(2025) The Drift of Australian Foreign Policy

Published in Scott Prasser, editor, Promise and Performance. Albanese’s First Term, Connor Court, Redland Bay, 2025, pp. 315-341.

The purpose of this chapter is to sketch what happened in foreign policy in the first term of the Albanese-led Labor government, and to provide context and analysis of the bigger picture. The word ‘drift’ conveys direction of policy and action, rather than uncertain navigation.

Initially, I overview theoretical and historical perspectives on the changing policy environment and discuss the deployment of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power in the projection of Australian influence. Without that backdrop, this account would only be of events, one thing after another. (My selection of quotes and facts reflects a personal assessment of the arguments.) Then follows discussion on Labor’s preparation for government and its approach to foreign policy; then onto headline ‘challenges’ on this Government’s watch, namely relations with China, the US alliance, the development of AUKUS and the Quad. Australia’s relations with South East Asian countries – particularly Indonesia, Labor’s forging of better relations with the Blue Pacific,[1] is followed by reactions and actions in far flung regions, including Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. The latter is the most domestically controversial international conflict during the last few years. Finally, a brief outline of leading critiques of Australian foreign policy, particularly on AUKUS, rounds off the analysis.

Theoretical Overview

The first term of the Albanese Labor government will be remembered for the unmooring and shaky erosion of what were once considered firm pillars, and uncertainty about new directions. The longevity of AUKUS, the Quad, and some earlier creations, including the G20 and APEC, require constant attention. As, indeed, the ANZUS (Australian New Zealand US) Treaty arrangements, forged in 1951, do also. During the first Trump presidency, 2017-2021, the doyen of Australian foreign policy strategy, Allan Gyngell, opined: “Multilateralism is in flux: it is unclear which organisations will continue, which will emerge, and which will atrophy.” (Gyngell 2017: 362).

The Albanese Government came to power 16-months after the first Trump presidency ended and was re-elected nearly 15 weeks after the second Trump inauguration. President Joe Biden (President 2021-2025), compared to his immediate predecessor and successor, was a benignly sympathetic figure towards Australian interests. (Fullilove 2022). So were many State Department figures, notably Kurt M. Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State, and key strategist on China and US-Asia relations. AUKUS was conceived on Biden’s watch, with Albanese’s predecessor, Scott Morrison, playing the catalysing role. (P. Kelly 2022: 161-192). In Opposition, Labor endorsed the AUKUS option, though with little debate and scarce transparency. (Simons 2023). President Biden insisted that Morrison test the waters with the then Labor Opposition to secure bi-partisan support. Morrison reciprocated to give the ALP a day to respond. He hoped to wedge Labor on the issue. Albanese and colleagues did not take the bait.

The AUKUS Agreement, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, has two pillars: Pillar 1 is the supply and delivery of a total of 8 nuclear-powered conventional attack submarines under Australian command by the 2040s; and Pillar 2, providing a platform for advanced technology cooperation. The origin and evolution of AUKUS is further addressed below.

The overall strategic landscape is an environment where much is contested and disputed. Wong says: “Long-standing rules are being bent, twisted or broken.” (Wong, 2024a). Further: “We live in a world of increasing strategic surprise – ever more uncertain and unpredictable.” (Wong 2025). The government’s second term will reveal how well it has considered and mastered such challenging, difficult conditions.

“For the times they are a-changin’”, to quote the Bob Dylan song, have been for some time. Thirty years ago, foreign policy thinker Owen Harries predicted: “A realistic assessment … is that quite early in the next century – say, in fifteen – or twenty-years’ time … Australia will have lost many of the security advantages it has enjoyed until now.”

Harries identified three factors that would diminish the strength of Australia’s security – the long receding roar of US presence in the Asia-Pacific region; the rise of economic and security competition; and the world ‘shrinking’, with new technologies, to a ‘smaller’ place. Let’s examine each point. First, he said Australia “will no longer enjoy the assured presence of an enormously powerful but unthreatening ally, one that is firmly committed to its protection and to maintaining a balance in the region.” He surmised: “There is no longer a compelling mission for the United States in the Asia Pacific region, no cause, no obvious bad guys to frustrate and good guys to support, nothing (and this is important) that can be clearly and readily explained to the American people. The role usually suggested by strategists – that of a balancer, balancer of last resort – is historically and temperamentally uncongenial to Americans – too complicated, too amoral, involving too much shifting and manoeuvring.” Arguably, the rise of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), provided the new ‘bad guy’ for America to counter. But it took more than 16-years after Harries wrote the above, a period of grand optimism about US-China engagement (Shambaugh 2025: 53-83), before America’s ‘pivot to Asia’ occurred in 2011 under President Obama. The ‘pivot’ suggested a change of focus or renewed focus on Asia. Some Chinese critics asserted that America was pursuing a “bellicose strategy aimed at containing China’s rise,” whereas a few western academic scholars only saw an anaemic, half-hearted turn. (Silove 2016: 45).

