Anthony Albanese will be feted when he heads to the US, but White House hard heads may be wondering about the seriousness of Australia’s defence commitments.
The Biden White House will fuss over the Australian leader. It has to. And not just because protocol guarantees it, or because the visit is the reward for Biden’s no-show at the Sydney Quad leaders meeting in May.
You can be sure that the prime minister’s rhetoric in Washington will memorialise Curtin as architect of the Australian-US alliance. The Americans won’t mind that, either. But the hard-headed in the West Wing will be examining the level of Australian defence spending. The new expenditures in the Albanese government’s first budget were funded by other spending cuts.and consequent further inquiries conveniently allowed the government to delay budgetary decisions.
But as historian David Lowe concluded, “there was little in 1953 to suggest that the armed forces had expanded in a way which prepared them to mobilise and embark quickly for the Middle East or another destination”.The entire exercise, Lowe noted, was carried out in “fits and starts”, without effective bureaucratic co-ordination. Instead, Menzies’ grand “call” was beset, eventually, by “second thoughts”.
To date, there has been no additional funding for Defence beyond what the Coalition had been planning since the 2016 white paper. This, says Hellyer, is “defence policy on autopilot”. The question is whether in the Australian Defence Department there is a deliberate policy to go slow to hedge againstRegardless, the level of Australian defence spending is something the White House may raise in the franker private talks that always accompany the public fanfare of a state visit.
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