We live in an increasingly fractured, polarised world where principles and values we once took for granted in Australia are being undermined.
There’s no single person, movement, organisation or country to blame and there’s no single date that can be pinned down as to where it all went wrong. Marxism and its unhinged modern adherents protesting everything from Israel to climate policy and ‘trans’ rights are certainly at the core of it, but it’s only fair to say conservative leaders of the past are as much to blame for failing to counter it effectively much sooner.
Irrespective of blame, today the Albanese Labor government gets away with doing things that would simply not be acceptable in Australia a generation or two ago.
They’ve allowed rising antisemitism to go unchecked, and even encouraged it by supporting terrorism over democracy. They defend the drugging and mutilation of children, and men invading women’s sports and private spaces, in the name of ‘trans’ activism.
They spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars every year funding a net zero policy which achieves nothing but increase our electricity costs and cripple our economic productivity – they even defend the clearing of native rainforests to cover our landscape with their giant wind turbines.
They are deliberately risking our critical military alliance with the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, and leaving Australia more vulnerable to international aggression than we have been at any time since the start of the Second World War. In the meantime they are deliberately cultivating and kowtowing to the power which primarily threatens peace and order in our region, communist China.
Labor may have won the 2025 election, but that hasn’t made the problems Labor created go away. We still have a cost-of-living crisis. We still have a housing crisis. We still have declining economic productivity, record immigration, reduced defence capabilities, increasing debt and huge budget deficits. The Coalition – which ran just about the the worst election campaign in living memory this year – gives no Australian any hope of a strong alternative government to oppose Labor’s incompetent excesses.
A generation or two ago, certain non-partisan principles were taken for granted: Australia is a democratic Western nation which supported other democracies like the US and Israel. Australia opposed tyranny, terrorism and authoritarian regimes because they violently denied self-determination and basic human rights. Australia supported those rights: voting; freedom of speech and religion; privacy and property rights.
How certain of these principles are you today?
Bringing this to a head in recent days is the Albanese Labor government’s effective ghosting of our major military ally while the Prime Minister flies off to China for six whole days to be wined and dined by our most potent military adversary.
For decades, Australia’s defence has primarily been funded by American taxpayers. America’s nuclear deterrence has prevented global war between major powers, America supplies us with our military platforms and our advanced weapons, and under AUKUS America will hand over to Australia the most closely-guarded military technology on the planet: nuclear propulsion.
Yet our current Labor government is publicly appearing less than grateful for this generous support from the ‘arsenal of democracy’, and is to all appearances sucking up to China – by far and away our largest trading partner, but also a country which routinely commits acts of aggression against Australia as if it’s entitled to do so and is not hiding its intentions to militarily and economically dominate our region.
America wants the countries it has protected to step up and do some of the heavy lifting by increasing their defence spending. Nearly all of them have agreed to do so; Australia under Labor is one of the very few gambling that it won’t have to. Labor is gambling with our national security.
The mistake Labor is making is purely political. It’s not principled. Labor – with its extreme left faction dominating the party – hates everything American and especially despises the current US president and his unique brand of politics. Labor fails to appreciate the relationship between our two countries will endure beyond the current occupants of the Lodge and the White House.
It’s impossible to imagine Bob Hawke – Labor’s most successful and longest-serving Prime Minister – supporting this profound mistake. Hawke was a noted champion of the US alliance despite the fact the very conservative Reagan and Bush (senior) administrations were in the White House, and a major critic of communist China (especially after the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989). Hawke understood principles. Even Paul Keating – a vocal admirer of China – knew enough not to jeopardise our relationship with America.
Albanese obviously didn’t get the memo, and now our relations with the United States are declining when we can least afford it. President Trump has demonstrated he is prepared to act decisively – even punitively – to prompt allies to start pulling their weight, and if Albanese doesn’t wake up he may find us way down the list of America’s priorities when it comes to defence and trade. We’re already facing increased American tariffs on steel, aluminium and pharmaceuticals. AUKUS is also under review by the Trump administration. This is not in our best interests.
Australia needs a statement of binding national diplomatic principles to ensure transitory political partisanship does not risk important international relationships that must endure beyond every three-year Parliamentary term.
At a minimum, these principles should include:
- aligning our national interests with those of countries with similar systems and values: secular representative democracy, the rule of law, international peace and order, protecting and promoting fundamental human rights and freedoms;
- opposing authoritarianism and supporting democratic movements;
- opposing and condemning terrorism both domestically and abroad;
- opposing communism, Marxism or any similar movement under the ‘socialist’ banner as anti-democratic; and
- having a defence force capable of deterring credible threats and aggression, able to deploy in support of allies and able to defend Australia independently.
This statement needs to say who we are and what Australia stands for on the international stage. It needs to be binding on every government we get, every Prime Minister, every diplomat from the Foreign Minister down.