The last decade of American pivots, resets, gyrations, and positioning with respect to China specifically and Asia more generally are as dizzying to watch as a dreidel. Some analysts just saw rotation and no landing. For example, this summation: “Trump’s ‘pivot actions’ appear to be erratic, pragmatic short-term actions rather than a meticulously planned long-term strategy similar to Obama’s rebalance (which did not materialize). Thus, while Obama failed to transform the pivot into an effective strategy, neither is Trump’s effectiveness backed by a coherent Asian strategy.” (Kolmas & Kolmasova 2019: 1). Feckless or considered or otherwise, America is no longer the supreme hegemon in the region that it once was. That is part of Australia’s reckoning.

Back to Harries, whose second prediction was that Australia would “no longer enjoy the strategic and technical advantage of having more sophisticated weaponry than adjacent countries, an advantage that has until now compensated for lack of manpower. Neighbours will be rich enough to afford the best, in some cases in larger bulk than Australia.” In 2023, Indonesia’s GDP was ~80% of Australia’s. If demography is destiny, the size of Indonesia’s expanding economy should eclipse Australia’s by 2030 or shortly thereafter. The PRC is at least ten times the size of Australia’s GDP. (World Bank Group 2023). Third, Harries suggested the ‘tyranny of distance’ would disappear and with it “the protective shield of distance. What Australia will gain economically from the revolution in transport and communication, it will lose strategically in terms of the insulation provided by remoteness.” (Harries 1995: 17). Complacency left the nation under-prepared for significant global shifts already probable when Harries wrote. The most recent comprehensive foreign policy review was the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, now out-of-date given current complexities of the rapidly changed international landscape.

Harries’ analysis begs the question of what cards Australia must play in the great game of protecting its interests. Hans Morgenthau in his classic study Politics Among Nations focuses heavily on diplomacy as a means of avoiding war. (Morgenthau 1973: 517-529). A more nuanced assessment, considering the mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ options, was coined on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union by Joseph Nye Jr. He recognised that power not only grows out of the barrel of a gun, but it also happens through influence, cultural and through other indirect means: “Although force may sometimes play a role, traditional instruments of power are rarely sufficient to deal with the new dilemmas of world politics.” There in Nye’s phrase “new dilemmas”, we see a familiar refrain that the new moment is an inflection point. Gyngell once wryly remarked, “Throughout its modern history Australia has known only a globalising world.” (Gyngell 2017: 360). Indeed, when has the modern ever been safely predictable, or not constantly changing?

Nye argued that “intangible forms of power [are now] more important. National cohesion, universalistic culture, and international institutions are taking on additional significance.” He concluded that this aspect of power “occurs when one country gets other countries to want what it wants” and that this “might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” This idea of ‘soft’ power is useful to ascribing Australia’s opportunities for influencing its allies and friends, fence-sitters, and even antagonists. Nye says such power “is the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with its own. This power tends to arise from such resources as cultural and ideological attraction as well as rules and institutions of international regimes.” (Nye 1990: 164; 168). Arguably, the combination of US hard power (military might, nuclear deterrence, NATO, a web of military alliances) and its decisive influences in shaping world economic institutions (World Trade Organisation, World Bank, World Health Organisation, etc.) and its superior advantages in culture, technology, and overall economic dynamism, has underpinned the post-World War II political environment. For most of the last 80-years, the western-aligned world was thereby seemingly safe for America and mostly safe in-itself. This, however, we need to remember, is relative. As for Australia’s place, the world is never in stasis.

Not for nothing did former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew use the term “America’s catchment area” to describe the world’s reliance on the United States as a source of innovation, investment, and political stability. A corollary of this concept is that much of the world is drawn to and benefits from American leadership in various aspects of global affairs. This once included free trade and anti-protectionism, as Lee explained in his address to the US Congress forty years ago. (Lee 1985). Another aspect of the idea is that many of the best and brightest are drawn to migrate to the United States. In 1999, Lee remarked: “Silicon Valley has 260 million Americans to pick from, yet nearly half its brains come from Asia, India, Taiwan, China, and other parts of Asia and the world… American banks in New York have growing numbers of Indians and Chinese in their executive ranks.” (Lee 1999). This was the zenith of regard for the United States across Asia and elsewhere.

