Editorial
For shills and losers

Donald Trump creates opportunities. Not in the conventional sense of genuine policymaking but through sheer chaos and destruction. His shameless, ricocheting presidency is likely the best opportunity Australia has to get out of the shameful folly of AUKUS. As Paul Keating noted last week: “The decision by the United States to initiate a review of the AUKUS agreement might very well be the moment Washington saves Australia from itself.”

Anyone who cares about Australia’s security knows that AUKUS is a farce. It is a deal done to pay for someone else’s submarines. For Scott Morrison, it represented a chance to line up lobbying work after politics. For Anthony Albanese it was an opportunity to be photographed alongside real world leaders. It’s a pact for shills and losers. It is the geopolitical equivalent of a kid giving his lunch money to a bully so he can sit near his tormentor at the back of the bus. The kid doesn’t realise he’s still a middle power and now he doesn’t have his lunch money.

Labor was tied to the deal by fear and habit. The party is terrified of looking weak on security, even in the face of a policy so stupid and counterproductive as to make the country demonstrably less safe.

Instead of buying defence hardware that could be used to defend Australia, the Defence budget is being spent on nuclear-powered submarines we don’t know how to operate and which will almost certainly never arrive. If they do arrive, whatever small technological advances they promise will no longer be relevant. They will be radioactive white elephants, lumbering in seas we have no reason to be attacking.

Meanwhile, thousands of American troops are on deployment in Darwin. They spend their days painting little targets on the country. In the afternoons, they make time to undermine our sovereignty. Sometimes they drink.

Keating again: “Yesterday’s statement by Defence Minister Richard Marles that Australia’s geography and continent would be crucial to any United States prosecution of a war against China will go down as a dark moment in Australia’s history.

“A moment when an Australian Labor government intellectually ceded Australia to the United States as a platform for the US and by implication, Australia, for military engagement against the Chinese state in response to a threat China is alleged to be making.

“And ceding the continent to the United States devoid of an electoral authority – a month after an election where the government had the opportunity – but declined to make explicit, its strategic intentions and policies.”

All this is an opportunity for Albanese to actually govern in Australia’s interests, to tear up a pact that should never have been signed. Trump’s indifference is for once an asset. Albanese’s defining legacy could be resetting Australia’s relationship with Asia and our place in the world. He just has to ask for his lunch money back.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "For shills and losers".

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