Anthony Albanese is failing to win people to Labor’s commitment to the aggressive $368 billion AUKUS nuclear-power submarine and military integration deal.
A YouGov poll conducted between June 27 and July 3 found that 66% supported a “parliamentary inquiry into the AUKUS security agreement”. The poll, commissioned by The Australia Institute, said fewer than half those surveyed believed that the agreement would make the country a safer place.
This is not surprising given that United States President Donald Trump has used the US military — the most powerful in the world — to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and illegally bomb Iran, while bullying the rest of the world with tariffs.
Trump’s total disregard for international and domestic laws is also having an impact. His unrelenting attacks on the US judiciary, the International Criminal Court judges as well as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, for daring to criticise Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, has turned world opinion against the US.
Trump’s bullying of traditional allies into raising military spending to 5% of GDP will come at great cost to social spending and addressing the climate emergency. However, it will boost giant US arms corporations’ profits.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan stands exposed as a barely coded white supremacist war cry.
His administration is a deadly threat to humanity — and people see it.
The AUKUS deal will not only soak up billions of dollars that should be spent on urgent social needs, it will further integrate Australia’s military into the US’, turning the continent into a giant US military base from which to threaten, and possibly wage, war on China.
China is not a threat to Australia, but rather its biggest trading partner, as the PM’s July 15 joint statement with Premier Li Qiang reaffirmed.
Yet Albanese remains committed to deepening its military alliance to bolster US military hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. He has no credible argument to justify this dangerous deal, the price of which is expected to rise after the US completes its review.
This was made clear from Albanese’s July 5 John Curtin Oration speech, where the PM obliquely tried to justify the deepening military alliance with the US by comparing himself to World War II Labor PM John Curtin, who shifted Australia’s military alliance from Britain to the US.
But Curtin was more honest about the reasons for this change. Like most other politicians of his time, Curtin shamelessly viewed Australia as a White outpost in Asia, and he championed imperial power and the racist White Australia policy.
As Curtin declared in a speech on December 16, 1941: “Never shall an enemy set foot upon the soil of this country without having at once arrayed against it the whole of the manhood of this nation with such strength and quality that this nation will remain for ever the home of sons of Britishers who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race. Our laws have proclaimed the standard of a White Australia … We intend to keep it, because we know it to be desirable…”
Under pressure, following the British rout in Malaya and Singapore, and the Japanese bombing of Darwin, Curtin turned to the stronger imperial power, the US, for protection.
“The Australian Government, therefore, regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say,” Curtin declared on December 27, 1941.
“Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”
Curtin explicitly offered Australia as a forward base for the US military and General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of the South-West Pacific Area, eagerly took it up.
Under Labor, Curtin said Australia was at war “because our vital interests are imperilled”.
He did not bother to hide Australia’s imperial interests in the region. He had written of the haggling for colonies between imperial powers at the Versailles conference at the end of WWI, admitting that Australia was fully complicit with that “game of grab”.
Today, Albanese tries to cast Australia’s imperialist alliances as a benevolent interest in freedom in the region. But this is a lie. The AUKUS deal ties us into US plans to maintain its military hegemony in the Asia-Pacific.
As public opposition to AUKUS has grown, former Labor PM Paul Keating, former foreign minister Bob Carr, former Coalition PM Malcolm Turnbull and former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese have all called for the AUKUS deal to be abandoned.
More and more Labor party branches are passing motions calling for the same.