Comment

Paul Bongiorno
Prime minister looks away from America

Days before the prime minister departed for the G7 summit in Canada this weekend he delivered a speech drawing a powerful contrast between his government and that of United States President Donald Trump.

It was Anthony Albanese’s first major address since winning a thumping majority in last month’s election. He said the antidote to the alienation of voters Trump so successfully tapped into was proving an elected government can deliver the essential framework and services people expect and demand in a democracy.

Not once was Trump’s name invoked, but the implicit target was unmistakeable, assisted by the fact the prime minister’s office released the key passages ahead of Tuesday’s National Press Club appearance as a pointer for the morning media.

Albanese said we live in “a time of significant global uncertainty”, noting that this reaches beyond economic instability. He said this uncertainty was the “more corrosive proposition” pedalled by populists, particularly on the right, “that politics and government and democratic institutions, including a free media, are incapable of meeting the demands of this moment”.

The prime minister said, “some simply dismiss such sentiment”. Others, he said, without naming them, “cynically seek to harvest it”. This observation was given piquancy by Trump’s creation of a national security emergency in Los Angeles, sending 4000 National Guards and 700 marines to quell an “insurrection” the state’s governor and city’s mayor denied existed.

Trump preferred a show of autocratic military force, rather than letting the Los Angeles Police Department deal with protests triggered by the federal government’s heavy-handed, wholesale rounding up of undocumented immigrants. These migrants have been universally demonised by Trump as hardened criminals, in a way that resonated with millions of his supporters.

Albanese said his responsibility was to disprove this loss of faith in democracy by recognising the frustration caused by “people’s real experience” and “feeling the government isn’t working for them”.

The Los Angeles situation hit home when Australian journalists covering the protests were victims of police rubber bullets. Channel Nine’s Charles Croucher asked Albanese if he had seen the vision of Lauren Tomasi being targeted and injured. Indeed he had – and it was “unacceptable”, he said, so much so our embassy had raised it with the State Department in Washington.

Albanese said “people should respect the role that the media play in our modern society”. This is something Trump ostentatiously refuses to do.

Albanese demurred when asked if he would raise the incidents with the president when he meets him in Canada. He said his discussions are between himself and Trump and he deals with them “diplomatically, appropriately and with respect”.

Complicating Albanese’s ability to achieve a positive response from Trump is the president’s political interest in showing no sympathy to the protesters or the media.

The White House was in no rush to confirm there would be any formal meeting between the two leaders. The opposition believes the revelation on Thursday that the Pentagon has instigated a 30-day review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership signed under the presidency of Joe Biden gives even more urgency to a face-to-face discussion. That review is in the hands of Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, who is sceptical of the deal. The Pentagon is reported as saying the review is to ensure AUKUS is aligned to Trump’s “America First” agenda.

Defence Minister Richard Marles responded calmly to the news, saying it’s natural the administration would want to examine this major undertaking. He noted the United Kingdom also recently reviewed the agreement and reaffirmed its support.

Albanese’s priority with Trump was to be the removal of the tariffs on our exports. He now must remind the president that Australia is a long-term ally that has already handed over half a billion US dollars to boost America’s ship-building capacity.

Another point of departure with the Trump administration emerged midweek when Australia joined the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Norway in imposing travel bans and financial sanctions against two Israeli government ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

A joint statement accuses the ministers of inciting extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. It says they have engaged in rhetoric advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians and the creation of new Israeli settlements, which it describes as “appalling and dangerous”.

Four of the signatories are members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement. The absentee is the United States. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the sanctions as unhelpful to the US-led efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza. Rubio urged a reversal of the sanctions and said Washington stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.

He rejected any notion of equivalence between Israel and Hamas, although none was drawn by the joint statement. It calls for the release of the remaining hostages taken by Hamas, an immediate ceasefire and the unhindered flow of humanitarian aid, including food.

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said the signatories want to see a reconstructed Gaza no longer run by Hamas and a political pathway to a two-state solution. Even here there appears to be a rupture with the Trump administration, with the US ambassador to Israel, a direct Trump appointee, Mike Huckabee, throwing doubt on Washington’s commitment to a two-state solution.

Wong is confident the alliance with the US will survive. She said that “through the history of our alliance, we have had differences of approach, differences of opinion, but we remain aligned in many areas of strategic objective and interests, and that will continue”.

Albanese may get an inkling of what Trump thinks of this in the next couple of days, but the prime minister makes a virtue of not looking to the US president as any sort of template for government. In his Tuesday speech the prime minister said that on May 3 the Australian people voted for Australian values, “for a progressive patriotism where we are proud to do things our own way”.

There is an awareness within Labor that this second term puts a heavier onus on performance, and nowhere is this more obvious than in housing. The election was the first in decades where housing was a major issue and Labor has nominated two big targets. They are: the construction of 1.2 million homes over the next five years, and 100,000 dwellings for first-home buyers needing only a 5 per cent deposit, with Commonwealth backing.

Albanese has given full support to his minister, Clare O’Neil, as she embarks on slashing the “thicket” of red tape that builders and developers say is too hard to cut through.

O’Neil is aware that the project of building more homes involves the three levels of government. Giving her more clout is Albanese’s decision to bring all sections of housing under the one portfolio and situate it within Treasury. For the first time, the housing minister will chair the council of Commonwealth, state and territory planning ministers, the housing ministers council and the business ministers council.

O’Neil believes all levels of government are aware they need to step up to end the housing crisis.

Voters rewarded Albanese’s good intentions and bought his argument that his inability to deliver more in his first term was the fault of the Coalition and the Greens stalling major legislation in the Senate. The electorate is unlikely to be as forgiving next time.

A key Labor insider says history firmly establishes that a huge majority is not an automatic buffer against defeat next time.

The election result also robs Albanese of easy excuses. Besides having an overwhelming majority in the lower house and the most progressive Senate in a long time, where the Greens retain the sole balance of power, the opposition is signalling a more positive approach.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley will use an address at the National Press Club in a couple of weeks to outline what she says is a new style of Liberal leadership: more consultative, inclusive and collaborative. It will be about how the Liberals build a platform that speaks to all Australians, both those who did vote for them and those who did not.

It’s a message she needs to give many in her parliamentary party, as much as anyone else. For one, her shadow minister for energy and emissions reduction, Dan Tehan, seems not to have heard what the voters were saying to the Coalition on May 3.

In an extraordinary performance on RN Breakfast midweek, he refused to commit to the net zero emissions target by 2050 and framed energy policy in terms of rejecting Labor’s transition to renewables. His preference was the much more costly approach of doing nothing.

Former New South Wales Liberal treasurer and Climate Authority chair Matt Kean says the Liberals didn’t lose votes to the right by demanding Australia walk away from its international obligations and commitment to net zero. Rather, they lost votes to advocates for strong action on climate change.

Kean says following the sort of policies Tehan is flagging would see the Liberals heading to electoral oblivion.

Those in the Coalition on Ley’s right are more impressed with the environmental vandalism of Donald Trump, who continues to dismantle many of the major initiatives of the Biden administration.

Albanese and Ley may be on a unity ticket in not looking to Trump for inspiration, but it’s a stand causing the Liberal leader more problems than it is for the prime minister.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 13, 2025 as "Not being what’s-his-name".

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