Back to Nye, who wrote: “Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. That can be accomplished by coercion (‘sticks’), payment (‘carrots’) and attraction (‘honey’). The first two methods are forms of hard power, whereas attraction is soft power.” (Nye 2025). Australia, notably in the Pacific, enjoys advantages, in both senses of hard and soft. Wong in a landmark speech, ‘Securing Our Future’, to the Australian National University’s National Security College in April 2024 recognised this point: “Often, security discourses have artificially divided actions to reassure and to deter. The implication being that the role of diplomacy is exclusively soft persuasion, while the hard edge of the military is our only deterrent. But that thinking limits our potency when we have to maximise all the tools of national power.” (Wong 2024a). Further, she said: “Without credible military capability, the efficacy of diplomacy and economic integration are invariably diminished. And without ever more investment into diplomacy and engagement, the risk of military capabilities being called upon for conflict increases.” (Wong 2024a). Although the promised AUKUS ‘hard power’ of submarines is not be available for another 20 years, this is where the complementary ‘soft power’ of alliances and diplomacy become a vital, an actual strength of AUKUS, hidden behind the ‘credible military capability’.

Preparing for Government & Labor’s Style

Clayton argues: “Traditional Labor foreign policy has been described as being more internationalist, characterised by enhanced multilateralism, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.” (Clayton 2023: 325). Too much can be made of the contrast between the two major parties, however, as both have had strong interests in fostering strong relations with neighbours, in Asia and the Pacific. On the latter, climate change and the shifts and changes of the Liberal-National Party Governments, from Abbott to Morrison, were sometimes sources of tension, with one Pacific Islands Forum almost coming to grief on the issue due to ambivalent Australian attitudes. (Lyons 2019; Ide 2023; Moore 2024).

Interestingly in the lead-up to the May 2022 Australian election, foreign policy issues barely influenced voters. “Polling data showed that less than 1 per cent of Australians ranked [foreign policy] as their major issue for the campaign.” (Blackwell 2022: 621). A comprehensive study of polls and election materials of the major parties in 2022 led to the observation that “[i]nternational relations were also prominent throughout the campaign.” (Botterill & Walsh 2024). But not as a major vote mover, unlike earlier elections this century when border protection and defence, as aspects of international security, heavily registered with voters.

In Opposition, Labor was determined to defuse certain contentious issues. Albanese said a few months before the 2022 election: “Under my leadership, Labor offered bipartisan support for the Defence Strategic Update 2020, and for AUKUS and the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines.” (Albanese 2022). He blended domestic and discrete foreign policy points into this summation of Labor objectives:

1. Supporting a stronger Australian Defence Force.

2. Prioritising better and smarter cybersecurity.

3. Shoring-up our economic self-reliance.

4. Strengthening our communities and institutions.

5. Deepening our partnerships in the region and globally around the world.

6. Taking action on climate change. (Albanese 2022).

Point 3 indicated part of the appeal of AUKUS for Albanese and many of his then Shadow Ministerial colleagues – namely, the potential to build up domestic manufacturing capacity, in this traditionally highly unionised sector of the Australian economy.

Labor in office tends to be more interested in the United Nations and other international bodies. Several early indicative initiatives of the Albanese Government included the appointment of separate Ambassadors for Climate Change and for First Nations. The former appointment indicates that climate change and achieving CoP targets are relatively non-controversial on the Labor side.

Whenever a change of government occurs in Australia, there is always the continuation of pre-existing policies, together with a few innovations: “consistency and innovation are intertwined in policy development.” (Easson 2023: 82). ‘We can do better than the others’, whether in eloquence, competence, or both, is the gist of pitches for support.

Throughout this Government’s first term, statements such as this were uncontroversial: “…we want an open and inclusive region, based on agreed rules, where countries of all sizes can choose their own destiny. Countries want a prosperous, connected region, trading together at the epicentre of global economic growth, through a transparent system, where economic interdependence is not misused for political and strategic ends.” (Wong 2023). Wong argued that Australia seeks to influence “by being active, by exercising agency, and by contributing our efforts to the balance of power in our region – so no country dominates, and no country is dominated.” (Wong 2024a).

Consistently, Wong has stated: “We are investing in our engagement … because diplomacy is always our first line of defence, and key to shaping our region and world in support of our interests.” (Wong 2024c). And that “… our collective interest is that we will always be better off in a world where the rules are clear, mutually negotiated and consistently followed.” (Wong 2022).

In recent years, Australia’s major diplomatic engagements involved major fora including The Quad, AUKUS, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ANZUS ministerial meetings, APEC, the G20, G7, and the CoP summits. Working closely with the PM and Foreign Minister, the easing of trade tensions with China was driven by careful diplomatic engagement by Trade Minister Senator Don Farrell.

