Opinion: Albanese's progressive patriotism goes international

By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

When Anthony Norman Albanese set out to defend his government in New York last week, he faced a media that, with some exceptions, had come to view Australian subordination to the US as natural.

From this uncritical mindset came the reductive focus on whether there would be a face-to-face meeting with America's rudest president. Was it all Kevin Rudd's fault for being mean in a past post, some wondered.

Australian prestige, perhaps even our national validity, turned exclusively on "his" favourable gaze.

National puffery as cultural cringe.

Poised to strike, opposition frontbenchers inevitably concluded that Trump's non-scheduling of said audience was "embarrassing" and a rebuke for not slavishly supporting America on climate, social media, and of course, the unfettered exceptionalism of Israel.

Embarrassing for whom was never really quantified because this, like much in the absurd theatre of politics, was hollow nonsense. Were we Australians embarrassed as individuals? Hardly.

Perhaps then, it was the Prime Minister? Yet he didn't blink, instead offering clarity, and even a spot of derring-do.

Pressed by reporters to concede dangerous frictions in Australia's relationship with the administration, he responded forthrightly.

"I'm saying that Australia makes our position clear as a sovereign nation. Our foreign policy isn't determined in Washington, or Beijing, or Wellington for that matter. Our foreign policy is determined around the cabinet table in Canberra."

Whoa! I mean, sure, this is true and all, but surely saying it out loud is, like, poking the bear, right?

My own response was relief. Suddenly, out of an unexpected quadrant, the PM's "progressive patriotism" bow had been given a new string.

Symbolically, it recalled the famous shift by wartime prime minister John Curtin in the final days of 1941, who, despite demands from Winston Churchill to defend British interests in Burma, insisted on bringing our troops home to repel the Japanese. Churchill simply refused to comply with this Australian impudence, but in the end, folded.

"Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom," Curtin wrote in a newspaper editorial published on December 27 - barely three weeks after Pearl Harbour.

It was a turning point in Australia's defence, but also in its international positioning.

Correctly analysing that the entry of Imperial Japan posed an existential threat to Australia, Curtin then used a radio address to Americans in March 1942 to argue that the US had a direct stake in the successful defence of Australia.

"Australia is the last bastion between the west coast of America and the Japanese. If Australia goes, the Americas are wide open," he told them.

True, these were critical shifts in allegiance made against clear real-time dangers. But it was Curtin's capacity to comprehend emergent dynamics and his willingness to forsake the old architecture of British subordination that made them possible. Even his use of media was innovative.

Self-evidently, Albanese's recent statement in New York was not of comparable weight to Australia's wartime survival, but what Curtin had diagnosed regarding British self-interest in 1941-42, Albanese can see in America's immovable position on Israel in that it has become central to the ongoing problem.

While Albanese wasn't bringing our troops home, there was a sense in his articulation of a distinctively Australian perspective that Labor was drawing our sovereignty home, in the context of a dynamic and more assertively independent foreign policy.

How this squares against AUKUS is anyone's guess - much like the pact itself.

Still, the Palestine decision signals a growing confidence within Labor that Trump's America is regarded by Australian voters as, at best, unreliable.

Trump's clampdown on dissenting speech, his aggressively partisan valorisation of Christianity, the demonisation of migrants, his flat rejection of climate change as a "con", are shredding American values.

This invites the question: can Australia exert more clout if it steps out from America's shadow?

This is not entirely new ground. During his initial stint as prime minister, Rudd talked about the creativity and potential of middle-powers.'

During his own inaugural address to the UN General Assembly in 2008, Rudd leveraged the idea of Australian influence born of an ability to forge multiple relationships that comes from being neither too small to matter, nor one of the dominant powers, such as the US, China, or indeed, NATO.

"Through our membership of the United Nations, we are committed to using creative middle power diplomacy to help overcome the great challenges of our age," he said in those more hopeful days.

I was in the General Assembly in 2008 when those comments were made. Tabloid analyses either ignored the proposition entirely, or scoffed at the unlikely presumption of exercising global influence outside of American sponsorship.

Now though, even the US is sprinting away from its dominance of the UN, with Trump trashing it in his speech, having spitefully denied visas to the Palestinian delegation.

Albanese appears to be open to a reworking of Rudd's possibilities, via a recognition that an enlightened, "progressive" patriotism can arise through greater Australian self-confidence and moral consistency internationally.

Crucially, this new assertiveness frontally challenges the inherently contradictory claim of the political right to be both more patriotically Australian, while also being unbreakably loyal to America and to Israel, no matter their behaviour.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.