AUSTRALIA WOW: A STEADY PEOPLE IN UNPREDICTABLE TIMES
Political Scientist John Warhurst talks the U.S.'s effect on the Australian election
In Australia, the government has just presented its proposed budget to the Parliament on national television (seen above, the House floor, a beautiful chamber). It’s a very big deal, much like our State of the Union, but delivered not by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese but his treasurer Jim Chalmers. I actually think it’s a lot less of a circus than our State of the Union, too, but it’s been a minute since I’ve watched one. Ask me tomorrow.
The budget comes at a really interesting moment for the government. By law, the Prime Minister has to call for an election sometime in the next few weeks. Most thought he was going to do so long before now, which would have meant there was no need to release a budget. But after a terrible cyclone hit the east coast of Australia a few weeks ago, “Albo,” as he is called, announced that he’s going to go pretty much full term, which would mean the campaigning will start in a week or two, with an election on or just before May 17th.
John Warhurst is a political scientist in Australia, and Professor Emeritus at Australian National University in the nation’s capitol. John is well known within Australian as a commentator and as a strong advocate for the Republican Movement, which would see the nation become fully independent of the United Kingdom.
I spoke to John about the upcoming election just after the President and Vice President of the United States attempted to publicly shame and embarrass Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Our conversation ended up being almost entirely about the effect of the U.S. situation on the Australian election. I think he offers a really interesting window into what it’s like being out in the rest of the world right now, particularly in a country that considers itself an ally, and whose people often think of Americans as friends.
A few points of explanation for non-Australian readers: Upon winning office in 2022, Albanese promised that he would bring forward a referendum that would give aboriginal Australians an ongoing voice in government legislation and policy. Known as the Voice, this referendum had been requested some years ago by a national gathering of indigenous leaders but dismissed until now by the then-Liberal National Coalition government. The national vote was held in 2023 after a nationwide campaign, and ended up a shocking failure, with 60% of Australians’ rejecting it.
Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton, a former cop who has spent 20 years in Parliament playing the Hard Man in things like immigration, asylum seeking, and indigenous rights, led the fight against the Voice, and used it to reestablish his party after they were decimated in the last election. In the last year he has worked to build on that momentum, and has made a number of moves, like culling the public service or calling the government anti-Semitic, that feel drawn directly from Donald Trump’s playbook.
Albanese has only a slight majority in the House of Reps. If he were to lose even a few seats in the election, he would likely have to reach out to independents to form government. Though they are not a party of their own, many of these independents are referred to collectively as “Teals”. They are often social progressives in favor of strong climate change action who are either former members of the conservative LNP party or took seats previously held by the LNP. The LNP’s color is blue. Blue+Green (for climate change)=Teal.
Also, AUKUS is a recent-ish treaty between the U.S., the U.K., and Australia that saw Australia walk away from a contract with the French to build new submarines in favor of one with the U.S. and U.K. to buy nuclear submarines, a first for Australia (which has no nuclear power plants). But the subs won’t be ready for 15 years, and many in Australia question the need for them.
Hi John! Let’s start with some basics. What’s the state of Australian politics right now?
I would say 2024 was a year in which there was as steady drift away from the government towards the opposition, away from Albanese towards Dutton. At the beginning of 2024 the likelihood was minority government—Albanese has had a small majority anyway, and the conventional wisdom in Australia is that in the re-election of a first term government usually there’s a slight swing away from the government.
So yes, people started to think about a minority Labor government. That was not too shocking in a way, in that people thought that was a reasonable option. But never did anyone think that it would go beyond that. But by Christmas time when you were there, people started to talk about perhaps it’s going to be a minority Dutton government. And that was a huge shock in itself, because the numbers in Parliament meant that it was always going to be very difficult for Dutton to win enough seats to form a minority government. Most of the independents are not inclined to support Dutton, so a minority government for Dutton means he would have to do pretty well.
Then early this year people started to whisper the unthinkable, that perhaps even a majority Dutton government could come around. I think in the couple of months since you hear that less and less. Albanese has stabilized a little bit in the last few weeks and Dutton seems to have run out of steam. But most of the pundits say it’s at least 50/50.
I’ve been surprised to see Dutton rising to the point where he could actually become prime minister, given his history.
It was the common view three years ago that he was fortunate to be the last man standing after the big defeat [of 2022] and to have been thrust into the leadership, and that he was almost unelectable. That was the word that was basically used. But the Voice Referendum in October 2023 was a major pivot in Australian politics. It took the wind out of Albanese’s sails and emboldened Dutton.
