LATIKA M BOURKE: Albanese should avoid MAGA trap and reap political dividends of embracing national security

Anthony Albanese wants to entrench Labor as the natural party of government in Australia.

His stunning and historic landslide win on May 3 shows he is on his way but he needs to embrace national security if he is to be truly successful.

As the celebrations over his huge victory begin to subside, the Prime Minister should look closely at the vulnerabilities that put his grand project at risk and the potential for him to cement his place in history as one of the Australian Labor greats.

National security and government spending remain his greatest weaknesses and, as Julian Leeser, the Shadow Attorney-General told The Nightly last week, the Coalition’s two greatest strengths.

The Liberals will be on life support for some time, but when they fight back — and they will — these two issues will be their primary targets.

But Mr Albanese should not wait that long. It is in the national interest, and his own party’s that he acts. Now.

He is open to increasing Australia’s defence spending further this term, but doesn’t believe in having to fund targets that don’t directly correlate to increasing capabilities.

That’s fine. But a shopping list for the capabilities Australia urgently needs exists, and he should start asking for the bill to be tallied.

The case for increasing Australia’s military readiness is two-fold.

For the past two years, China has increased its military spending by around 7 per cent each year. The Chinese attack Australians in the cyberdomain and their military harasses Australia’s Navy and pilots.

But more importantly, the People’s Liberation Army-Navy’s circumnavigation of Australia by its warships just before the election showed it was capable of sustaining a long deployment without having to make a port call, and that Australia’s southern border is vulnerable and exposed.

Further, the Chinese Navy’s decision to conduct live fire exercises between Australia and New Zealand without even warning the Government underlined the limits of the so-called “stabilisation” of the bilateral relationship that Labor has pursued.

No Labor landslide can erase these realities, or the fact that as US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth pointed out at the Shangri-la Dialogue on the weekend, a Chinese attack on Taiwan could be “imminent.”

Xi Jingping has stated he wants to take Taiwan, by force if necessary by 2027 — that’s only two years to go, i.e. imminent.

While China might be happy enough to resume buying Australia’s wine, barley and lobster, its behaviour is that of a power wanting to dominate the region and subdue or pacify any Australian resistance.

Two things can prevent conflict: statecraft and deterrence.

Australia should not be building up its defence capability because it’s a jobs program or because America told us to. Both undermine our stature as a middle power with regional influence.

Australia should be bolstering its defences because sending a signal that the country is capable of and willing to push back — if forced — is a deterrence measure in itself.

And if Xi Jinping, like Vladimir Putin, won’t be deterred or swayed by rational arguments that a conflict over Taiwan would plunge the global economy into depression, Australia will have no choice but to be ready.

The second reason is that the United States is demanding greater reciprocity in return for its role and military presence in the region, aimed at preventing Chinese dominance of our sea lanes and shipping routes.

This is not just an expectation being prosecuted by US President Donald Trump.

Ely Ratner, who served as US Assistant Secretary of Defence for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs under Joe Biden, wrote in Foreign Affairs last week that the balance had shifted.

“The PLA now poses serious challenges to the US military and the American homeland and US allies in Asia are now among the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world, capable of playing a significant role in both deterrence and warfighting,” he said.

“To adapt to this new reality, US alliances need to build on a foundation not of asymmetry but of reciprocity.”

Trade-dependent Australia has a mortal stake in the US safeguarding the Indo-Pacific regardless of who sits in the White House. Remember how easy and sudden it was the CCP to hit Australia with economic coercion when it felt offended?

“Time is of the essence, we must step up and move out with urgency,” Secretary Hegseth warned during his speech at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on the weekend.

“And it’s hard to believe, a little bit, after some trips to Europe that I’m saying this this – but thanks to President Trump Asian allies should look to countries in Europe as a new-found example.

“NATO members are pledging to spend 5 per cent of their GDP on defence, even Germany.

“So it doesn’t make sense for countries in Europe to do that while key allies in Asia spend less on defence in the face of an even more formidable threat, not to mention North Korea.”

That portion of the speech was distributed on social media by Pentagon adviser Elbridge Colby, who has previously expressed doubts about selling Australia nuclear-propelled submarines under AUKUS.

Mr Colby has also urged Australia and Japan to raise defence spending to 3 per cent. Mr Albanese and Mr Marles have chosen to ignore that plea.

Secretary Hegseth waited until Sunday to say out loud that he had asked Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles to raise defence spending to 3.5 per cent during their meeting on Friday. Mr Marles had refused to tell journalists the US’s request figure and limply said he was “up for a conversation” about it.

In case you hadn’t heard, the MAGA crew aren’t exactly the pop-the-kettle-on-and-serve-a-plate-of-biscuits-while-you-have-a-good-old-natter types.

As this column has written before, they are expressly sick of subsidising their allies’ social services programs by underwriting global security.

We should not expect them to play nice for much longer or imagine that we will escape the Europe treatment just because we have Pine Gap and are members of the Five Eyes.

MAGA can’t be making itself any clearer, the time for freeloading is over and for those who still refuse to hear, they have shown themselves willing to use brutal diplomatic methods to get their views across.

Does Australia really want to let the situation develop to a point where the Americans feel we too, deserve an Oval Office dressing down or something comparable?

The costs of such a global shaming would be enormous, both to domestic support for the Alliance and to the Prime Minister personally, however much the public may detest the Trump Administration.

Anthony Albanese proudly states that he is not a revolutionary but a reformist. However, he is actually an incrementalist prime minister.

While this paid off for him handsomely on May 3, he should use that political capital to fortify his long-term ambitions for Labor and embrace the political dividend that leaning into national security would deliver the government.

By proposing a small tax cut and neatly trapping the Coalition into opposing it on the eve of the election, he was able to declare that Labor and not the Liberals is the party of lower taxes.

He has made much progress, with the help of the Coalition’s ineptitude, of neutralising one of the opposition’s two great strengths.

Polling done in key swing seats during the course of the campaign by RedBridge shows that Labor managed to reduce its net negative rating on the economy from minus 38 to minus 30.

But the Coalition’s numbers tell the true story, their ratings were in the black at 6 points. But by the time RedBridge concluded their fifth wave of polling at the end of April, this had plummeted to minus 19.

Mr Albanese has the Coalition on the ropes on the economy and there’s no reason why he couldn’t do it a second time.

The Prime Minister made a bold call on potentially involving Australian troops in a Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine — something the deposed Liberal Leader Peter Dutton opposed.

One factor that explains the Prime Minister’s uncharacteristic embrace is that the idea is led by the two European leaders he feels closest to — France’s Emmanuel Macron and the UK’s Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

He need only look at Sir Keir for inspiration of how to make the Labor case for national security.

Sir Keir, announcing his own Strategic Defence Review says he is putting his country on a war footing and making it “battle ready.”

The threat in Europe, naturally feels more immediate, given Russia’s ongoing illegal war against Ukraine. But if Russia is the thunderstorm, China is the climate change and Australia faces an even greater long-term challenge because it’s biggest security threat is also its biggest trading partner.

This cannot be said for Britain. Nevertheless, Sir Keir is raising defence spending to 2.5 per cent in three years. Having previously said almost nothing about foreign policy, he has embraced national security as the core of his government’s purpose.

While Sir Keir is under pressure to guarantee his promise to go even further and raise defence spending to 3 per cent after 2028, he is nevertheless several steps ahead .. and in the right direction.

Mr Albanese has some catching up to do but there is no reason why he should not and could not.

And in funding a capability-first defence force, he might just vanquish the Coalition’s hopes of rebounding in the process.