Kym Davey

In the second on our Rethinking Foreign Policy series Kym Davey says Labor’s foreign policy platform is out of step with current realities – clinging to US alliance settings while ignoring its own commitment to self-reliance and the opportunities of the Asia-Pacific.

In July the Australian Labor Party will hold its 50th National Conference in Adelaide. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles will be expecting a tame, media friendly and lifeless event. Their objective will be to administer a strong dose of policy futility to Labor’s delegates and supporters.

By contrast, the efforts of delegates will be critical to Australia’s future on an issue that most voters are allowed to ignore – Australia’s foreign policy. Central to those concerns is the absurdity of Labor’s international relations. At Chapter 7, Australia’s Place in a Changing World, three clauses standout in the current 2023 platform. The first describes the United States as Australia’s “enduring partner” and asserts that America is our closest security ally “formalised through the ANZUS Treaty”.

Only fools and the uninformed would consider the US an “enduring partner” in the Trump era. Displaying his malignant narcissism, Trump’s cowardly bombing campaign and his threat to obliterate the entire civilisation of 93 million Iranian people leaves America now accused of waging aggressive war. This is the “supreme international crime” condemned by the judgement of Nazis at Nuremberg in 1946. Those proceedings bequeathed the rules based order that Labor leaders love to cite.

In this age of fickle alliances, Labor continues to emphasise the security of ANZUS. The NZUS component lapsed in 1986 over the issue of non-declared US nuclear armed ships visiting New Zealand ports. It has been reworked as a bilateral defence and security agreement only. But Australia still clings to the 1951 agreement, although it merely requires consultation between the US and Australia in the event of a foreign act of aggression.

As the war in Ukraine and the treatment of NATO and other allies have shown, America no longer sees itself bound by the security commitments it made after 1945. Citing ANZUS as a protective treaty is a distortion promoted to encourage herd think. It’s a fake security blanket for incurious Australians. It should be called out for what it is not and consigned to an exhibit in the National Museum of Australia.

The second commitment in the 2023 ALP National Platform identifies our relationship with China as one “of great importance to Australia, to our region and to the world”. This, of course, is undeniable because our prosperity and the major drivers of our economy depend on China’s status as our largest trading partner. China purchases one-third of all Australian exports, supports some 570,000 Australian jobs and generates bilateral trade worth over $200 billion annually.

Despite its importance, Penny Wong reduces the relationship to a smug slogan, repeated ad nauseam: “We will cooperate with China where we can, disagree when we must, and engage in the national interest.”

If we in Labor see ourselves as realists dealing with the world as it is, we would at least apply the same “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must” principle to all our foreign policy relationships, including the US. We don’t. In 2026 we should. And, as Paul Keating and many eminent Australians have said for years, we know we can forge goodwill in Asia and use diplomacy and statecraft to make our security the region where we live.

The third commitment deserves to be known much more widely by the Australian people. Under the heading, Self-reliant defence and peacemaking, the ALP Platform states, unambiguously:

Labor’s defence policy is founded on the principle of self-reliance. Australia’s armed forces need to be able to defend against credible threats without relying on the combat forces and capabilities of other countries.

That declaration deserves scrutiny in the current climate of muddle and maladministration in Australia’s defence policy. Where, one might ask, does the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear powered submarine project fit within the parameters of armed forces self-reliance? AUKUS thoroughly enmeshes Australia into American military systems via asset procurement, joint training and shared technology platforms. Add to that Pine Gap, the Tindal RAAF base, US Marines in Darwin and the HMAS Stirling naval base. All of this is deep “reliance on the combat forces and capabilities” of another country.

A prominent example of one domestic alternative is Sam Roggeveen’s ‘ _Echidna Strategy_’. It’s a defensive military capability that would utilise technologies to make our maritime approaches inaccessible by deploying advanced underwater sensors, submarines, missiles and cyber defences. The approach proposes a move to a non-aligned foreign policy, working collaboratively in our region to reduce the threat of armed conflict, especially between the US and China. It also involves cultivating closer cultural and security ties with neighbouring countries in the Asia-Pacific region. These are the elements that should underpin urgent foreign policy reform in Australia.