China

Clayton described the challenge of Australia’s China policy as defrosting the relationship. (Clayton 2023). Australian Trade Minister Senator Don Farrell was central to the defrosting of the relationship with China. This is one area of success. Yet, overall, with disputes in the South China Sea and Taiwan, “Australia, like the region, is largely hostage to calculation involving the United States and China. Australian diplomacy needs to be geared to conflict avoidance.” (P. Kelly 2022: 211). On the military build-up, Wong stated: “It is worrying that large-scale Chinese military operations in the Taiwan Strait have become a routine event. The risk of an accident, and potential escalation, is growing.” (Wong 2024a). The Prime Minister emphasised: “Our Government has put dialogue at the heart of our efforts to stabilise our relationship with China. We are not naive about this process, or its limitations.” (Albanese 2023b). The rapid, expanded buildup of China’s PLA and associated military material, the ‘wolf warrior’[2] rhetoric of its diplomats, its militarisation of disputed Islands in the South China Sea, the assertion of sovereignty over vast swathes of water with the revival of the ‘nine dash’ maritime borders,[3] prompted bipartisan support for increasing Australia’s hard power capacities. Australian rhetoric sounds realistic about on-going challenges: “China continues to modernise its military at a pace and scale not seen in the world for nearly a century with little transparency or assurance about its strategic intent.” (Wong 2023). Rudd in his analysis of contemporary Chinese political thought, and of the outlook of China’s most hardline communist leader since Mao, argues that supra nationalism, ideology, and military build-up under Xi Jinping go together. (Rudd 2024: 13-16). In this respect, the Foreign Minister has noted “China is going to keep being China.” (Wong 2023). She found a neat and compelling formula to express policy: “…the Albanese Government will be calm and consistent and continue to do as we have since coming to office: cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, manage our differences wisely, and above all else, engage in and vigorously pursue our own national interest.” (Wong 2023).

United States

Both the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister pledged fidelity to the US alliance. Wong in 2024 said: “… American leadership remains indispensable.” (Wong 2024a) and that “…at the heart of our traditional relationships is our alliance with the United States.” (Wong 2024c). But she also knows: “America has often been talked of as the indispensable power. It remains so. But the nature of that indispensability has changed.” (Wong 2023). This last, ambiguous point refers to the shifts in the balance of power in the Asia Pacific as well as shifts in American attention to the region.

The PM evinces a personal commitment to the alliance of western democracies and to the American alliance in particular. He endured barbs from conservative commentators for many years that he was really at heart an anti-American leftie; but he actually sees himself firmly in the Curtin-Hawke tradition on the US. He thinks former PM Paul Keating and former Foreign Minister Bob Carr are wrong on China. Albanese has actively countered internal ALP criticism, notably from Carr and Keating, deploying allies like Assistant Defence Minister Pat Conroy, elevated to Cabinet in 2024, to manage dissent internally and dampen down resistance to AUKUS in the ALP.

With President Trump returning to the White House at the end of Albanese’s first term, however, it looks like Trump’s personality makes for a foreign policy grittier than pretty. Early into Trump’s second term, America is trashing much of its soft power with zig-zag policy shifts, seemingly random tariff imposts, threats to allies (Greenland), and the like. According to a March 2025 poll by the respected Lowy Institute, only 36% of Australians express any level of “trust in the United States” – the lowest level in Lowy’s 21 years of annual polling. Most Australians (68%) are pessimistic about the next four years with Donald Trump as US president. (Lowy 2025). Naturally, the US pursues its national interest, as all countries do. But as New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said: “To cite Forrest Gump: Life under Trump is like a box of chocolates, because you never know what you’re going to get. Except that it’s a Pandora’s box. And they aren’t chocolates.” (Stephens 2025). Australia lives in more interesting times than it is used to. The conduct of Australian foreign policy with Trump’s erraticism makes it impossible to predict where we might be by 2028 — the time of the next Australian general and American presidential elections.

AUKUS

When AUKUS was first unveiled in 2021, most observers were taken by surprise: “In contrast to …continuities, some new developments caught both scholars and analysts off guard. The announcement of a totally unanticipated initiative in the form of the ‘AUKUS’ … trilateral agreement unveiled a centrepiece deal… And created shockwaves at the existing French deal to provide conventional vessels was unceremoniously jettisoned.” (Abbondanza & Wilkins 2022: 264). Prime Minister Morrison dubbed the agreement the “forever partnership” (Abbondanza & Wilkins: 271). Former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating scoffed at the so-called benefits saying: “eight submarines against China in 20 years’ time will be like throwing a handful of toothpicks at the mountain.” (Cited in Abbondanza & Wilkins: 272). The then head of the Asia Society, Kevin Rudd, critiqued AUKUS as leaving Australia “strategically naked for 20 years” during the wait for submarines. (Cited, Clayton 2023: 329).

In contrast, former diplomat and past Australian Secretary of the Department of Defence, Dennis Richardson, argued: “When we have these nuclear-powered submarines, they will be under Australian command and control as is the rest of the ADF. We will make our sovereign decisions about what capability we deploy or don’t deploy in any conflict. In acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, we are no more dependent on US technology than when we acquired the Joint Strike Fighter from the US. In that sense, the submarines do not constitute any historic break with the past. At no point in our history have we possessed independent defence industry capability. Therefore, we will always be dependent upon technology from other countries. The submarine is consistent with that history.” (Cited in P. Kelly 2022: 189). Historical evidence of nuclear-submarine project overruns in the US and UK, however, underscores the high risks associated with Australia’s reliance on timely and cost-effective delivery of AUKUS capabilities.

