Albo Heeds The Great Call of China
The Labor government picked a fine time to reveal internal tension about the importance of our military alliance with the United States.
China wants to invade Taiwan and use it as a springboard for a regional war. Ukraine is boasting that its drones have taken out $7 billion worth of Russian bombers at four separate air bases deep within Russia, which might finally provoke Vladimir Putin to press the nuke button. And the streets of some western liberal cities have become so vibrant with multiculturalism that civil war is breaking out.
If you find all this incredibly disturbing, as you should, spare a thought for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. He’s just won a federal election by extravagantly promising to extend free healthcare, pay off billions of dollars’ worth of student loans and build thousands of homes for people who can’t afford them. And now, just as he is turning his genius mind to how he will finance all this largesse, his Defence Minister, Richard Marles, gets all caught up in the excitement at some international defence gabfest in Singapore and agrees Australia should be spending more on guns and soldiers instead.
For all her backstabbing ambition, at least Tanya Plibersek never returned from any of those globalist environmentalist love-ins having blown another multi-billion-dollar hole in the budget, which is what Marles has ostensibly promised to do.
After a private meeting with Hegseth on Friday, Marles came out guns blazing, saying China is engaging in the biggest military build-up since World War II, and that the US’s regional protection, while welcome, needed to be complemented with increased commitment from the locals, including Australia.
Over my dead body, said Albo. “What you should do in defence is decide what you need, your capability, and then provide for it — that’s what my government is doing,” he said publicly. What he told Marles in private might have been slightly more robust.
He also pointed out that he had committed another $10 billion in the “forward estimates”, a phrase Hegseth was probably quicker than the average Australian voter to pick as a euphemism for “never”.
Albo obfuscates and ambiguates over defence because it’s not his strong point. The only war he has every publicly declared allegiance to is the war against rich people. “I like fighting Tories, that’s what I do,” he said, tears welling in his eyes, by way of explaining why he backed Kevin Rudd over Julia Gillard for the leadership of the Labor Party in 2012.
But fight Australia’s enemies? On the contrary, he’s flooding the place with them, including violently alienated theocrats from Third World shitholes. Paying for their housing and welfare isn’t cheap, so why would he waste more money on a stupid army?
If there is a silver lining on this cloud, it is that this disagreement highlights the difference between Albo’s Left faction of the Labor Party, which suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and has a deep antipathy for western freedoms and middle Australia, and Marles’ Right faction, which doesn’t let petty undergraduate resentment affect policy, especially when it comes to international diplomacy.
I predicted this government would unravel during this second term as a result of its extravagant promises and lack of cohesive conviction, but I didn’t dare dream it would start happening only a month in.
Albo’s petulant response to Hegseth’s reasonable request for Australia to pull its weight has more in common with Greens Senator David Shoebridge, who said on X in response to Hegseth’s demands: “The arrogance is shocking. Australia is not just a pot of money for the US military. Australia needs to be an independent and peaceful force in the world. That does not happen by footing the US's bills and buying US weapons that threaten our neighbours.”
Albo agrees with Shoebridge here. He thinks the key to containing China is friendly engagement, not military escalation.
And that’s not the only point of difference he has with Washington. He has promised to back Ukraine “for as long as it takes” to defeat Russia, and has already sent Volodymyr Zelensky $1.5 billion worth of aid and equipment, some of which might even have been used in the war effort. He thinks climate change is real, which can only be resolved by sending money and surrendering sovereignty to a cabal of globalist grifters. And he has sympathised with Palestinians over Israelis since his university days, allowing thousands of unscreened Palestinian refugees to resettle in Australia, although safe in the knowledge that they won’t be forming a ghetto or building mosques anywhere near his retirement mansion on the Central Coast of New South Wales.
All of these foreign policy positions weaken Australia, which is why Albo has been warmly invited to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping later this year. Albo’s naive faith in a mutually beneficial relationship with China belies the truth that China has been at war with the west since Mao Zedong rose to power in 1949. Mao said in 1950: “The Chinese people will never be cowed by the American imperialists, who are the enemies of all revolutionary people in the world.”
Deng Xiaoping, who took over in 1978, toured the US pretending to represent a more western-friendly China, and an ally in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But Deng’s secret mantra was: “Hide your strength, and bide your time”.
By the time Deng retired in 1989, China had fooled the west it wanted to be an equal and friendly participant in world trade. In truth, the CCP wanted to enrich and fortify itself to fulfil its dream of world domination, and started to develop a military not designed to defend the country but, according to a report to Congress by China academic Arthur Waldron in 2004, was “specifically configured to fight the United States”.
It’s been backing various tyrannical autocracies that oppose the west ever since.
Albo, who has his own secret ambitions for Australia and is no slouch when it comes to communist-style censorship and state control of the means of production, has more in common with Xi Jinping than he does with Donald Trump.
At a time when peace is increasingly unlikely, our alliance with the United States has never been on shakier ground.
There are none so blind as those who won't see. Albo is one of them. He is a Commo at heart and maybe the Australian public are the blind ones who refuse to see what sort of a man he is. A very good article, thank you
We don't have a military alliance. The terms of the AUKUS deal only require the USA to consider its options if we are attacked. In the meantime we are to be involved in all US wars of choice.
It's a vassalage agreement, pure and simple. We should withdraw unilaterally, today. Yesterday, if possible.
The US is vastly more aggressive toward China than China is toward the US, that's just a fact. It's time to draw down the sabre rattling and (ironically) adopt the foreign policy suggested by almost all founders of the United States: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none" - Thomas Jefferson
"Albo agrees with Shoebridge here. He thinks the key to containing China is friendly engagement, not military escalation. "
How exactly do you see this military escalation ending? After what we did to Russia following the Cold War no power will ever go down that route again. China has the ability (like all modern nuclear armed states) to obliterate most of the world, certainly every major city in the Anglosphere. It's just a button press away.
We aren't going to contain China. We are going to contain ourselves.
____________________________________________________________________________
"Albo, who has his own secret ambitions for Australia and is no slouch when it comes to communist-style censorship and state control of the means of production, has more in common with Xi Jinping than he does with Donald Trump."
The irony of this is that the US and China are converging on a common political system. One characterized by mass surveillance, AI enforced laws, digital ID, CBDCs, etc.
At the same time the US is becoming more tyrannical, China is becoming less so. Both have realized for their respective reasons that the sweet spot of governance lies somewhere in between. Xi is a vastly less evil leader than Mao. Orders of magnitude so.
For more on this I recommend the following: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
"At a time when peace is increasingly unlikely, our alliance with the United States has never been on shakier ground."
It's increasingly unlikely due to the anti-American actions of the United States. Only one country has dozens of bases just miles off the other's coastline. Only one country has orchestrated 28 wars of choice since the other's last war. Only one country asserts its warships are doing freedom of navigation operations in international waters while denying the other the same right. Only one country has threatened to invade the ICC if it issues warrants against its leaders for war crimes. The US doesn't even formally recognize the independence of Taiwan yet it wants to go to nuclear war over it?
I have no love for China, I despise their system, yet they don't force it on us like the US does. The US has lost its way, its founders would not recognize it anymore. They would likely rise up in revolution against it.
It's time for the US to fix some of its own problems before it gallivants around the world telling other nations how to run their own countries. It's time for Australia to pursue a foreign policy which is not subservient to foreign powers, this was our mistake in the past and we are repeating it thoughtlessly.
What this is really all about is exaggerating a foreign threat so our populations don't look at our historically unpopular leaders too closely. Nothing helps an unpopular leader as much as a foreign threat.