Will China set up base in Australia's backyard? Mark Schiefelbein/POOL/AFP/Getty Images
Australians, on the whole, are a conservative lot. Since the end of the Second World War, they have only voted for a change of government seven times — on average, once in every four elections. And throughout that entire period, spanning almost 80 years, the Australian Labor Party ruled for only 26 years. The conservative Liberal-National coalition has won seven of the past nine federal elections.
However, on the rare occasions Labor did win federally, it was when it offered a meaningful alternative to the Coalition. In the 1972, 1983, and 2007 elections, the ALP presented big ideas to an electorate ready for change — and won. By contrast, when the ALP tried to pass itself off as Coalition-lite, voters opted for the full-strength option.
The next federal elections, scheduled for 21 May, could break the mould. Despite some early hiccups, and an apparent lack of enthusiasm among voters for its leader, Anthony Albanese, Labor’s strong poll position has so far held. Labor comfortably leads the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis 54% to 46%.
Remarkably, this is despite the fact that Labor’s election pitch can be boiled down to being nicer and more competent than the incumbents. Gone are its serious plans to reform the tax system, which increasingly favours high income earners and the asset-wealthy. Although Labor promises to increase the share of renewable energy, coal exports will not be touched. On foreign policy and national security, the major parties’ platforms are almost identical. So why is Labor still looking poised to win?
For one thing, the public has clearly tired of the government and its responsibility-shirking leader. Historically, though, this hasn’t been enough. Enthusiasm for the Coalition hit rock-bottom ahead of the 2019 elections, after successive internal coups removed two election-winning prime ministers in three years. Yet the Coalition still won. This time, however, circumstances may have conspired against another Morrison miracle.
The most difficult thing about governing, according to the British PM Harold Macmillan, was “events, dear boy, events”. And “events” may finally be on Labor’s side. All Albanese has to do is grab the popcorn and watch.
As a rule, Australian voters tend to see the ALP as stronger on health, education, and social services. The Coalition tends to poll better on national security and economic management. Unfortunately for Labor, while the former strengths win state elections, the latter issues appear more decisive in winning federal elections.
Coming into this election, the Coalition has again campaigned heavily on its national security and economic management record. It has sought to paint itself as the David that stood up to the Chinese Goliath — by, for example, introducing tough anti-interference laws, calling for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, signing up to the AUKUS alliance, and committing to substantial increases to defence spending. It also claims to have delivered strong economic results, such as historically low levels of unemployment, despite the ravages of the pandemic.
The Coalition’s election attack ads, under the slogan “It won’t be easy under Albanese”, routinely denigrate Labor’s national security and economic credentials. They claim that Albanese would be “soft on China”, extending earlier smears that sought to present Labor as “Beijing’s pick” in the election. Morrison even called ALP deputy leader, Richard Marles, a “Manchurian candidate” in February. The Coalition’s ads also highlight Albanese’s earlier support for unpopular tax reforms and his lack of economic experience in government.
How fortuitous for Labor, then, that two unrelated events, both occurring in the middle of the election campaign, have severely undermined the government’s national security and economic management narrative. The first is the 19 April security agreement between China and Solomon Islands, an archipelagic country of around 650,000 people located approximately 2,000km to Australia’s northeast. Although the agreement is secret and its final wording unknown, a draft version was leaked by local opponents and published on Twitter in March. It caused a political storm across the entire region, especially in Australia.
Under the draft agreement, Solomon Islands could request policing and military assistance from China. If the Solomon Islands government consents, China could also “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”. Although permanent bases are not mentioned, many analysts have suggested that the agreement opens the door to China establishing an operations base for its navy, allowing it to potentially block shipping routes between Australia and the US, and across the wider South Pacific.