Paradoxically, the failure of the Voice referendum in 2023, again denying justice to First Nations Australians, suggests a reason for our historical reluctance to seriously engage with Asia. Writing about how the Australian nation invented itself after 1788, Dr Peta Stevenson relates the fascinating hidden details of Australia’s Indigenous-Asian history. In The Outsiders Within, she documents the stories we are told and what has been left out of the nation’s official narrative. Her thesis is that “presumed membership of a privileged national community is not self-evidently good”.

Anyone who has travelled extensively or lived in Asia will know how we are still regarded as an island of white privilege walking in the shadow of the United States of America. Stevenson makes a sobering observation about those attitudes, noting that the 21st century “invaders”, the objects of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation racism, are now identified as migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Their demonisation is, she says, entirely logical given the refusal of white Australia to confront its original theft of Aboriginal land. That in turn creates anxiety that we might also become the victim of theft by our neighbours. Hence our deep historical paranoia about invasion from Asia.

Ironically, it is those same neighbours we have turned to now when our economy is under direct strain from the effects of Trump’s war in Iran. We have always been wary of our great near neighbour, the mostly Muslim peoples of Indonesia. Yet it is Indonesia that has moved first to offer fertilisers and urea to support our agricultural sector. And that other great historical nemesis, China, is assisting us in keeping supplies of aviation fuel flowing to our transport sector. Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Brunei and Japan have all given us supply assurances for the refined petroleum products we depend on to sustain modern life. In turn, Australia is offering a secure supply of LPG to Singapore and others. Prime Minister Albanese is now lauding the merits of regional cooperation with Asia.

Surely the scales are beginning to fall from Australian eyes. Diminishing US military advantage, geopolitical overreach and a shift in the moral, social and rational behaviour of the declining American empire are now obvious. It is reasonable to conclude that the rampant militarism of America poses manifest risks to our national security. Any Australian who is not seriously sceptical about the “enduring partnership” with the US is in denial.

It’s time Labor recognised the truth and transformed our foreign policy to reflect the new realities of the world. Our future is in the Asia-Pacific. As the Prime Minister said recently, “we won’t find our future security in the past”.

The 2026 ALP National Conference in Adelaide is the opportunity for the Labor rank and file to demand a fit-for-purpose defence and foreign policy. 

Next in Policy Foreign Rethink is Geoff Raby.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/04/australian-foreign-policy-requires-remaking/

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Mark Beeson

In the latest in our Foreign Policy Rethink series, Mark Beeson takes a look at Australia’s long-standing alignment with the United States and argues it is increasingly out of step with shifting global realities and regional dynamics.

Anxiety about our literal and metaphorical place in the world is seemingly baked into the minds of Australian policymakers. Ever since this country became notionally independent, fretting about ‘Asia’ and our distance from fellow members of the Anglosphere has been the default position of strategic thinkers and foreign policy officials.

Despite Australia being economically dependent on the region to our north and enjoying an enviably benign strategic geography that also fortuitously confers fabulous resource wealth, not much has changed. On the contrary, Australia’s integration into the strategic posture of the United States has only grown over time, in spite of pointless and costly wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only the absence of other countries joining America’s latest folly in Iran seems to have stopped the Albanese government from dutifully enlisting in yet another disastrous coalition of the willing. But given the impulsive, clueless and increasingly unhinged policies of the Trump administration, which are undermining the international order it helped create, even the likes of Richard Marles must surely recognise that America is no longer a reliable ally – if it ever was.

Being a ‘sub-imperial power’ is clearly a role Australian policymakers have embraced in the belief that it has economic as well as strategic benefits. Whatever the merits of that argument may have been, they clearly no longer withstand scrutiny. All of which begs the question of what it takes to change the conventional, seemingly unchallengeable wisdom that prevails in Canberra.

Ironically enough, Trump’s contempt for alliance partners and international institutions may make a rethink possible. Looking ‘weak’ on security may no longer be the sort of electoral liability that caused the Albanese government to wave through Scott Morrison’s woefully ill-conceived AUKUS project. Indeed, as Mark Carney has discovered, standing up to the Trump administration and seeking new international partners may be electorally advantageous, as well as in the much-invoked ‘national interest’.

