Malcolm Turnbull is right. Silence won’t help Australia with Trump
For many weeks now, Malcolm Turnbull has been detailing the case for our leaders to wake up and respond to the environment created by Trump 2.0 — or what the former prime minister calls “the new world of disorder”. Having led Australia during the first Trump administration, and having criticised the Gillard government for being overly close to the Obama administration, he speaks from a vantage point of experience that no-one in politics at the moment has.
In an ABC interview three weeks ago, the former PM pithily spelt out the problem with the response of the government and opposition to Trump: “They’re scared that he will impose tariffs, and so in other words they’re doing exactly what a bully wants you to do which is to knuckle under.” And he offered a solution: “We have got to be able to appeal to American self interest but at the end of the day we have to be able to defend ourselves.” That includes taking a hard look at AUKUS, accountability that he thinks will only happen if the crossbench force a minority government to do it.
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“People always say ‘isn’t it a pity there isn’t more bipartisanship’,” he said back in February. “But when you’ve got a bipartisan error, or bipartisan gaslighting, that’s essentially where we are at the moment … we’ve gotta look at that clear eyed, objectively, don’t delude ourselves, don’t worry about offending anybody and just focus on how we defend this country…”
Turnbull has repeatedly referred to bipartisan gaslighting since then, including in his stoush yesterday with Trump and his appearance on 7.30, where he sharpened his rhetoric with a Lathamesque reference to “a conga line of sycophants creeping through the White House”.
What was more remarkable, however, was the reaction of the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson. “You’re … making an argument publicly,” she said. “Is it easier and better for Australia in this acute moment when the tariff decision is being made, if diplomatists are given the maximum opportunity to operate behind closed doors without your intervention?”
Turnbull suggested she was embarrassed to ask that question. If she wasn’t, she should have been. It was effectively a demand that Turnbull cease from urging Australia do what other Western countries are doing, which is focus on the new thinking required by a world with an unstable American government that might ally with our enemies.
Ferguson isn’t alone in this demand for Turnbull to shut up. The Australian’s Cameron Stewart, while endorsing what Turnbull has said, reckons it wrecked whatever slim hopes the Albanese government had of securing a tariff exemption. Unsurprisingly, at Fox News After Dark, Chris Kenny, interviewing Liberal hack Zoe McKenzie, offered the same view — though News Corp’s shitflingers have to walk a fine line, because Turnbull’s ability to secure a tariff exemption is the stick with which they want to beat Albanese, while his fundamental critique of Trump and Australia’s response to it is at odds with the Murdoch line.
So the bipartisan gaslighting extends to the media as well, which wants a conspiracy of silence about Trump and the historic risks he poses to Australia.
Turnbull’s response isn’t merely that standing up to Trump is the only way to protect our interests; it’s that the disorder the US president is inflicting on the world and on allies like Canada demands a response. “This is all unprecedented, but yet, if you look to our political leaders, there’s nothing wrong with AUKUS, everything’s fine. The relationship is fine. Nothing’s changed. Well it has changed.”
Turnbull is acting as a one-man engine to drive a reassessment of Australia’s role in a changed world, not just around his long-standing unhappiness with AUKUS — likely to become the greatest disaster in Australian military history if it’s not stopped — but about how we stand on our own two feet. He’s organised a conference at the end of March to discuss a rethink of Australia’s role in “a future without the protective blanket of a great power” — the sort of work the government itself should be doing.
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Instead the government and opposition are paralysed by fear of Trump, and have let the short-term issue of tariffs on two relatively small export markets get in the way of a clear-eyed view of the bigger issue of Australia’s role in a post-US security environment.
The demand that Turnbull shut up perhaps suggests something else might be at work. “We are now seeing somebody who is utterly unconstrained,” Turnbull observed last night. “And if the advice is to go and suck up to him, well, where does that get you?”
Is it merely political calculation — and the mediocrity of Albanese and Dutton as leaders — that has kept them silent about how the world has changed? Or is it because Australia’s foreign policy and security establishments are so incapable of understanding a world without the United States that they can only advise politicians to keep pretending nothing has changed, and stick with “quiet diplomacy” (AKA cowed silence) as the response? Is our governmental system — the major party politicians, the security and foreign policy bureaucrats, the institutional media — so captured by their long-term role as subordinates of the US military and foreign policy apparatus that the idea of planning for a world devoid of the American security blanket is unthinkable?
Other countries, led by France and Canada, are seeing the need to reassess their global role. The Canadians have been forced to by being targeted by Trump. Will Australia sit on its hands doing nothing until our turn comes and we are forced, startled and blinking, into the new world of disorder? It’s possible to make even worse mistakes than AUKUS. We might be right in the middle of one.
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