The last time I was in Washington, Scott Morrison was the prime minister and Donald Trump was the president. Morrison, like Anthony Albanese this week, was treated to a state dinner. That was a surreal affair. The soiree in September of 2019 was alfresco, in the Rose Garden of the White House. There were Trump people – a colourful coterie. Respecting the zeitgeist, the Morrison entourage was studded with the mega rich – Anthony Pratt with his shock of red hair, reclusive Gina Rinehart in bejewelled white and the younger Murdochs, Lachlan and Sarah, sleek as orcas in designer black.
That whole state visit was days of strobing insanity. I wasn’t with Albanese in Washington this week but it was clear from my distant vantage point that madness is now cordoned off from the White House. But dysfunction hasn’t been purged from the American political system. It abides in the legislature – paralysed for three weeks before the Australian prime minister’s arrival – and in the gladiatorial cable networks egging on the performative obstructionism of post-reality Republicans.
Before they sat down to their braised ribs and polite conversation with Washington’s current movers and shakers, Albanese quipped he’d delivered his partner, Jodie Haydon, the best date night she was ever going to get. But enjoying a serene ceremonial occasion in the White House is cold comfort for an Australian prime minister reliant on an unhinged legislature to deliver the biggest defence deal in Australian history.
Congress needs to click together three pieces of the Aukus puzzle to make the submarine pact a reality: ship transfer legislation, export control legislation and a supplementary budget request for submarine industrial base support.
Over the duration of Albanese’s visit, Biden made sure the political system understood the president wanted the Aukus nuts and bolts delivered. Australian diplomats in Washington also pulled out all the stops. (In one of the better asides of the week, the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, described Kevin Rudd, Australia’s former prime minister and now ambassador, as a “force of nature”.) Albanese managed to get in front of key lawmakers despite the rollercoaster ride of appointing a new speaker of the House of Representatives.
But Biden also made it clear he can’t guarantee passage of the required legislation. Let’s cut to the chase. Biden can’t guarantee that he’ll still be in the White House by the end of next year. Given Australia is all-in with Aukus (rightly or wrongly), no legislation and no future-proofing are bracing thoughts. Safe to say that Australia’s expatriate force of nature is already working 24/7, with much more programmatic specificity to come.
While guaranteed outcomes were elusive, Albanese captured Biden and the administration’s attention. Getting US presidents to focus is harder than it looks. Given all the ruckus at home, and the horrors playing out in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, the prime minister of a middle power holding his own in that maelstrom is an achievement.
Before he won the 2022 election, Albanese was considered by many commentators as municipal rather than statesman-like. But thus far he’s managed to establish what reads like a genuine friendship and rapport with Biden, while not upending the steady thaw in diplomatic relations with China.
Some of this is luck. Biden is a rational actor with similar values to the prime minister. China was also looking to de-escalate. Presentationally, the regime in Beijing has backed off wolf warrior diplomacy. Full-frontal aggression has proven counterproductive to its foreign policy objectives.
But there’s skill here too. Commanding the attention of Australia’s principal security partner before heading to Beijing at the end of next week to continue stabilising diplomatic relations with our most significant trading partner is reasonably elaborate as diplomatic dances go. Albanese has decades of experience in prospering through complicated power plays. It shows on the world stage.
While the focus of the trip was on Aukus and the known unknowns, and the three dimensional chess of geopolitics, it was clear domestic politics was also on the prime minister’s mind. If you watch politics closely you’ll know Peter Dutton is very focused on Western Australia (where Labor overperformed electorally in 2022) and a cluster of seats in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
Given the rout the Liberals suffered in 2022, Dutton knows it will be hard for the Coalition to win the next federal election. But pushing Labor into minority government is pretty easy. Not many seats need to change hands.
Some Liberals believe minority government is the only pathway to winning back some of the teal seats while Dutton remains leader. If the teals backed Labor to govern in minority because of an alignment in policy objectives, Liberals argue they would be punished by their electorates (think Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor). Suddenly, the metropolitan Liberal heartland is up for grabs again, Dutton or no Dutton. So goes the thinking.
On the hunt for seats, Dutton visits the west regularly and declares Albanese is hostile to the resources industry. The evidence proffered is Labor’s industrial relations reforms and its inclination to elevate environmental objectives above economic imperatives (apparently these two things are still in conflict on Planet Dutton).
In the Hunter Valley, Dutton visits, and tells voters he loves renewables. Unless somebody actually wants to build anything. Dutton argued this week in the Hunter that offshore windfarms shouldn’t proceed because he was very worried about whales and dolphins.
Yes.
He did.
Liberal leaders have to be more careful these days. Climate change can’t be crap any more because too many voters know this is bollocks. Obstruction and regression have different locutions now. Wither the whales. I heart small modular nuclear reactors.
Albanese is fully aware that Dutton intends to weaponise the transition to net zero in WA, so while in Washington, Albanese had his eyes firmly on the west, and demonstrating positivity about the resources sector.
He doubled the size of the government’s critical minerals facility from $2bn to $4bn. An opinion piece was dispatched post haste to the West Australian newspaper. Albanese declared the West would help Australia “win the future”; he was backing “WA to win in the world”. Companies such as Lynas, Iluka and Liontown Resources would sit at the heart of the coming net zero transition, supplying lithium, cobalt and rare earths for domestic value-adding and for export and the government would facilitate end-to-end sustainable, reliable and transparent critical minerals supply chains globally, with a key focus on the US.
Biden, through the passage of the behemoth Inflation Reduction Act, has tied winning the energy transition directly to future-proofing opportunity and prosperity for the American middle class. Albanese says he wants Australia to become a renewable energy superpower, but given the rancid history here, he always treads more cautiously.
Given Dutton wants to use the transition as a knockout blow, Albanese has an opportunity to take Biden’s cue – create more incentives for households and give low-emissions industries a powerful shot in the arm. The government needs hard propulsion out of a referendum defeat. Creating opportunity through the energy transition does need to be front and centre because, at the moment, Albanese is submerged in meh. He has Dutton criticising him for doing too much and progressive forces in the parliament roasting him for lacking ambition.
The critical minerals announcement in Washington was about creating concrete opportunities for Australia out of Biden’s measures. Separately to this the government is pondering domestic measures to keep clean energy capital tethered in the country rather than racing to the US.
Labor is working on its own mini Inflation Reduction Act if you will. There’s already a $2bn program called Hydrogen Headstart. That same model could apply to other comparable industries. That seems to be the direction of travel, but the detail and scale of any intervention is yet to be resolved.
While winning the future certainly has its attractions, substantively and politically, losing a referendum reminds a government to manage risks in the present.
The failure of the voice suggests Australians have limited bandwidth for big aspirational ideas at the moment. People are head down in life – expensive mortgages, high power and petrol prices, big grocery bills. The government wants to pick up the pace of the transition. But if reforms run too hard and fast, and the lights go off, Dutton and his naysaying agenda prospers.
