Australian centre-right politicians are very fond of quoting Winston Churchill. One of the last pieces of advice that great wartime leader gave before finally stepping down was that: ‘We must never get out of step with the Americans – never.’
Today, it is striking how much leaders in Australia have diverged from their US counterparts.
Take foreign policy. Tony Abbott, now on the international speakers’ circuit, likes to use very bellicose rhetoric when discussing Ukraine and indeed many other trouble spots. In recent weeks, our former Prime Minister has encouraged bombing Iran and wants to send Australian military ships and jets to that part of the world.
But JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is much more circumspect. He has said bluntly, ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.’ Though supportive of Israel, the Iraq veteran is more reluctant to get America involved in another war in the Middle East.
It is an attitude he shares with his running mate. John Howard may still say he ‘does not regret’ the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and that the Afghanistan debacle was ‘not entirely a failure’. But this is in stark contrast to the way Donald Trump talks about those terrible wars – ‘the single worst decision ever made’, ‘throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest’ etc.
The new American right increasingly looks at the last 30+ years of failed interventions – from Somalia to Serbia to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Afghanistan to Ukraine – and believes they are the product of a fundamentally flawed ideology.
Their new stance is not ‘isolationism’, but one which stresses realism, rather than the utopian dreams of the George W Bush era and earlier. It is one which recognises that not every bad regime or godawful ethnic dispute on the planet is a re-run of the second world war or the Cold War and shouldn’t be treated as such.
JD Vance, as he often does, sums things up pithily: ‘There is nothing radical about having a strong national security so that when we go to war we punch, and we punch hard, but being cautious and not trying to get involved in any far-flung corner of the world. Sometimes, it is just none of our business, and we ought to stay out of it.’
Trade policy is another area where the Australian right is increasingly out of sync with the Americans.
‘Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,’ Trump recently told the crowd at a campaign stop in Michigan. ‘The most beautiful world in the English language is tariff…’ he told the Economic Club of Chicago a few days ago. One can well imagine Peter Costello’s head exploding when hearing stuff like that.
Yes, the Orange Man’s language is typically bombastic. But he is nevertheless right that a serious reappraisal of America’s trade agreements was long overdue. During his first time in the White House, Trump changed the bipartisan consensus on trade in Washington. If he gets a second term, his great big, beautiful tariff wall will only get higher.
In Canberra, no such reassessment has taken place. We remain ideologically stuck in the 80s and early 90s when questions about trade policy were supposedly solved for all time.
There is perhaps no better illustration of this out of date thinking than the agreement we signed with China on June 17, 2015 – the same day a flamboyant New York businessman came down the escalators in Manhattan promising to re-industrialise America.
Under that agreement we allow close to 100 per cent of Chinese manufactured goods to be imported duty free. So long as that continues, our country will never have a serious manufacturing industry.
Such a policy is neither economically sensible nor geopolitically wise as everyone from Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Robert Gordon Menzies could have told you. Yet we ignore this key issue and instead fret about whether Chinese leaders in Beijing will decide to have our lobster and wine for dinner.
On immigration, the US and Australian right are also dividing.
It is true we have been better in recent times at preventing unauthorised arrivals crossing the Timor Sea than Americans have been at the Rio Grande. Trump was elected for the first time to rectify this. However, our success at ‘stopping the boats’, has been used as an excuse to justify an excessively high legal immigration intake. As a result, in many ways, we are now in a worse position than the Americans. Our universities, cities, and real estate markets have been completely transformed.
While there have been some moves to reduce numbers, the has not been a recognition that the reliance on mass immigration in and of itself is a structural defect of our economy, not a benefit.
No amount of earnest talk about the need to inculcate ‘Australian values’ or minor adjustments will improve social cohesion if such high numbers continue. As Mark Krikorian, an influential advisor to the Trump-Vance ticket, has long stressed – the best immigration policy today is for it to be ‘low and slow’. This is the direction the Republican Party of the future is heading.
The above is not an argument that Australia must always adopt the same policies as America. But it is a plea, particularly to Liberal Party types, to take more seriously the ideas of the new American right. In many ways they reflect a wiser older conservativism. They have better solutions to today’s problems than the open borders liberalism that the centre-right in Australia has adopted since at least the end of the Cold War.
Left-wing Baby Boomers like to overly celebrate changes they made to social policy, overlook any downsides, and imagine they were the only ones who ever considered questions about family life, and one should live.
But the Australian right has a similar attitude when it comes to Hawke-Keating-Howard era on questions on foreign policy, trade, and immigration. It is long past time that for that policy framework to be upended. The torch is being passed to a new generation. The times they are a-changin’.
Dan Ryan is executive director of The National Conservative Institute of Australia
