Comment

Paul Bongiorno
Albanese pushes back on Trump

It has taken the second coming of the wildly erratic Donald Trump and a landslide election win to do it, but Anthony Albanese is finally manifesting a new-found confidence in standing up for Australia with his responses to the whims of our key strategic partner.

The almost paranoid desire to be seen as close to Washington in his first term has been replaced by the realisation that an overwhelming majority of Australians no longer see unquestioning support for the United States as serving our national interest or his political advantage.

Kowtowing to President Trump, or at least perceptions he was, damaged then Liberal leader Peter Dutton during the election campaign. Albanese, despite pressure from Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, on defence spending, is not about to create the same impression.

This message is being briefed out to journalists and was given stark expression in several news conferences this week.

On Tuesday, Albanese said Australia was a “sovereign nation that needs to have pride in our sovereignty and in our capacity to make decisions in our national interest”.

The truth is the Australian public has not always been as keen as our governments in committing to the US’s various military conflicts since World War II.

Even when, in 1966, prime minister Harold Holt told US president Lyndon Baines Johnson he was “all the way with LBJ”, the sentiment was not greeted with universal enthusiasm back home.

Holt subsequently won a landslide election with his unswerving commitment to America’s Vietnam War effort, but opposition to the allied involvement increased as the death toll mounted and the campaign faltered.

Almost 60 years later, the belief of successive governments that they needed to steadfastly follow the US as insurance against any threat to our shores is well past its use-by date.

Donald Trump is making it clear he no longer sees the US as the guarantor of democratic freedoms around the world, which undermines Washington’s commitment to alliances such as NATO in Europe and ANZUS with Australia and New Zealand.

Albanese knows it, even if his defence minister, Richard Marles, hasn’t quite caught up. The deputy prime minister is still using the talking points from Labor’s first term.

Maybe Marles, attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, was dazzled by Hegseth’s wildly bellicose assurances that the US intends to “fight and win decisively” if Beijing invades Taiwan.

Hegseth said the threat from “communist China” is real and an attack on the self-governing island is potentially imminent.

In a speech at odds with the White House, according to strategic expert Hugh White and other informed observers, Hegseth said the US “will not let our allies and partners be subordinated and intimidated”.

Hegseth spoke of the need for Asian nations to lift their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP, but in his face-to-face meeting with Marles trimmed the demand for Australia to 3.5 per cent as soon as possible.

Hugh White says meeting Washington’s demand for a specified increase in spending is no guarantee it would honour treaty commitments by coming to our aid. He says it would happen only if it was in America’s own interest. The “big, beautiful” Pacific Ocean between us and the continental US, as Trump would put it, adds to the unlikelihood.

By several estimates, the demanded amount would double Australia’s annual defence spending to almost $100 billion a year. It would severely constrain any government’s ability to adequately fund Medicare, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and almost every other function of government.

Marles told reporters the US wanting to see its friends and allies spend more is “a sentiment we understand” and added it’s “a conversation we are totally up for”.

Albanese’s office says there is no conflict between the prime minister and his deputy. Committing to a conversation is not the same as agreeing to a preordained conclusion.

Albanese was quick to make this point. At the weekend he said Australia will “determine our defence policy” and, as Marles hadn’t done, said that over the next four years the government had invested “an additional $10 billion in defence”.

That allocation is for identified capabilities and Albanese said it was not the blank cheque the Coalition committed to at the election. On cue, shadow defence minister Angus Taylor recommitted the Coalition to defence spending of at least 3 per cent of GDP, ahead of his leader Sussan Ley’s root-and-branch review of policies.

The Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen, like Hugh White, talks of the challenge for Australia in our “post-American” future, with the US’s dominance waning and China’s rising.

Roggeveen says doubts over the US’s commitments throw new uncertainties over the AUKUS technology and nuclear submarine project. It assumes an even closer integration with the US. If you are in favour of Australia having a more self-reliant defence posture, he says, then you have to start by exiting AUKUS rather than more spending, as Taylor and Hegseth are calling for.

Roggeveen told Radio National Breakfast the “giant sucking sound that you hear from the Australian defence budget, that’s AUKUS”. If that agreement is rethought and cancelled, “then suddenly there’s much more space in the defence budget even within its current limitations”.

The strategic relationship with the US isn’t Albanese’s only challenge in dealing with Trump. He is due to have his first meeting with the president on the sidelines of the G7 summit that begins in Canada next Sunday. The talk around Parliament House is that a special trip to Washington for an Oval Office tete-a-tete is looking unlikely.

Maybe just as well. The prime minister intends some polite-but-straight talking after Trump included Australia when he upped tariffs on aluminium and steel imports to 50 per cent.

Albanese will tell Trump it is an act of “economic self-harm by the United States that will increase the cost for consumers in the United States”. Besides not being the act of a friend, Albanese will say “it is an inappropriate action by the Trump administration”.

Sussan Ley is wishing Albanese well while noting the United Kingdom has been able to secure an exemption from the latest American steel tariffs. She says she stands ready to help “to ensure Australia can achieve the same outcome”.

Albanese’s ability to pull off surprises will be enhanced if he scores an exemption. Even without it, that skill was on display earlier in the week when he fronted a news conference in Perth accompanied by his latest Labor senator.

Dorinda Cox announced she was quitting the Greens to sit “as a Labor senator as part of the Albanese government”. The decision was a long time coming, but after “deep and careful reflection”, she reached the conclusion that her “values and priorities are more aligned with Labor than the Greens”.

At face value this is a coup for the prime minister. It reverses the trend from the minor parties and gives Labor an extra seat in the Senate, denying the Coalition and the Greens the ability to block the government without the assistance of some on the cross bench.

Cox comes with considerable political baggage, however. She has faced a number of allegations of staff bullying and has seen a huge turnover of staff in her office. Albanese said these complaints had been appropriately dealt with. A former staffer refuted this, telling the ABC she and other aggrieved colleagues intend to take legal action against the senator.

Cox, a Yamatji-Noongar woman, is well regarded in the Labor caucus and has strong friendships with its Indigenous members, something she did not enjoy with the “Blak Greens” in her former party’s internal Indigenous advisory body. That faction is closely aligned with the other Greens defector, Lidia Thorpe, who, unlike Cox, opposed the Voice.

Greens leader Larissa Waters said she was disappointed but wished Cox well. Waters revealed she was not surprised by the resignation, as Cox had been at loggerheads with others in the Western Australian branch and was not assured of winning preselection again.

Party insiders believe Cox’s 9-3 loss to Senator Mehreen Faruqi for the deputy leadership and her subsequent defeat for another job convinced her that the party didn’t want her.

Waters’ true feelings were revealed in an email she sent to party members, where she said she was sure “many of you will feel this is a betrayal of the Western Australians who voted in 2022 for her to represent Greens values”. She added these were voters “who did not vote for a Labor Party that is approving more coal and gas, locking up kids in custody, logging native forests and failing to act on Truth and Treaty”.

Albanese must have realised that Cox’s previous opposition to the North West Shelf gas processing plant, expressed strongly in the recent election campaign, was inviting controversy and charges of political expediency. Still, he won the backing of Labor’s national executive and its First Nations caucus members before the defection.

There’s no doubt Albanese has taken a risk in welcoming this newcomer to his ranks. Maybe it’s another sign he is prepared to be more adventurous in his second term.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 6, 2025 as "Three quarters of the way with the USA".

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