The sensitivity of the technology shared and developed on a trilateral basis, the complexity of associated logistical requirements, together with the high-level of required strategic trust is part of the challenge. Pillar 1, is the delivery of nuclear submarines. Pillar 2 is the “the still underdeveloped part of the agreement intended to drive cooperation on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, hyper-sonics, quantum computing, cyber, unmanned underwater vehicles, and electronic warfare.” (Edel 2023). This aspect of AUKUS fits with the Prime Minister’s instinct to develop local defence industry capability, but project management is incredibly complex and hard to master.

A potential AUKUS Pillar 3 relates to energy transition. Discussion now is focused on creating this new Pillar, associated with critical minerals, which opens up a whole other discussion.

Interestingly, Wong has argued that rather than standing apart, AUKUS complements other Australian policy: Understanding this “is a powerful corrective to critics of AUKUS who define it in isolation of our broader efforts.” (Wong 2024c). In expressing herself this way, Senator Wong alludes to the argument that the original AUKUS announcement by the Coalition was badly handled. In the Indo-Pacific region, Australian diplomatic missions were given zero notice before the announcement: An unfortunate signal as if this was the old Anglo Whities club being perpetuated, instead of an embrace of the critical need to bring more regional partners into a cooperative fan rework. The formal framing of policy matters.

The Quad and its Potential

The Quad is the diplomatic partnership between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Days after being sworn-in as Prime Minister, Albanese attended the second in-person Quad Leaders’ Summit in Japan, where for the first time he met his counterparts. (Rudd 2021). After this “triumph”[4] Albanese convened the next one in Australia a year later, with President Biden convening in the US the fourth Leaders’ Summit in the US in September 2024.

“Although the significance and potential of the Quad as a stabilising force in the Indo-Pacific remains debated, it certainly is an important grouping for Australian foreign policymakers.” (Clapton 2021: 548). The Quad, so far, is a discussion forum, tremendously useful to directly canvass opinion, but not a military pact. It has steered clear of aggressive posturing on some issues, notably with respect to the South China Sea. (Bradford & Emmers 2024).

Arguably, besides strengthening Australian-Japan ties, the most important impact for Australia of the Quad meetings has been the deepening of Australian-Indian relations, two countries which have never quite ‘hit it off’. After Albanese’s visit to India in March 2023, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Australia in May 2023, both receiving rapturous receptions. Prominent, ‘rising star’ Labor backbencher Andrew Charlton’s book Australia’s Pivot to India (Charlton 2023), launched by Albanese in September 2023, captured some of the optimism about improved relations. India is now the largest source of migrants to Australia, most of them highly skilled.

There has been talk of South Korea and, potentially The Philippines joining, hence the notion of Quad Plus. But this has so far not eventuated.

South East Asia

Since Whitlam’s prime ministership, it is traditional for Australian Prime Ministers to visit Indonesia at the beginning or early after their election. Because the second Quad leaders conference occurred immediately after he was elected, the Prime Minister visited Japan, where the Quad was held, and later to Indonesia. Early in her period as Foreign Minister, Senator Wong visited her birthplace in Malaysia and travelled to other countries in the region. Arguably, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have travelled more kilometres to more countries in the region and beyond than any other combination in Australian history. The prominent presence of a woman of Asian heritage as Foreign Minister is tangible evidence of Australia’s changing face as a nation, of importance to Australian diplomacy.

There were few if any significant differences expressed at ASEAN Regional Forum meetings or other fora between Australia and South East Asian countries. Disputes with China over its belligerent stances in the South China Seas have been mostly expressed behind closed doors.

The hosting of the Special ASEAN Regional Forum in Australia in 2024, as well as the commissioning in 2022 of former Macquarie Bank CEO as Special Envoy for Southeast Asia, marked a significant diplomatic initiative, indicating renewed strategic and economic priority to Australia’s ‘near abroad’.

Whereas ASEAN countries mostly felt it wise not to ‘formally’ take sides with growing tensions between the US and China – with Cambodia, Brunei and Myanmar more on the Chinese side – the reputation of American reliability is increasingly in question. Whereas Australia drew strength from its closeness to the US, and the leverage this provided as acting as friendly intermediary for Indonesia in particular, this looks more unpredictable under President Trump II.

Potentially, should American credibility continue to be undermined (by itself) regional concerns about the Quad and AUKUS might become more pronounced. But for Albanese’s government, so far, so good. Importantly, however, Australians need to understand “… Indonesia does not see the United States in the same way Australia does… Jakarta does not define an increased US military presence as necessarily benign or reliable for its own security. Indeed, the likelihood of a US-China conflict has led to a resurgent discussion among defence policymakers and analysts about Indonesia developing its own ‘anti-access’ and ‘area-denial’ strategy against both China and the United States to ensure the neutrality of its waterways and airspace during wartime.” (Laksmana 2024: 30). Indonesia (and India) has a history of ‘non-alignment’, of not choosing ‘sides’ during the cold war, and a prickly need as a nation to be taken seriously. At the time of writing, President Trump’s overall, punitive tariffs against Indonesia, threaten to drastically undermine US credibility and regard. This is another challenge for Australian policy: not to be damaged in the ‘crossfire’.