While other observers, more familiar with the Solomon Islands context, strongly disputed the likelihood of a Chinese military base in the country, Australia’s election campaign was set alight. In a country already anxious about China’s growing power, the agreement seemed to confirm the most alarmist security predictions for a region politicians like to call Australia’s “patch” or “backyard”. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong pounced, calling it “the worst failure of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific since the end of World War Two”. Albanese also called it a “massive foreign policy failure”. Both blamed the agreement on the Coalition’s mismanagement of the relationship with Solomon Islands and other Pacific countries. Wong pinpointed Australia’s declining aid disbursements to the country since the Coalition took over in 2013.
Wong’s claims are obviously hyperbolic. Experts argued that Australia’s influence in the region should not be exaggerated, and that the agreement was also motivated by domestic political considerations in Solomon Islands. Additionally, Wong’s claim that aid declined under the Coalition was also judged inaccurate.
Nonetheless, Labor’s punches had the government rattled, with Morrison struggling to defend his record in the Pacific. He was not helped by a fair bit of exaggeration from his own side, including Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s statement that the Solomon Islands could become Australia’s “little Cuba”, and Defence Minister Peter Dutton claiming he now expected “the Chinese to do all they can”. Worse, from the Coalition’s perspective, a survey has found that 72% of voters were “concerned” or “very concerned” about the agreement. The Coalition’s lead over Labor on national security narrowed dramatically from almost 30% in August 2021 to 14% in April 2022.
To make matters even worse for the Coalition, in early May, Australia’s independent central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, raised interest rates for the first time in 11 years to combat the growing problem of inflation. The RBA’s decision exposed the deep holes in the government’s economic management success story. Sure, unemployment is low, but underemployment has been worsening for decades, reflecting the fact that many of the jobs created in Australia are casual or part-time. Wage growth has also been stagnating for almost a decade, such that rapidly rising living costs have become a major political issue. Inflation has reared its head in Australia, as in many other countries, but the cause is not a wage-push, as in the Seventies; it is disruption to supply.
Rate rises are, therefore, only going to compound the cost-of-living crisis for many Australian families by making their mortgage and credit card repayments more expensive without an offsetting increase in pay. The problem for the Coalition is that many of the worst-affected are likely to live in the exact same outer-suburban seats it needs to hold in order to stay in government. Tellingly, the rate hike and rising inflation have sparked the first substantive fight between the major parties in this campaign, over how much wages should rise.
None of this is to say that Labor has a clear plan for addressing the cost-of-living crisis — but it’s clear that neither does the government. If Labor wins on 21 May, it should thank its good fortune, not its campaign managers.
Shahar Hameiri is a Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia
ShaharHameiri 
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SubscribeIt seems to me as an Australian expat in London that there is little to choose between the current government of Australia and the opposition. Both have succumbed to the Culture Wars as defeatists and are “woke” pietists. “Cry the beloved country” indeed! Bring back the larrrikins!
Based on Australia’s truly pathetic response to the Great Covid Scam, they are ripe for Chinese conquest and enslavement. Ditto New Zealand.
I’m fairly sure that history will record Australia’s response to the pandemic as one of the most successful in the world. A very small minority of people think otherwise. I disagreed with lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations, but Australia’s experience (with the possible exception of the state of Victoria) has been that our pleasant lives continued much as before and comparatively very few people died.
Where is the laugh button Russell? We saw the beatings of citizens and the ‘containment camps’ and the inability of severely allergic citizens to get vaccine waivers.
Gosh yes you’re right Lesley! Who cares about the hundreds of thousands of dead in the U.K. and their grieving relatives compared to the Australian experience. Moaning Minnies who should just shut up and look at photos. Laughing my head off I am.
OK, I’m just sayin’ … we’ll see how history judges Australia’s response. There were mistakes with quarantine etc. but I’m sure they will be seen as minor mistakes. The big picture is our lives went along pretty well, and very few died. The conspiracy stuff will fade away.
You make it sound like a Test Match. I was mainly referring to the thuggery of your Police and the overtly coercive attitude of the authorities in general.
