It’s a sign of just how dire the Albanese government really is that even my uber-Boomer, rusted-on, elder siblings are scathing of Anthony Albanese. These are people, bear in mind, who still worship Gough Whitlam as a demigod, rather than one of the worst, most incompetent, PMs Australia ever had.
The Australian military is weaker and feebler than when Labor took office. Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles talk big about the future but deliver nothing. Australia’s regional standing has declined sharply. Once we were seen as a powerful country getting stronger; now we’re seen as weak, confused, living off past riches.
Donald Horne called Australia ‘the Lucky Country’, because, he said, it is so rich in resources and people that it manages to rise above the incompetence of its political class. At critical junctions, though, our luck runs out. In the crisis years of the early ’70s, we were saddled with a government of not just legendary hopelessness, but outright venality.
Whitlam so alienated our allies that the US, Britain and Canada cut off intelligence-sharing with Australia. Whitlam toadied to the communist dictator, touring Maoist China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution (some 25 million killed, and three-quarters of China’s cultural heritage destroyed) and recognising Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew dubbed him ‘an arrogant sham’.
Worse, Whitlam breached the Constitution in trying to secretly secure Saudi money from a Pakistani loan shark. Had he succeeded, Australians would still be paying the loans off today. To really ice the cake, Whitlam appointed a literal Marxist as treasurer. In a final act of astonishing bastardry, in his last, desperate election campaign, he secretly begged for electoral funding from Saddam Hussein’s Baath Socialist Party in Iraq.
Has Anthony Albanese topped all that? Not for want of trying.
The Albanese government, led by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, has failed to identify principles or national interest, so policy is incoherent and ineffective. It has alienated our oldest regional friend, Israel, and joined the opposition to the US at the UN.
The government provides no rationale or narrative for its disconnected actions. Everything is spin, frequently designed to appease Greens voters and the Labor Left. As a result of the government’s moral confusion and lack of political leadership, Australia is gripped by an anti-Semitism crisis the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The government is not remotely anti-Semitic. Its failure in leadership has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish.
‘Not remotely anti-Semitic’? Sure about that? If the Labor Left alluded to – the faction of Penny Wong – aren’t anti-Semitic, they sure give a good impression of it. At best, it was just rank cowardice that led to Albanese’s too-long silence after October 7, and his pointed refusal to visit Israel in a show of solidarity. His odious foreign minister did visit Israel… eventually, but even more pointedly refused to tour the October 7 massacre sites, which seems awfully close to the anti-Semitic left’s outright denial of Palestinian atrocities on that day.
To damn him with faint praise, at least it wasn’t on Whitlam’s watch that the left tore Australian social cohesion to shreds over Vietnam. The shocking anti-Semitism crisis is all Albanese’s to own. The best that can be said about the anti-Vietnam protests is that they were solely ideological and didn’t divide Australia along sectarian, religious and ethnic lines. Albanese’s anti-Semitism crisis is doing all three, in a way not even seen in the bitter WWI conscription debate.
On the foreign policy front, aside from its deplorable anti-Israel obsession, Albanese’s government is leaving Australia as critically exposed to a hostile foreign dictatorship almost as badly as Neville Chamberlain did to Britain. At least, though, Chamberlain could claim to have acted from well-meaning incompetence: Albanese’s Labor are blatant Chinese puppets.
The ALP has accepted literal shopping bags from Chinese ‘businessmen’. Its former senators were caught by ASIO leaking to Chinese Communist Party-linked spies. And the Albanese government has done everything it can to undermine the independent Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
ASPI was set up by John Howard to give independent analysis on national security, especially defence policy, to provide contestability of policy. Defence documents are designed to be completely impenetrable to any normal person. Typically the only place you can get proper analysis of the defence budget is at ASPI and among some ASPI alumni.
So Albanese has sicced University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese onto ASPI. Varghese is a notorious pro-China toady, under whose watch UQ student Drew Pavlou was first assaulted by CCP-linked thugs, then persecuted by university authorities for leading anti-China protests. Varghese’s university rakes in massive funding from China, in return hosting pro-China entities on campus.
Big surprise: Varghese wants ASPI under the thumb of the government. Just as China has demanded.
Varghese recommends that ASPI’s funding be extended only for two years and that a fully competitive tender be set up so base funding is renewed every five years, with other organisations invited to bid for that funding. At the same time, funding would be assessed against ASPI meeting priority research guidelines to be set by the public service.
The government presumably believes that with a sword of Damocles hanging constantly over ASPI’s head every five years it will self-censor, cut out critical stuff on the defence budget or any research that might be controversial about China.
Maybe Albanese isn’t worse than Whitlam... maybe he is. But all of that is academic in the face of the stark reality: at the most critical juncture of global affairs since WWII, Australia has one of the worst governments in its entire history.
