Australia, explained.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton (Hilary Wardhaugh and Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images)
Party preferences extend abroad.
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If foreign countries could vote in Australia’s election, which box would they tick?If foreign countries could vote in Australia’s election, which box would they tick?
Australia’s election campaign formally kicked off today, with a vote to be held on 3 May. Labor, under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, presently holds a narrow majority in parliament, with Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s Liberal-Nationals Coalition aiming to make it the first government since the 1930s to lose after a single term. But a swathe of independents could also push Australia towards the unusual, although not unprecedented, position of minority rule.
A tense international scene forms the backdrop to this campaign. US President Donald Trump’s tariffs will be one debating point, especially if Australia’s pharmaceutical benefits scheme is targeted. But I wouldn’t expect anything as extraordinary as Canada’s overnight declaration from new Prime Minister Mark Carney, also in the midst of an election campaign, that “the relationship Canada had with the United States … is over.”
Foreign diplomats in Canberra will be scrambling over the coming five weeks to chart the contours of the campaign and report to their home countries. While they don’t get a vote, they will have preferences about which party they prefer to govern Australia.
So, let’s start with the United States. The White House is unlikely to offer any signal as clear as the time George W Bush effectively endorsed conservative PM John Howard over Labor’s Mark Latham. Trump has shown a penchant for flattering Australia’s leaders. He called Albanese a “fine man” in February. But Trump also once described his “fantastic relationship” with former Coalition prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a “tough negotiator”, only to now belittle him as “a weak and ineffective leader”. Scott Morrison still has Trump’s ear after his time as PM, but with Trump, who can really say? He likes winners.
Then prime minister John Howard’s triumph in 2003 of having a US president and China’s president address parliament on consecutive days now seems a quaint memory.
Trump might make up his mind based on a country’s trade deficit or surplus with the United States, or pledges made about defence spending, even as the target moves ever upwards. It could be that Elon Musk has influence over the presidential preference, having picked a fight in Australia before. With both sides of politics rhetorically welded to the US alliance, as well as the AUKUS nuclear-powered subs deal, this might be an election that Trump feels he wins no matter the outcome.
Japan is carefully neutral and works with either side, but would probably prefer a Coalition win. Japan’s former ambassador to Australia has made plain his annoyance at Labor’s policies. Shingo Yamagami last year described Albanese as “weak and meek” on China, and while this can be dismissed as the disgruntled complaint of an individual, especially given Foreign Minister Penny Wong evidently thought Yamagami a troublemaker, Japan had wider gripes with Labor. It was highly critical of the Albanese government’s energy policy, and there is a sense Japan has never forgiven Labor, way back under Kevin Rudd in 2008, for having visited Beijing ahead of Tokyo.
Peter Dutton meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Canberra last year (David Gray/AFP via Getty Images)
China? With the relationship “stabilisation” mantra under Albanese, it would be easy to assume Beijing would prefer more of the same. Dutton has promised “the relationship with China will be much stronger than it is under the Albanese government.” Stronger is one of those words open to interpretation. Dutton has a more hawkish reputation, having said in his earlier job as defence minister it was “inconceivable” that Australia would not join the United States in war over Taiwan.
But China must also know that despite gushing about Albanese as a “handsome boy”, both sides of politics in Australia are suspicious about Beijing’s intentions. Then prime minister John Howard’s triumph in 2003, of having a US president and China’s president address parliament on consecutive days, now seems a quaint memory. And why else dispatch a “show of force” flotilla of warships to circle Australia in the weeks before the election if not as a warning to both sides of politics.
Pragmatism rules and any foreign country will work with the government of the day.
Israel clearly favours the approach set out by the Coalition on the conflict in Gaza, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having lambasted “the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia” and described its voting record in the United Nations as “scandalous”. A return to the Coalition’s recognition of “West Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital (although Israel wasn’t entirely satisfied when this policy was first floated in 2018) would be welcomed.
India has been more inclined to the Coalition, at least under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Albanese might have ridden a chariot at the cricket and lavished praise on Modi as “the boss”, but India was suspicious of Labor’s return to office in 2022, still wrongly blaming Rudd for abandoning the first iteration of the Quad, and with memories of Labor’s decision, later reversed, to ban yellowcake uranium sales to India.
True, Labor has made significant efforts across this term to build ties. The recently revealed “nest of spies” allegations against India in Australia dated to the time under a Coalition government, and Modi’s complaints while standing alongside Albanese about local vandalism directed at Hindu temples seemed as much about Indian domestic politics as issues here. But ideologically, Modi’s India would prefer the message of former Coalition prime minister Tony Abbott, that “the answer to almost every question about China is India”.
Anthony Albanese and India's Narendra Modi ahead of a March 2023 India vs Australia Test match in Ahmedabad, India (Prakash Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Indonesia appears typically more comfortable with Labor’s historical emphasis on ties with Asia. The confrontation over asylum seeker boats was at its sharpest under the Coalition. Indonesian elites are said to harbour lingering resentment about Australia’s role in Timor-Leste’s independence, which also occurred under Coalition rule. Albanese skipping Prabowo Subianto’s inauguration in October last year might have been short-sighted, but is less likely to be remembered than Dutton’s announcement last week that, should he win, he won’t visit Asia on his first overseas trip as prime minister. Dutton’s preference for Washington is bound to revive the motif of Australia as America’s “deputy sheriff” in Southeast Asia.
Long memories also leave Dutton floundering with the preferences of Pacific nations. It was ten years ago that Dutton was caught on a hot mic, joking about rising seas leaving “water lapping at your door”. Yet such moments do tend to shape stubbornly held views, as Morrison also found with the Pacific after his stunt of burnishing a lump of coal in the Australian parliament. Labor’s climate change credentials might still be questioned in the region, but they are better regarded than those of the Coalition.
Pragmatism rules and any foreign country will work with the government of the day. Overt – or covert – interference in Australia’s campaign from abroad is just as likely to backfire. But that doesn’t mean countries won’t be quietly barracking.
About the author
Daniel Flitton
Daniel Flitton is one of Australia’s most experienced foreign affairs journalists and is Managing Editor of the Lowy Institute’s international magazine, The Interpreter.
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