To some extent he has been running with some of the themes that Trump and other right wing politicians have picked up around the world. In that sense I think he’s riding the same wave. But he is smart. He’s also very disciplined. Dutton’s quite careful about modulating his language, even when he’s announcing policies which have a sort of Trumpian flavor to them.
Dutton’s slogan is Getting Australia Back on Track, and that had a little bit of a whiff of Make Australia Great Again, but not so much. But people are talking about that now, and saying He’s talking about cutting the public service, he’s got a new shadow minister for government efficiency, though he denies that has anything to do with DOGE and Musk.
Musk is particularly unpopular in Australia. There’s a lot of talk in Australia, as I imagine there is in America, about stickers you can put on your Tesla to say, I bought this before the American election. A lot of people are quite seriously saying Look, I couldn’t buy an Tesla, which is a very popular electric vehicle in Australia, I just couldn’t buy one now.
Dutton has also said he won’t stand in front of the indigenous flags, and he’s attacked aspects of diversity and inclusion. He keeps denying that has anything to do with Trump, but he has to be very careful.
Anytime the government wants to put a Dutton policy down, it makes the link with Trump. That’s how Trump has entered the Australian language, as something dangerous, something you don’t want. And Dutton is now in a mode where he’s steering away from those sorts of comparison, where possibly six months ago he might have felt some association wasn’t a bad thing. During his 1 or 2 visits to the United States, [former LNP prime minister Scott Morrison] was happy to be on the same platform as Donald Trump. I think Dutton at the moment would “run a country mile” as we say in Australia against too close an association. Australians were always more supportive of Harris than they were of Trump. But very few people in Australia would have predicted the carnage that has followed the Trump election.
There are some people in Australia of course who welcome Trump and are happy with some of his policies, or at least elements of them. The thing about cutting the public service, that’s never been a killer to a candidate’s chances in Australia, there’s an audience out there in the Australian electorate who are not averse to reining in the public service to some extent, particularly if it’s associated with Canberra. But the way it’s being done [in the States] is something that Dutton certainly wouldn’t want to be associated with.
And again, the general limits on immigration which are playing out in many countries around the world, there are some Australians that are not averse to that. But they are averse to callousness and inhumanity in the implementation of policies. If Dutton shows himself to be inhumane in the Trump sense, that will certainly be a negative for him.
So in one sense it’s an election as usual. But hanging in the background there is what in the hell’s going to happen over the next 6-8 weeks in the world.
How has Albanese been dealing with Trump so far?
Albanese’s line at the moment, and it doesn’t satisfy everyone, is I will not give a running commentary on the U.S. president. Now at times he’s got to go beyond that because people are saying Look, some of this is so unthinakable. You have to be willing to say you disagree.
On Ukraine, for example, Albanese won’t mention Trump’s name, but he will say, We stand firmly with Ukraine, full stop. That’s about all you get out of Albanese at the moment—although he has gone further and said we will consider and be open to being members of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, which is quite a step for an Australian prime minster. We’re certainly averse to doing too much of that.
You’re starting to get some discussion about how far do you go to mollify this Rampaging Bull in a China Shop-type of president. Australians see ourselves having a lot in common with Canada, so we’re looking at Trudeau and seeing he seems to be standing up more than our own prime minister. There are those who are saying Albanese should be more on the front foot. But I think Albo would like nothing more than to get some sort of small favor from the Trump administration in terms of tariffs which he can then take to the election.
It’s cringeworthy, really, to watch Albanese and I would say many other world leaders trying to think through How do you deal with this individual? Do you try and cuddle up to him, to flatter him?
Dutton’s favorite attack on Albanese as a person is to say that he’s weak. Weak weak weak, you hear that to do with anything, weak on China, weak on security, weak on you name it. Albanese certainly has to avoid being seen to be weak on Trump, but that’s a complicated situation. What exactly does that mean? How do you go about that?
Our ambassador in the United States Kevin Rudd is also under attack from the opposition. There are suggestions he’d be replaced if Dutton happens to win the election. So there are all kinds of different angles on [the US] in Australia at that moment.
The comments about Rudd being replaced have to do with things Rudd tweeted after Trump lost to Biden, right?