Australia might develop much closer ties with our neighbours and become a genuine part of the region, rather than a transactionally minded opportunist. Improving links with the middle powers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ought to be the easy part. The real test will be Australia’s relationship with China.

At present, Australia is a prime mover in AUKUS and the QUAD, both of which are driven by the assumption that China’s rise is a strategic threat that needs to be ‘contained’, not that they’re described as such, of course. But given that America has been at war with someone or other for nearly all its history as an independent country, the claim that China is the principal source of regional instability and that the US is the irreplaceable bedrock of peace and security looks increasingly implausible.

Of course, there are justifiable concerns about China – or any other country, for that matter – developing a hegemonic sphere of interest in the Indo-Pacific. But at least the People’s Republic uses the language of multilateral cooperation and a common destiny; ideas that look both appropriate for this historical juncture and strikingly at odds with ‘America first’. More to the point, perhaps, by using and exporting massive quantities of green technology China has done more to address the greatest security problem we have ever faced as a species.

No doubt, such views will induce eye-rolling in Canberra. But recent events remind us that, whatever the logic that underpinned Australia’s version of a grand strategy, it hasn’t worked out too well: it has undermined sovereignty, nullified independence, and was always hostage to whoever happened to be in the White House. Trump embodies the inherent folly of this policy.

If opportunity really is the flipside of crisis, perhaps this perilous historical moment does offer the chance for a reset. As Keynes famously pointed out, if the facts change, it’s best to change your mind, especially when there is absolutely no guarantee that whoever replaces Trump will be any better, or that it will even happen as a result of a democratic process, for that matter.

True, it is difficult to imagine the ultra-cautious Albanese government doing anything radical, especially if the recently released National Defence Strategy is anything to go by: China is the principal threat to security, and military cooperation with the US is the only way of countering it. Spending ever-more money on guns and bombs is still seen as the best way to ‘safeguard Australia’s sovereignty, security and prosperity.’

Really? As the report notes, ‘international cooperation on disarmament, arms control and risk reduction, is in stasis or is being rolled back’. Hardly surprising at a time when Trump intends to expand US defence spending by $US1.5 trillion. Suggesting that China and the US could engage in meaningful arms control negotiations and introduce a de-escalatory dynamic into global security sounds like a good idea, especially if all the savings are diverted to paying for a global green transition.

I have absolutely no expectation that’s going to happen. But in a slightly saner world it’s just the sort of thing a plucky independent middle power with lots of influence might suggest to its greater counterparts. Now that would be an idea for the times.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/04/geography-doesnt-change-but-minds-can/

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Gareth Evans

In the latest of our Foreign Policy Rethink series, Gareth Evans argues that Australia’s foreign policy must give greater weight to being, and being seen as, a good international citizen.

Australian foreign policy is understandably preoccupied right now with protecting and advancing our geopolitical security and economic prosperity. In today’s fragile, volatile and increasingly demented Trumpian world, there is every reason – in the kind of policy rethink to which this Pearls & Irritations series is devoted – to focus on these two traditional core national interests. But I believe there is also the need – and the space – for our foreign policy to devote more time and attention to advancing what I have long argued to be the third pillar of our (and indeed every country’s) national interest – being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen.

To be a good international citizen is, essentially, to be seen to be a decent country – not just wholly inward-looking and self-interested, but a country that others respect, trust, are happy to deal with and want to emulate. One that genuinely cares about poverty, peacekeeping, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation and other problems afflicting people very often in places far from our own shores, and very often having little or no direct or immediate impact on our own security or prosperity. What the great Australian international relations scholar, Hedley Bull, described as “purposes beyond ourselves”.

For those hard-headed cynics who view all this as just boy-scout stuff – optional extras, not the real business of national government – my answer has always been that it is not just a moral imperative to so act. The national interest returns are harder than just warm inner glows. There is a clear “soft power” reputational return. There is a reciprocity benefit: in diplomacy, as in life generally, if I take your problems and interests seriously, you are that much more likely to help me solve and advance mine. And the third return is simply helping get difficult stuff done. On global public goods issues like climate change, where the whole world, including us, ultimately benefits from effective collective action, but where the national costs for many players might seem for a long time to outweigh the benefits, the more states that have a cooperative, collective, good-international-citizenship mindset, the better the chance of success.

