Australia’s incumbent Labor Party won a resounding election victory on Saturday. Some commentators have portrayed its victory as part of a global backlash against Donald Trump, comparing it to the recent poll success for Canada’s centre-left Liberal Party led by Mark Carney.
There is an element of truth in this. Australians’ wholesale rejection of the right-wing opposition, confusingly also named the Liberal Party, partly reflected distaste at senior Liberals’ efforts to ape some of Trump’s language and style. Anthony Albanese, the first Australian prime minister to be re-elected since 2004, hinted at that in his victory speech when he said: ‘we do not need to seek our inspiration overseas.’
But the explanation has its limits. Unlike Canada, which has been a major target for Trump’s ire and bullying tactics, Australia is still seen in favourable terms in the White House. Trump himself praised his ‘very good relationship’ with Albanese.
And also unlike in Canada, foreign policy was not a major issue in the Australian contest, which was dominated by domestic issues such as the cost of living, healthcare and productivity. Australians decided that Albanese could deliver on these challenges better than opposition leader Peter Dutton, who lost his seat in a sign of the swing against the Liberals.
Relations with Trump
Although Australians voted for stability at home, their government faces difficult choices abroad. It must try to balance its deep economic relationship with China against growing concerns about Beijing’s assertive regional actions. It must also try to maintain its critical security alliance with the US while navigating Trump’s unilateralism and his unpopularity in Australia.
Despite his predilection for targeting his allies, Trump seemed relatively well disposed to Australia in his first term and the first few months of his second term, in large part because the US usually runs a trade surplus with its key Pacific ally.
But most Australians do not like Trump.
Their level of trust in the US has fallen to the lowest level for two decades, according to a poll by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think-tank, with only just over a third of respondents having any faith that the US will act responsibly in the world. Nearly 60 percent of Australians believe that Trump’s re-election is bad for Australia and two-thirds believe it is bad for the world, according to a poll by the Australia Institute, another think-tank.
Beyond generating public distaste, Trump is also destabilizing the open and predictable global order on which Australia has depended for its economic success.
The Albanese government, like other US allies in Asia and Europe, will have to find ways to boost its own sovereign capabilities and resist the Trump administration’s moves to remake the global economic order, even as it tries to keep Trump on side.
AUKUS
There is particular concern in Canberra about the prospects for AUKUS, Australia’s trilateral security partnership with the US and the UK. Through AUKUS, over the next 20 years, Australia is acquiring three nuclear-powered submarines from the US while jointly developing a new class of nuclear-powered submarine, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defence, has backed the partnership, which is the centrepiece of Australia’s long-term military-industrial strategy. But AUKUS has previously been criticized by some in the Trump administration for stretching the US’s military industrial capabilities when Washington is already unable to expand its navy quickly enough to keep pace with Beijing.
Like other US allies facing a similar dilemma, Australia will need to mimic some of Trump’s own transactional approach when it deals with Washington, highlighting the mutual benefits of AUKUS, both for industrial capacity and integrated deterrence against China in the Indo-Pacific.
Dealing with China
The Albanese government has handled China, its largest export market, with necessary care.
It has reopened channels of dialogue with Beijing and convinced the Chinese leadership to remove many of the trade embargoes that Beijing placed on Australia during a period of strained relations with the previous Australian administration.
This mending of relations has occurred even while the Albanese government has continued to resist the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in its domestic affairs and called out aggressive and dangerous Chinese military activity in the wider region.
But the bilateral relationship remains fragile, partly because of Beijing’s propensity to use economic coercion against those who test its expanding range of red-line issues.
Canberra will have to continue expanding other partnerships as a hedge against an uncertain US and an ever more powerful China.
Led by foreign minister Penny Wong, the Labor government has stepped up its neighbourhood diplomacy in the Pacific islands, Southeast Asia and India. Three more years of stable government should help Canberra to build on and start to reap the diplomatic and economic dividends of this approach.
The renewed wariness about the US in much of Asia presents an opportunity for Australia to highlight its own distinct approach, based on listening, fairness and collaboration, and help shed the enduring perception that it is Washington’s ‘deputy sheriff’.
Australia can and should also help to accelerate coordination on security, economic and other global issues with other US allies, who share concerns about China and the Trump administration. The partnership between the ‘Asia-Pacific 4’ – Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – and NATO is one key forum for discussions about defence.
EU-CPTPP coordination
Australia and other US allies in Asia should also expand their cooperation with Europe in defence of global trade, using the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) as a platform.
This trans-pacific trade bloc, which the UK joined last year, shares the European Union’s ambitions for free and open trade. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, has already discussed the possibility of EU-CPTPP coordination with the prime ministers of Singapore and New Zealand.
As the chair of the CPTPP this year and a large, globally integrated economy, Australia can lead on this coordination. It should push for meaningful talks and outcomes between the CPTPP and the EU to support a trading system that is under intense pressure.
Getting the balance and the trade-offs right in these complicated and often conflicting relationships will require patient, subtle diplomacy, ambition and risk-taking. It will be incredibly hard. But that is what is required of nations if they are to prosper in this increasingly fragmenting world.
Ben Bland, Director, Asia-Pacific Programme.