Yes and maybe even during the first Trump administration before he became ambassador. Many people have said things about Trump at some stage which are worse that Rudd has said, but they were fairly strong, along the lines of “He’s an idiot” or something like that. And Rudd of course like others has been trying to walk those back. I think Dutton’s current position is that he’ll see what sort of a job Rudd does over the next three months. He’s not actually come out and said he’ll definitely recall him. But it’s a possibility, and it’s a bit of a distraction.
How do you plan to interact with a country in the U.S.’s current governance arrangements. Who do you contact? What ploy do you use? Do you stand up a little bit? Do you try to build a bridge? Or do you just try to keep out of the way? Out of sight out of mind mgith be the safest place to be in the moment.
Sir Keir Starmer coming along with an invitation for a visit with King Charles in his pocket, that seems to me strange behavior. Or Macron doing a good imitation of being all pally. As a small to middling-sized country Australia is looking for little avenues into the administration, and they’re beyond the normal diplomatic relations in Washington. You’re looking for prominent Australians or friends at court or people who have some sort of influence. Even Greg Norman the golfer has been called upon. It’s cringeworthy, really. And no one’s really confident that anyone has any influence on such an unpredictable individual. I hope Americans wouldn’t mind me describing Donald Trump in that way; unpredictable would seem to be a very kind description.
It certainly is.
In the context of the Australian election, people ask the question, would Albanese or Dutton be best placed to deal with the United States of America? And some think that Dutton might have some sort of ideological advantage, because he’s on the conservative side. Some people think that Dutton is sort of stronger in the macho sense of the word.
But would that help? Would that work? I think we’re all a bit confused at the moment. It’s not clear if there’s any advantage one way or another for either side of Australian politics.
This time around, the Trump administration seems to be insisting that whatever its policies are, other countries have do the same or get screwed. Which is astonishing.
It’s absolutely astonishing. I don’t think you can get away from talking about Trump’s impact on the rest of the world. Direct, indirect. A license to conduct public discourse in the way that he does in terms of belittling other people. The great disruption of settled policies—I think that’s somehow the threatening aspect of this. Even in our neighbor New Zealand at the moment, which at the end 2023 elected a conservative government, the very underpinnings of the Waitangi Treaty between the Maori people and the white colonizers is almost up for grabs.
You look at Germany, and you look at what appeared to be the case in Canada, with Trudeau on the way out, you look at New Zealand…the exception is the United Kingdom, but countries that Australia has looked to, and see itself as part of, a circle of friends or a community, seem to be moving in that direction.
Trump is almost the latest and most horrific manifestation of something which was happening anyway in a number of other environments.
Do you think Trump’s election makes AUKUS a more frightening thing for Australia? American subs in Australian waters, American troops on the ground?
Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden, and Rishi Sunak talk AUKUS
AUKUS has been a subject of a lot of contention every since [LNP prime minister Scott] Morrison broke the submarine contract with the French and the way he treated the French. Then Albanese comes along and more or less accepts it with 24 hours of his election. That offended many of his supporters.
There’s a political aspect to it, those who feel that being locked into this sort of Anglo-American alliance is just the wrong direction to be going. And then there’s the element, even among suporters, of Will it ever be delivered? Is it a good deal for Australia? We’re now talking about policies where everyone will be dead by the time the submarines arrive. That’s a hard policy area to deal with, that long wait time that you wouldn’t put up with in any other area of policy.
But it has been solidly bipartisan, the deputy prime minister/defense minster, Richard Marles, has been a staunch supporter of AUKUS, and is derided by [former Labor prime minister] Paul Keating, who also derides [foreign minister] Penny Wong partly over the commitment to AUKUS. And there are a lot of respectable people, progressive and conservative, who doubt whether it will ever happen. They really doubt whether the production in Britain and United States will go smoothly enough and quickly enough to deliver these supposed Virginia class nuclear submarines at any time. And there’s a whole raft of academics who argue that America will just put its own national interest first. If there are not enough submarines being produced to meet America’s needs, we’ll become surplus to requirements, and they will never arrive.
And then are they going to be any bloody good, these submarines? And are there enough of them anyway in terms of the China threat, which is the unspoken threat behind it all. What will a dozen or so nuclear submarines do for Australia?
At the same time, the nuclear aspect of these submarines has certainly given Dutton an avenue to talk respectably about nuclear power, and although you can say they’re not the same thing, once you’ve accepted nuclear submarines, particularly if they’re going to be docked in Australian ports and owned or run by the Australian Navy, then the arguments about the safety of nuclear becomes a bit harder to make.