The Blue Pacific

In an address to the National Press Club in Canberra, the Foreign Minister stated this truism: “As a member of the Pacific family, our priority is to ensure the Blue Pacific remains peaceful, prosperous and equipped to respond to the challenges of our time.” (Wong 2023). Many Blue Pacific nations are only recently independent: For example, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu in 1978, Kiribati in 1979, and Vanuatu in 1980. In Senator Wong’s first six months as minister, she visited Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands Marshall Islands, Niue, Cook Islands, Nauru, French Polynesia, and Fiji twice. (Wong 2022).

The Solomon Islands’ security arrangements with the PRC remains of concern. (Blackwell 2022: 624). The Government, however, has been treading cautiously on this issue. In Opposition, then Labor Deputy Leader Richard Marles (in the Albanese Government, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence) wrote: “Our actions in the Pacific denote our place in the world, where we fall on the spectrum of internationally acknowledged leadership…”. He urged: “If Australia’s renewed interest in the Pacific is interpreted by the region as an attempt to keep China at bay, then it will be seen in a very cynical light.” He went on: “Australia has no right to expect a set of exclusive relationships with Pacific nations. They are perfectly free to engage on whatever terms they choose with China or, for that matter, any other country. Disputing this would be resented…” (Marles 2021: 78;79).

Labor has committed resources and targeted aid to the region. This is the projection of soft power. The Prime Minister noted: “In a region where more than one third of people live on less than $1000 a year, [Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme] workers send home an average $1500 a month boosting Pacific economies and lifting families out of poverty and filling urgent gaps in our workforce, including in aged care and regional communities.” (Albanese 2023c). The Prime Minister also observed: “That’s also the beauty of a team from Papua New Guinea taking part in the National Rugby League.” (Albanese 2023c). The funds for that came from the Australian Government. Pat Conroy, Minister for Defence Industry and Minister for Pacific Island Affairs, has travelled extensively for the Government throughout the Blue Pacific,

Prior to the 2022 election, Labor committed to a First Nations Ambassador and other policies to “embed First Nations perspectives in Australia’s international diplomacy.” (Australian Labor Party 2022). Wong argued: “Elevating First Nations’ perspectives will strengthen our connections across the world and in our region, especially across the Blue Pacific.” (Wong 2023). Though “…it may not be unfair to ask, what is a First Nations foreign policy, how do we achieve it, and what benefits does it bring to Australia?” (Blackwell 2022: 627). In sum, First Nation principles and the stand-alone Ambassador are potentially potent in projecting Australia’s empathy with other indigenous people, of importance to the Pacific especially, and in emphasising Australia’s respectful, multicultural credentials. (Brigg & Graham 2023). The jury is out on the impact and utility of this initiative.

Two ‘Far Away’ Conflicts

Worth mentioning briefly are two conflicts which attracted attention in Australia, namely Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza- Palestine conflict.

1.  Ukraine

Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Moscow had earlier annexed Crimea from Ukraine and seized parts of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, both in 2014. There is bi-partisan consensus that Australia ‘should’ assist the Ukrainian resistance through humanitarian and military aid. The Prime Minister in 2023 boasted: “… We are proudly one of the largest non-NATO contributors to [Ukraine’s] military and humanitarian needs.” (Albanese 2023c).

During the 2025 election campaign, there was a brief frisson of excitement when Albanese said he would consider limited troop deployment as part of an international peace-keeping force. But as his comments were qualified and vague, this controversy petered out on the campaign trail.

• Israel-Gaza-Palestine

On October 7^th, 2023, more Jews were killed in a single day since the Holocaust when Hamas terrorists from Gaza crossed over the Israeli border and slaughtered every Jew they could, killing 1200 (including some foreign nationals), and taking 251 hostages. This led to the Gaza war and a humanitarian crisis both of which, at the time of writing, are ongoing.

Within Australia, rampant incidences of antisemitism, as well as instances of Islamophobia followed. Community stress in parts of Sydney and Melbourne was high. The crisis further exposed sharp divisions within Australian political discourse, with progressive critiques (including the Greens) accusing the government of insufficient condemnation of Israel, and conservatives criticising perceived equivocation on Hamas terror. Holding a ‘balanced’ view, reflecting sympathy for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, support for Israel’s right to self-defence and the release of all hostages, urging the purge of Hamas from the government of Gaza, and dealing with the timely delivery of aid, tested everyone. The Albanese Government was slow in appointing official envoys to fight antisemitism and Islamophobia (in August and October 2024 respectively). The Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister seemed to dissatisfy key sectors of both the Jewish and Muslim communities. With the former, the decision to annul in October 2022 the Morrison Government’s decision in December 2018 to eventually (it was no stronger than that) move Australia’s Embassy to West Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, was announced without warning. The designation at the same time of the West Bank as the Occupied Territories also met criticism, but this nomenclature has been long-standing Labor policy and that of most of Australia’s allies, with the exception of the United States.

