Australia and New Zealand are both trying to find their footing in a rapidly changing global order.
And both countries are being warned of complacency as we try to keep our heads down on the international stage, hoping to dodge retaliatory tactics from either the US or China – or both.
Today on The Detail we speak to an Australian security expert about the risk of standing still.
It comes after former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd recently gave his compatriots a kick in the intellectual pants.
Long called the ‘Lucky Country’, Australia was becoming the ‘Complacent Country’, Rudd said in a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra.
He’s a Mandarin-speaking China expert who now heads a New York-based think-tank, so he knows a thing or two about great power rivalry.
The global strategic, economic and technological challenges facing Australia – particularly a rising China, AI and climate change – were enormous and complex challenges, he said.
“We can navigate these changes successfully, but it will require a radical change in our national psychology – a new sense of national urgency, combined with a new, vital sense of shared national purpose,” he said. “The alternative is to slide into becoming a second-rate country. Because that requires no effort at all.”
But the first thing that needed changing: The national mindset.
“As a people we have become so risk-averse that we fail to comprehend that the even greater risk is standing still and trying in vain to preserve the status quo,” the former PM said.
Rudd was speaking to Australians, of course, but we here face the same challenges – and have less diplomatic and economic clout. We are also at risk of standing still.
To find out more about how Australia is dealing with the changing world order, The Detail talks to Emma Shortis, director of the International and Security Affairs Program at the Australia Institute.
“There has been an effort to diversify Australia’s security relationships in response to what is happening in the world. But broadly speaking I think the Australian government is attempting to pursue this kind of similar path between giants,” Shortis says.
“We have the United States still, despite everything, as our major security partner and China as our major economic partner. And the Australian government, I think, quite rightly actually has been fairly quiet about Australia’s relationship with China, especially in the last kind of few months.”
Some in Australian political and foreign policy circles have become concerned about US President Donald Trump’s recent warm words and gestures towards Chinese leader Xi Jinping and what it might mean for these efforts at balancing.
Shortis says some in Australia are worried about that closeness, and what that means for Australian security and US staying power in the region.
“There’s always this anxiety in Australia that the United States will abandon us, that it will pivot away from the Indo-Pacific rather than pivot towards the Indo-Pacific,” she says. “And so there’s always this effort to tie the United States in ever closer to Australian security and to the region.”
While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government recognises the ongoing assault on the international rules-based order is bad for Australia, it is unwilling to talk about the causes for fear of attracting Trump’s ire or undermining Australia’s security alliance with the United States.
“In the eyes of this government, in the eyes of successive governments, [this] needs to be preserved at all costs,” she says.
While Australia is a member of regional security groups like the Quad – with Japan, India and the United States – it hasn’t exactly been enthusiastic about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call for a “middle power” moment.
Australia and Canada did sign a climate agreement when Carney was on his middle power tour, and has also signed free trade and security agreements with the European Union.
But Shortis says the substance of those deals is undermined by the deepening of the US alliance that is happening at the same time.
“The required weight is not put on these other agreements as something to counter what the United States is doing, something to counter the United States’ assault on international law,” she says.
“Because at the same time, we’ve got our defence minister, deputy prime minister, going to talk to his good friend Pete Hegseth in Washington about accelerating the US presence in Australia. So you know, those two things are inherently contradictory, even if we don’t want them to be.”
This Saturday episode is made with funding from the Peter M Acland Foundation
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