It all plays into the themes like the American alliance, the reliance on great, powerful friends. One of the things that Paul Keating is concerned about is turning away from Asia and the Indo-Pacific and back toward the old Anglo sphere. In the last few days, we’ve had the U.S. defense secretary designate, saying Australia has to up its spending on defense from the current just over 2% to 3% of GDP.
Trump has just added to all of this. He would appear to be an America First sort of guy, and even more than other presidents there’s a fear that he would tear up an agreement as soon as he would have breakfast.
One thing we haven’t talked about yet is the question of Musk’s possible influence on the Australian election. We’re in the process, which again is bipartisan, of trying to prevent under-16 children from having access to much of the internet. Well Musk in particular doesn’t like that. And looking at the way that he interefered in the German election on behalf of the right wing party, his support for Farage in British politics, and so on.
This is not talked about a lot, but personally I wonder if there won’t be some intervention over the next 2 months which will have an impact on the outcome of the Australian election. That’s almost unthinkable. That hasn’t happened in the past. The electoral spheres of countries have been quite separate largely, as far as Australia has concerned. But there’s an unpredictability…. I keep coming back to that word.
I’ve been trying to explain to friends of mine the election process in Australia, that it has to be announced, the campaign is a very short period of time, and when it’s over there’s immediately a new government. That’s all so different than our system.
It certainly is a bit strange, but it’s one that we’ve gotten used to. As you know, we have only three year terms of Parliament rather than your four for the presidency, so it’s a relatively short time anyway. But the only rule is that there’s an upper time limit, the three years, beyond which the government cannot go. It’s been some time since we’ve had a parliament and a government go the whole three years. The prime minister and the government always have up their sleeve so to speak the option of calling an election as a way of asserting their superiority over the opposition or sometimes to deal with some sort of purported crisis, an economic crisis or a political crisis. There was a possibility that the election could have been as long ago as last September, so for the last six months it’s been a high state of alert. One of the favorite games here in Canberra is guessing when is the election going to be called.
And you only have basically a 30-day campaign period, at a minimum. Sometimes it’s as long as 8 weeks. That’s the other option that Albanese has, he can call the election early but still have it 8 weeks in the future. But everyone is assuming that when this election is called it will be a standard 30 to 35 day campaign, depending on the day it’s called, because we always have the election on a Saturday. It could be as late as May the 17th. That’s the last Saturday that Albanese can legally have the election. Three years since his election, basically.
I must say, the idea of such a tight window for an official election process sounds incredibly attractive compared to our year or more- long never-ending process.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton
Yeah that’s not the case for us. There is talk that we have been in a quiet or an informal campaign for months, particularly since the beginning of January, when both of them but Albanese in particular started to make some policy announcements and promises. So for the last 6 to 8 weeks we’ve been in “election mode” as they say.
But there are rules about things that can only be done during the formal election period. They might sound like small things, but for instance you can’t put up street signs until the formal election period is called. The members of Parliament can’t use their parliamentary staff on election matters, so they can’t just drop everything in Canberra and go back to their electorates. That’s also ruled out in the election period.
Also the government can keep making decisions during this quasi-election period. But the moment they call the election, we enter something called the “caretaker mode” and that’s effectively when there is no government except for emergencies or business as usual-type things.
So the government at the moment is still making announcements for important decisions to key government bodies, for instance, spending announcements. But once you get to the formal election period there’s sort of an equality between the government and the opposition. They can both make promises, but the government can’t just keep governing.
When I was in Australia in December, there were a number of times I was with people I’d assume to be progressive, and the Voice or indigenous people would come up. Their reactions and sometime their outright hostility was really unexpected.
Has it been your experience that the Voice has created new gaps or conflicts over indigenous rights?
Australians march in support of the Voice referendum
I think so, at several levels. The Voice continues to echo as an event and for what it meant. There’s been a knock-on effect in the efforts of state governments in the area of truth telling, state level Voices for indigenous people, Welcome to Country countries. And Dutton, whose record is abysmal in this area—he absented himself from the Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008— has certainly sparked that. There’s been several state conservative premiers, for instance, or leaders of the opposition who are now saying I won’t stand in front of an indigenous flag either.
So at one level that has had a knock-on effect. It’s emboldened opposition parties, and it’s made government parties more timid. That is, where Labor is still in government, they’ve become more timid. Albanese himself has walked away from the other aspects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart which were to do with treaty and truth telling, and not the Voice, which was only one part of the whole package. And there’s no sign now that that that will have any life.
