Ambiguous Albanese
The Labor leader needs to make up his mind over where he stands on China. By Nick Cater.
The Northcote RSL sits in the seat of Cooper in inner-city Melbourne, currently the scene of an election battle between Labor and the Greens. The club contains a plaque honouring the sacrifice of Able Seaman Billy Williams, a working-class hero if ever there was one.
Williams caught a train from Spencer Street station shortly after the declaration of World War I to join a battalion of 500 sailors aboard HMAS Berrima, about to depart from Sydney.
On September 19, 1914, Williams was assigned to an advance party that landed on the German New Hebrides, now part of Papua New Guinea, to seize control of a radio station at Bita Paka on the outskirts of Rabaul. He is reputed to be the first Australian to die in his country’s uniform in WWI.
The shot that ripped through his body was fired just 1500km from the coast of Queensland and barely 300km north of Solomon Islands, which the Germans also occupied and where the Chinese Communist government now is planning to station forces.
The first front on which Australian units fought in WWI was not Gallipoli but what was then known as the Bismarck Archipelago, an extensive network of islands stretching from PNG to Samoa. The mission was to dislodge the German toehold in the Pacific.
The swift and successful campaign in the Pacific by Australians and New Zealanders is a reminder that the imperial ambition of rising nations is seldom limited to the territory immediately beyond their borders. It explains why that conflict and the one that broke out 25 years later were properly called world wars. We pray that there will never be a third one, but the possibility can never be dismissed.
The lesson of German expansion in the Pacific speaks so loudly to our times that it need not be amplified. Then, as now, views were mixed. Germany’s annexation of the New Hebrides in 1884 alarmed many. The Queensland and Victorian governments lodged protests in Britain asking the British navy to intervene. The Admiralty declined.
Others were more sanguine about German intentions. William Bede Dalley, the acting premier of NSW, said Germany had “an undoubted right … to occupy, for the purposes of civilisation, an unclaimed and unoccupied territory”.
Dalley’s statement provoked a strong rebuke from a retired brigadier-general in a letter to The Daily Telegraph in January, 1885: “Germany is not aligned with Britain, but, on the contrary, she is disposed to be an enemy. In the event of war breaking out between Britain and Germany, is it likely that the German colonies in the Pacific would hesitate to attack colonial traders and even Newcastle and other easily attackable ports?”
The reassuring picture of a peaceful continent situated in untroubled waters in a tranquil corner of the world is not, and has never been, an accurate reflection of Australia’s strategic fortune. Our security and prosperity rest on dependable and peaceful order in the Pacific. It requires nations to respect the sovereignty of others, abide by international rules and resist the temptation to establish hegemony by force.
Indeed, modern Australia was founded to fulfil that purpose, as historian Margaret Cameron-Ash shows in her recent book, Beating France to Botany Bay: The Race To Found Australia. She establishes beyond doubt that the need for a penal colony was only a secondary reason for establishing a colony at Port Jackson. The main reason was to frustrate French ambition to command the Pacific and monopolise its trade.
The stable world order we have enjoyed since 1945 cost countless millions of lives, including the deaths of more than 100,000 Australians in two world wars. The price of its maintenance is eternal vigilance.
It would be crass to politicise the lessons of history on Anzac Day of all days. Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the expansionist ambitions of its Chinese ally in the Pacific elevate the importance of defence and foreign policy in this election. Indeed, it is hard to recall any election since World War II when the defence of freedom has been so important.
The duty of Australian voters is to elect a government with the resolve to secure our borders and protect the independence of our neighbours. Anthony Albanese’s greatest challenge in the next four weeks is to demonstrate that Labor is up to the task.
His first step should be to denounce the defence policies of the Greens and its ally, the Teal Party. He should give a cast-iron guarantee that Labor will never enter a governing arrangement with Adam Bandt so long as his party is wedded to a policy of appeasement and the ruination of our defence forces.
The problem with wars, according to the Greens, is that they “distract from the fight against the climate crisis”. This is not a tweet from a daft 20-year-old intern, but part of the Greens’ formal policy statement on defence posted on its website.
“By refocusing on peace, the billions of dollars that are being thrown at weapons manufacturers with little scrutiny can be redirected towards the services our community needs, and prepare us to respond to climate disasters,” the document says.
Albanese’s second step must be to settle the confusion about Labor’s own policy after the unfortunate comments by his deputy, Richard Marles, reported by Sharri Markson in The Australian last week.
Marles’s defence of China’s right to turn Solomon Islands into a vassal state should rule him out of contention for the defence portfolio he covets in an Albanese government. Indeed, unless he repudiates the speech he gave to Chinese students in Beijing, amplified in a monograph published last August, Marles would be an unfortunate appointment to any senior cabinet role.
On the issue of China, as on almost everything else that matters, Albanese must make up his mind where he stands.
The days when Australian leaders could temper support for trade with China with formulaic statements of rebuke for China’s human rights record are over. Now that China is vying to take control of the Pacific, the luxury of ambiguity is gone.