Against the benchmarks that matter most, Australia’s overall record as a good international citizen has been patchy at best, lamentable at worst, and presently not what it could and should be.

On overseas aid, we have been the worst-performed of any rich-country donor in terms of the decline in our generosity over the last five decades, with a current official development assistance (ODA) commitment of just 0.19 per cent gross national income (GNI), against the OECD target level of 0.7 per cent. Of course we have budgetary stress, but one can’t help but be wistful about the difference that would be made by the diversion to this quintessential soft power enterprise of just a tiny proportion of the eye-watering hundreds of billions being devoted to the wholly misconceived AUKUS submarine project.

In meeting our responsibilities to refugees and asylum seekers, our record has been at times in the past a very proud one, but in recent years, on both sides of politics since Tampa, little short of shameful. On human rights generally, where what happens at home very much matters abroad – nobody likes a hypocrite – our record remains at best mixed, and is seen as such internationally.

In peacemaking diplomacy, and responding to mass-atrocity crimes, opportunities to play the kind of creative diplomatic role we were able to in ending the Cambodian conflict do not often arise, but we can certainly do better than we have done in recent years in commitment to UN blue-helmet and other peacekeeping operations, where our boots-on-the-ground contributions have fallen to the lowest level for decades.

And as to helping meet the three great existential risks to life on this planet as we know it, our international performance has been underwhelming. With respect to pandemic response, including support for struggling countries in our own region, we can maybe claim a narrow pass. In the case of climate change, barely that. Chris Bowen’s leadership brief for the next COP gives Australia the chance of redeeming our well-earned international reputation as a grudging, minimalist, climate laggard. But managing effective transition to a genuinely low-carbon economy still faces huge obstacles in the absence of across-the-board political and industry buy-in.

On nuclear weapons, arguably the most serious global risk of all in the present environment, Australia has played a useful role in the past, in multiple international forums, in advancing both risk reduction and the ultimate goal of elimination. We can again, but in recent years our contribution has, while energetic, been risk averse. My highest priority here would be to support the struggling but still growing international movement for the universal adoption of No First Use doctrine by all the nuclear-armed states. It should not be a matter of pride for us that when both President Obama and President Biden were attracted to going down this path (or at least to its “sole purpose” functional equivalent), Australia was one of those nervous Asia-Pacific and East European allies who failed to support them. And our current government is still showing no appetite at all for pursuing this brief.

My strong view is that a country with Australia’s general record and reputation as an energetic, creative middle power which has many times in the past played a world-leading role in international diplomacy, should be setting its sights higher. The bottom line is that we have just one planet, we are a global community, and our political leaders should give more weight than too many of them have done to what Abraham Lincoln famously called ‘the better angels of our nature’.

Neither our Prime Minister nor Foreign Minister are given to making big, visionary conceptual statements, but they could do better than they have done so far in this space. Penny Wong says she doesn’t disagree with the concept of good international citizenship, as specifically embraced by the Hawke-Keating and Rudd-Gillard Labor governments in the past, but prefers to use the language of “constructive internationalism”. That phrase, however, implies little more than a commitment to multilateral institutional process, without any real hint as to the ends to which that process should be directed. Anthony Albanese’s own preferred shtick of “progressive patriotism”, while no doubt undeserving of Samuel Johnson’s famous riposte to a more cynical earlier user of the second p-word, clearly conveys no sense of commitment to any particular international causes or values.

My pitch to them both, in conceptualising and articulating their approach to Australian foreign policy, is to play to their perceived, and real, personal strengths as thoroughly decent human beings leading a government which is itself basically decency-driven. Albanese has often spoken of “kindness” as the quintessential virtue, and “looking after each other” as the “Australian way”. It is not a big step from there to say that we hugely value being perceived internationally as a decent country, and that we rank as a core national interest in its own right, ranking alongside physical security and material prosperity, being and being seen to be a good international citizen.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/04/466037-2/

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         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….