Labor loses its foreign policy bearings
the albanese government’s support for a ceasefire in the israel-hamas war is evidence of its descent into undergraduate foreign policy. By nick cater.
Any doubt that the Albanese government has lost its bearings was dispelled in the early hours of Wednesday when results came through in a crucial UN vote on the Israel-Hamas war.
Our closest allies, the US and Britain, were among the 33 countries who did not support the demand for a humanitarian ceasefire.
Russia, China, Iran and Australia were among the 153 countries in favour.
The result would hardly have raised a shrug in Jerusalem. Israel knew long before October 7 that Australia was not a friend it could count upon under this government.
However, evidence of Australia's descent into undergraduate foreign policy would have raised more than a few eyebrows for the administrations in Washington and London. Could this be the same Australia that wants them to share their most closely guarded military secret: the technology inside a nuclear submarine?
The AUKUS defence pact is far more than an agreement to share technology. It is an alliance of free nations in the face of tyranny. Labor’s sustained character assassination of Scott Morrison has not made a dent in our 30th prime minister’s great legacy.
This week’s endorsement of the security pact by the US House of Representatives, hailed by the Prime Minister as “extraordinary”, is evidence that Morrison’s achievement is beyond partisan politics and the agreement is here to stay.
"Scott was the progenitor," Boris Johnson acknowledged in Sydney this week. "It was his brainchild. You took it to us, Scott and I thank you, and I congratulate you."
AUKUS is arguably Johnson's most significant legacy, too, with the possible exception of Brexit. And it will doubtless be one of President Joe Biden's most outstanding achievements. Biden may struggle to find the exit door occasionally but knows where the US must stand in the contest between the free world and its enemies.
Australia, by comparison, is led by the flakiest prime minister in foreign affairs since Gough Whitlam. Israel’s justified and necessary war against the terrorist state on its border was a test of Albanese’s conviction. He has failed. He has capitulated to electoral pressure and the shibboleths of plodding progressives who seek to defend the virtue of rapists, kidnappers, torturers and baby killers.
As proceedings at the UK's Covid-19 inquiry have demonstrated, Johnson's prime ministership was far from perfect. Yet, on foreign policy, he was a rock for freedom, an unwavering ally of Israel and Ukraine.
On Wednesday, he delivered the 11th John Howard Lecture, organised by the Menzies Research Centre, in front of a thousand-strong audience. He argued that supporting Ukraine was a sound investment.
”After decades of being pushed around, the world's democracies will finally be sending a signal that we're willing to stand up for our values, for the cause of freedom," he said. "And that signal will be heard wherever an autocrat is meditating an attack on a neighbouring democracy."
The cause of freedom in Ukraine was inextricably linked to the security and safety of Israel, said Johnson.
"Putin is thrilled by the appalling events in Israel and the inevitable distraction from Ukraine," said Johnson. "The Iranian regime rejoices at the atrocities committed by Hamas. Indeed, it's no coincidence that Iran is providing drones for Putin and providing funding and training for Hamas.
“Because what we're up against now, the Western liberal democracies, is a great global continuum of evil. It’s an arm wrestle and we must prevail.”
Johnson didn’t comment on the Albanese government’s blunder at the UN. A ceasefire without disarming Hamas, the release of the remaining hostages and a renunciation of its practice of using innocents as human shields would not be a ceasefire at all.
Yet Johnson brought a Churchillian clarity in describing the global battle between the civilised West and the axis of tyranny that joins China, North Korea, Russia and Iran with its barbarous proxy death cult in Gaza.
He warned of the barbarians within our ranks manifest in the anti-Semitism that is sprouting again in Western capitals.
“Jewish kids, once again, are afraid to take the bus to school … and middle-class intellectuals tear down the posters of Jewish kids being held hostage,” he said.
"We must call that out for what it is: The emergence from beneath the collective floorboards of the ancient spore of anti-Semitism, that lazy, horrible, diversionary tactic of the human race."
Australia under Albanese is bereft of the moral clarity of Johnson or even Biden, who has dared to stare down the pro-Palestinian left and stand firmly behind America's most important Middle East ally.