After the Gaza War broke out, Prime Minister Albanese stated: “Australia recognises that Israel has the right to defend itself – and the way it does so matters. Which is why we have called on Israel to respect international humanitarian law.” (Albanese, 2023c). But this wordy formulation antagonised, as if Israel needed to be cautioned. Wong expressed frustration about the stalled peace process, stating: “The failures of this approach by all parties over decades – as well as the Netanyahu Government’s refusal to even engage on the question of a Palestinian state – have caused widespread frustration.” (Wong, 2024a). Israel’s global standing is damaged by the presence of diehard extremists in its Cabinet.

Wong’s most wounding comment came in a newspaper article where she penned: “While some don’t hear our condemnation of Israel Defence Forces’ attacks on civilians or aid workers, others wrongly claim we enable Hamas by insisting Israel follow the rules of war.” (Wong 2024b). Wong’s statement — intended as balanced diplomacy — nonetheless inadvertently implied moral equivalence between IDF actions and Hamas terrorism, as if the IDF had the morals of the Wagner Group.[5] Words matter and a careless formulation should have been better expressed. An investigation by Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, as the Special Adviser to the Australian Government on Israel’s response to the IDF strikes on the NGO World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid delivery in Gaza and the killing of an Australian, Ms Zomi Frankcom, concluded inter alia that that “the IDF strike on the WCK aid workers was not knowingly or deliberately directed against the WCK.” (DFAT 2024: 10). This was only one instant of loss of life by an aid worker. Australia and other Governments will press Israel after the war’s end for a full investigation of the overall conduct of the war, as Israel has always done subsequent to past conflicts. Labor’s vote in the UN in December 2024 for a “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” was criticised as undermining Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas. (M. Kelly 2024).

On the eve of the 2025 election, Peter Wertheim, co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, explained the differences between Liberal and Labor: “You can’t say that the Labor government has been derelict in its duty to the Jewish community, or that it has been completely oblivious to or uncaring about antisemitism. That would not be true. They’ve given us funding for security as well as new laws, and they’ve taken quite a lot of initiative over the past 18 months. But there’s always this perception that it’s not quite as strong as it should be, and if you compare the responses on foreign policy issues, there are some significant differences between the two main parties.” (Quoted in Segall & Malta 2025). Albanese and Wong held off implementing ALP policy to ‘recognise’ Palestine, but this cannot be far off in the second term, probably with ‘riders’ that Hamas be excluded from any Palestine government, together with security guarantees. It is likely that, overwhelmingly, Jewish voters in bigger numbers than ever before cast ballots for the Liberals in May 2025.

At the 2025 election, an avowedly Muslim Party, in the electorates they contested, failed to win a majority of the Muslim vote (Rifi 2025). But their votes in the high teens in several electorates in western Sydney indicated frustration with Labor not taking a harsher stand about Israel in Gaza. The Jewish vote was decisively relevant in the federal electorates of Goldstein and Macnamara, both in Victoria. In the former, the Liberal candidate and former MP won against the Teal independent. (Visontay 2025). The outcome in Macnamara was also important in sending the Greens backward and preventing them from taking the seat off Labor. (Solomon 2025). This too, as with the next section, merits detailed consideration unavailable in this necessarily short overview chapter.

Key Criticisms

Besides debates on Israel-Palestine, the main criticisms of the Albanese Government’s foreign policy centre on the government not doing enough in defence preparations (Sheridan 2025) and, from a different direction, concerning AUKUS and scepticism about American intentions associated with the US-Australian alliance (e.g., White 2022). The subtitle of Shortis’ 2021 book Our Exceptional Friend reads “Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States”. This succinctly states her perspective. She asserts: “We are allowed to demand better, even if we don’t know exactly what better looks like. It’s enough to know that it doesn’t look like this. And to know that the long, entangled thread of our shared, human histories might point to other possibilities. That, I think is where hope lives – radical, defiant hope.” (Shortis 2021: 233; see also Shortis 2025). Such hazy analysis is matched by Behm who writes: “We leave neither footprints nor fingerprints on any of the major issue confronting the regional or global communities.” Unhelpfully, he goes on: “Once we have settled on a clear set of interests and values – clarifying who we are and what we stand for – we need to address the four principal pathologies that affect our strategic mindset: racism, misogyny, isolation and insecurity (the principal indicator of which is the cultural cringe).” (Behm 2022: 285). Such critics, White, and Shortis in particular, are significant as they reflect broad, elite sentiment in the academy.