And we’re seeing evidence of it playing out in the community. I was reading some shocking things that are happening, indigenous kids in schools being mocked by other students, who say We won’t let you speak because we’ve decided you don’t have a voice in Australia. That’s a terrible level of added discrimination and hatred, really, that we’re seeing.
It’s also, I think, a license to people to be more open in their prejudices. To know that you defeated the Voice 60% to 40% gives I think some people comfort to keep saying Well we’re in the majority here and we’ll say what we bloody well like. And there’s an element, which I know is going on in the United States, about a culture war over alleged woke policies. Nobody here has put it in the terms that Trump and his team are putting it, but there’s something echoing in the background.
So you’re not wrong. I think it’s set back race relations broadly and the place of indigenous Australians quite considerably. The complication of course is that some of that is being led by indigenous conservative politicians. That too I think sometimes allows the expression of anti-indigenous views, the view that somehow the most disadvantaged section of the Australian community was being privileged by the voice above other Australians. You would think that would be such a hard thing to sell, but Peter Dutton and Senator Price, his indigenous spokesperson in that area, have managed to do that. And it really has infected the Australian environment.
The other effect, which I mentioned earlier, is that it certainly had an effect on the confidence of Albanese, and also in an inverse way on Dutton. Dutton feels the wind is at his back, and it took the wind out of the sails of Albanese, because it was a shocking defeat, shocking also in its size. Even those of us who doubted in the end whether the Voice would be successful, I don’t think any of us predicted that it would lose by so much.
You’re a lifelong student of Australian politics and history, and the former President of the Republican Movement. Many of those reading this are not from Australia and may know little about it. What aspects of Australian life or politics would you raise up to them as indicative of the country and its strengths?
I think we are an egalitarian society. There’s plenty of inequality in Australia, but at least in our personal interactions and our community building I think there is something special and lovely about Australians and the way they relate to one another. I think we’re a more collective-oriented society than an individualistic one.
Then of course we pride ourselves on our electoral system and our desire that everyone will participate, and that the electoral system, the compulsory voting and the other aspects of it, will lift up the center rather than play to the extreme. There’s very little violence and extreme populism in Australian political history. I think we’re a steady people in that regard. I’d like to say we’re people who don’t take ourselves too seriously about our place in the world, but others can make that judgment.
All of these things together give me pride and hope in Australia and in the way that we will deal with our election and the choices we make over the next 6 to 8 weeks. When I look at many other countries, I’m glad I’m Australian.
Me geeking out: Do you have a favorite prime minister?
Former Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating
Not one in particular I think. I still love what Paul Keating brought to his place as prime minister, his leadership and larrikinism all wrapped up into one. And Bob Hawke in his own way, again a bit of a larrikin, a community person, someone who could relate to everyone more or less.
It sounds like they’re all Labor Prime Minister, but in the wartime period I admire the Curtins and the Chifleys. There was a humility about them that really appeals to me and they put the nation ahead of any of their own aspirations.
They would be the ones anyway out of whom I would pick my favorite.
Chifley has that famous saying about Australia as “the light on the hill”.
Yeah, and that’s a phrase that still lights up many of us. It was aspirational. I think it was bringing out the angels in us rather than the devils, and looking to the best and the most equal society that can be provided. Certainly he got a lot wrong too, but that was his aim.
It’s funny, a term like that in American would generally be used in a very triumphalist way. We are the tops. But when I hear it in Australia it always sounds like something to reach for rather than something you believe you have achieved.
One of the things that always strikes me as inauthentic or jars with me is any Australian politician who says we’re the greatest society in the world, or versions of that. “Greatest.” It doesn’t seem true, and I think most modern leaders just don’t sound right when they’re in that space. You want something understated. Puffing up your nation or puffing up you as an individual should be a fatal flaw as far as I’m concerned. So I’m always drawn to those, particularly those wartime leaders I talked about, Curtin and Chifley. It seemed a simpler time.
We’re not a flag-waving society. Our patriotism is not something about external display so much as I think it is in some other countries. I grew up with my father who was a returned serviceman from the Second World War. Glorifying war was terrible as far as he was concerned. But there was a comradeship, a collective effort, an honesty about the patriotism which really appealed.
Thanks so much to John Warhurst for a great conversation! Advance Australia fair!
What an enlightening piece, Jim. You are a man of catholic interests indeed.