In 1969, former SA Federal MP Bert Kelly was sacked as Minister for the Navy after the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne collided with America’s USS Frank E Evans in the South China Sea. Ministerial responsibility was interpreted differently in those days.
In 2025, Australia is once again on a collision course with the US, this time over our commitment to defence spending – with China again eerily in the picture.
Putting it bluntly, Australia is not pulling its weight and the Americans, who we rely on to defend us, are not happy.
In fact, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, together with his Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd, seem to be going out of their way to annoy our most important ally.
All have made no secret of the fact that they do not like Donald Trump – or even America for that matter – but do they have to take the opposite side on everything?
It brings to mind those two great books – ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ and ‘How to Lose Friends and Irritate People’.
Albanese and Co. have clearly been reading the wrong book!
What they are doing is downright dangerous.
They are jeopardising the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) agreement which, at present, is our only forward defence plan.
Meanwhile, Chinese warships traverse our waters with impunity.
It is a given that the first duty of any government is the defence of the nation.
However, from the defence of the nation to the Middle East conflict to Russia and Ukraine to Australia’s energy policy and censorship laws, the Albanese government is letting the Trump administration know that we are not on the same page.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Richard Plantagenet (later Richard III) says, ‘How sweet it is to wear the crown.’
Richard covets the crown and expresses his ambition and desire for the throne. He yearns for power and the perceived joys of kingship as he plots against the reigning King Henry.
However, when the question, ‘Where is thy crown?’ is posed to Henry himself, Henry responds that his crown is in his heart, not on his head, symbolizing that true kingship lies not in outward symbols of power but in what the crown represents.
Shakespeare’s insights into human nature and the yearning for power are timeless.
Like Richard Plantagenet, our Prime Minister might be good at getting to the top – be it to the top of a student union or the top of a political party – but once there he has proven himself to be totally unsuited to the role of competent governing.
It’s been said that voters want leadership, they want to be led – “But don’t boss me around,” they quickly add.
The job of a leader isn’t easy, but that’s the whole point.
Anthony Albanese was once asked, ‘Mr Albanese, if you were dictator, what’s the first thing you would do?’
‘Ban social media’, he replied.
How revealing.
That the Prime Minister would ban social media – our most popular means of communication – is brutally authoritarian.
It reminded me of a scene in the movie Oppenheimer in which nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer meets with President Harry Truman shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2.
Following his successful testing of the bomb, Oppenheimer was known to have uttered the words, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’, a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, a holy scripture from Hinduism.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer told Truman he felt he had ‘blood on his hands’.
Truman angrily responded with the words, ‘The blood is on my hands, not yours. It was me who dropped the bomb, not you’.
With that, the meeting was over, and Truman said he ‘never wanted to see that man again’.
There’s more than a little Oppenheimer in Albanese’s view of himself and the world around him.
There’s an old Greek proverb, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one thing’.
Albanese knows only one thing – politics. It’s all he’s ever done. He’s a hedgehog.
But as we know, the world isn’t made up of just one thing, it is made up of a whole range of competing factors and trade-offs that differ for different people of different ages who live in different places and have different priorities.
Like the ‘crystallised intelligence’ vs ‘fluid intelligence’ paradigm. Crystallised intelligence employs experience and wisdom and knows how the world works. Fluid intelligence knows how to study, learn facts and pass exams. Foxes vs hedgehogs. We’ve all met them.
Harry Truman – a Democrat (America’s version of the Australian Labor Party) was a good President. A Bob Hawke type of President.
Before entering politics, Truman was a soldier and then a shopkeeper. A better understanding of how the world works you wouldn’t get than by owning a shop!
Harry was quite the fox.
The story is told of when Truman was elected President, his former army buddy and shopkeeper partner, Eddie Jacobson, said to him, ‘O Harry, now that you’re President, everyone’s going to start telling you what a great man you are, when you and I both know you ain’t’.
True leaders value the Eddie Jacobsons in their lives.
Anthony Albanese is no Harry Truman – or even a Bob Hawke for that matter.
And Australia is all the poorer for it.
Having said all that, I am consoled by the words of a small child who prayed, ‘Dear God, please look after mummy, and please look after daddy, and please look after my brother and sister and most of all please look after yourself because if anything ever happens to you we’re all going to be in a real mess.’
Thank you for your support.
Lord Byron, in his moving poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, offers the following reflection on life:
As most will recall, the Coalition went to the 2013 election promising to ‘abolish the carbon tax, abolish the mining tax and stop the boats’.