Of more potent and acute import are analyses that regret the lack of scrutiny of and debate about AUKUS’s costs and delivery (Dunley 2023), and the risky, inherent uncertainty associated with Australia’s ‘bet’ on American and UK capabilities to deliver on time, within budget. (O’Connor et al. 2023). Australia is also gambling that no matter what, America will honour commitments. The America First antics in the first months of the Trump II Presidency give pause. (Curran 2025). Such critiques are worthy of separate and exhaustive analysis.

Conclusion

Watching ‘what Labor has done’ in the past three years yields the conclusion that the Albanese Government has had a thought-out perspective on the utilisation of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power. Senator Wong has articulated a coherent perspective. Policy and outcomes were mostly effective and targeted in befriending Blue Pacific countries, though some problem areas, the Solomon Islands notably, remain on ‘watch’. Relations with most Asian countries are strong and mostly warm, with the single exception of Myanmar. The China relationship is out of deep freeze, defrosted, and nearly all trade restrictions are lifted. That is a singular success., The Albanese Government deserves credit here, but so too do successive Australian governments in standing up to bullying. The swearing-in of President of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto in October 2024, introduces a potentially mercurial figure at the top. But, early days, Australian relations are warm (as they were with President Jokowi) and there are no troubling signs – other than that President Trump’s tariff and protectionist policies and ignorance of Indonesian interests which might cause counter-reactions of consequence for Australia.

The contest between China and the US and its associated tensions, together with the fickleness of US policy and personnel is a reminder, as Allan Gyngell once said, that “the world is a messy place” (cited in Albanese 2023c). As mentioned above, the unprecedented decline in public confidence in the United States by Australians and nearly everywhere else in the Indo-Pacific significantly complicates Australia’s diplomatic and strategic calculations, making policy formulation for any Australian Government especially fraught with the Trump administration.

We are a long way from the America Singapore’s leader Harry Lee described, as earlier cited. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the government itself will need to develop stronger and deeper expertise and deployment of clever personnel to match these new challenges. Australia, effectively, seeks to balance the rise of China with an even deeper alliance with the US. This is aimed at avoiding war. (Rudd 2022: 1-18). The future of key treaty commitments, particularly AUKUS, require critical attention to delivery of outcomes. A menu of choices is no substitute, especially where there are optimistic, ill-costed assumptions. A ticking danger for Australia is to rely too much on the new-generation nuclear ‘subs’. US and UK experience suggest likely, major cost overruns. Should the shortage of nuclear engineers in all three AUKUS partners persist, for example, design and construction and delivery will languish.

There is further counsel worth heeding: Owen Harries urged Australian analysts to understand that all treaties are conditional. He wrote: “As statesmen as diverse as Bismarck, Gladstone and Teddy Roosevelt had cause to stress, the reserve rebus sic stantibus – ‘while the same conditions apply’ – is always silently understood in every treaty. In other words, no firm and unconditional guarantees are ever available in international politics.” (Harries 2007: 101). There are no timeless warranties even if formally inked on archive-quality paper.

A big issue for a Labor government which prioritises multilateralism and the global order as a shield for middle and lower order powers, is the petering demise of the UN. This relates to the alarming rise in the number and strength of authoritarian states, and the impact this has on UN processes, institutions, and agencies. The patent failure and ineffectiveness of Antonio Guterres as UN Secretary-General is a major defect in the diplomatic matrix and stands in marked contrast to someone like Kofi Annan (1938-2018; UN SG, 1997-2006}. This significantly complicates Australia’s reliance on multilateralism, necessitating a careful calibration of diplomatic strategy in an increasingly fragmented global order, testing Australia’s expertise and capabilities.

Allan Gyngell, who died in 2023, wrote at the end of his opus on Australian foreign policy: “I have argued… that the motivating force of Australia’s international engagement has been fear of abandonment. For some, that will seem too timid and unheroic a motivation for a great country’s foreign policy. But it has also been the driver of one of the most consistent and commendable aspects of Australia’s worldview — rejection of isolationism; its conviction that Australia needs to be active in the world in order to shape it, and that gathering combinations of allies, friends and ad hoc partners is the best way of doing this. That will be a tradition worth defending in the years ahead.” (Gyngell 2017: 363). The job of Australian politicians, diplomats, the whole foreign policy apparatus, is never done – especially where vital interests are at stake, contested, and worth securing. The Albanese Government grasps the point. The question to be resolved in the next term is whether its team is equal to the challenge.

Author’s Acknowledgement

I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts from Shane Easson, Luke Foley, Catherine Harding, Mike Kelly, Alex Polson and Daniel Street; and to Anna Oldmeadow of Senator Wong’s office for sending certain background material. All statements, conclusions and mistakes, however, are entirely mine.

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