pine Gap. As foreign minister Wong informs us, the AUKUS deal expands these bases, while subsidising US weapons industries.
Until the middle of the 20th century, these imperial military alliances were openly justified in racist terms by Australia’s politicians, including revered Labor leaders such as John Curtin and Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt.
Today, most Australian politicians claim to be against racism and imperialism, but actions speak louder than words, as First Nations activists have been pointing out for a long time.
Labor and Coalition politicians’ responses to Israel’s genocide in Gaza amply demonstrate their racist double standards. No matter how many gross atrocities the Israeli Defense Forces commit and the use of starvation as a weapon of war, major party politicians continue to insist that the main atrocity is Palestinian resistance groups’ taking of a relatively small number of Israeli hostages on October 7, 2023.
Apart from endorsing a couple of statements critical of Israel, Albanese and Wong continue to supply Israel with military equipment, including F-35 warplane components, as Peter Cronau and Kellie Tranter exposed in their piece for Declassified Australia.
Labor, today, is essentially serving the same imperialist interests of Australia’s ruling elite as Labor and Coalition governments have reliably served in the past, and it deceitfully presents it as acting in the “national interest”.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the Socialist Alliance National Executive.]