A ‘joke’ circulating around England at the time was that we shouldn’t forget that not only did we ‘transport’ convicts to Australia, but also the Warders, hence the problem!
When police are challenged by demonstrators they respond – I don’t think Australian police are any more thuggish than average, and a lot less than some. Ditto your remark about overtly coercive authorities … sure, that’s just what most visitors to Australia think, not.
The joke about convicts & warders stretches things a bit too far. The days of convicts & warders was a long, long time ago, and lots of ‘free’ settlers came along with them. If I trace back far enough in my family tree I find a convict (I prefer the term juvenile delinquent, given his age!) and a guard. But that’s 200 years ago. A little more recently, and of interest to the kind of country Australia is today, I think more of my grandmother, who came out of an orphanage in the east end of London, set sail for a chance of a better life in an unknown place on the other side of the world, knowing she would never see ‘home’ again, and made a good life for herself. Those are the kind of people, in their masses, who formed the character of modern Australia. People who gave up all they knew and took a chance for a better life – in their heads they already had a sense of freedom and new opportunities. In the orphanage, my grandmother was trained to be a servant (cooking and sewing) the number one occupation of women in Britain at the time, but she didn’t want to be anyone’s servant, she worked in a factory ’till she stepped on the boat to come to Australia. It’s people like her who formed the attitudes of modern Australians, not people who would meekly be coerced. One wonders at the soul of the country where so many stayed on to go on being servants.
And hundreds of thousands more dead in the U.K. counts for nothing in comparison?
Arnaud you are indeed taking equivalence to extremes.
Hoist on your own petard I think.
The UK only ‘scored’ about 160K, not “hundreds of thousands”, despite the heroic efforts of the institutionally dysfunctional national treasure, otherwise known as the NHS.
Hmm. “Was when it offered a meaningful alternative to the Coalition.” Sorry, not buying that.
1972, 1983 and 2007 Labor won because the Conservatives were dumped by electoral gravity. You can only stay up for so long before you annoy enough people who will turf you out. In all three elections the Coalition was on its last legs and I would argue that 1972 was the only time Labor went big with policies, and they were afforded that luxury because the Coalition had defied electoral gravity for 23 years courtresy of The Split and, with a hopeless PM, were begging to be put out of our misery. The other two had Hawke surfing into government on his personal popularity and Fraser’s wood duck governmen and a recession. And Rudd did everything possible to avoid startling the herd.
PS: When Hawke was elected I was playing cricket at Exmouth and playing skolling games in the lunch break. Sorry, luncheon adjournment. Serious voters were we.
PPS: Good to see Unherd get its comments system back on track.
I disagree. Hawke had clearly different policies to Fraser & Howard’s – for one thing we would get a proper national health scheme back, and a totally different approach to industrial relations. Rudd too offered quite a change: Howard wouldn’t budge on climate change, where Rudd promised and did sign the Kyoto Protocol, Howard would not say sorry to Indigenous people, Rudd did, Rudd said he would get rid of the worst parts of Howard’s industrial relations ‘reforms’, and he did. They were real contrasts in direction compared to our current choice.
They were Labor bread and butter. The apology and climate change are garnish to the hip pocket nerve. And promising to wind back WC was hardly Rudd going out on a limb.
Can you really look at this election and say that climate change is garnish? Obviously to many people (maybe not you or I) it’s a major issue and one that clearly ranges the parties along a spectrum: Nationals, Liberals, Teals, ALP, Greens. It may be the deciding issue, this election.
One thing the author didn’t mention was the whole “me too” thing. As George Floyd was to #BlackLivesMatter, so Brittany Higgins & Grace Tame were to #MeToo in Australia. Poor old Scott Morrison just couldn’t get the ‘correct’ tone and has been made a sort of scapegoat for all the issues women have in the workplace. The Teals will peel away votes from Liberal male candidates just on the gender issue alone. It’s an issue that just hasn’t gone away.
Australians have managed to balance the whole “apologise for the past” with “standing up for ourselves” thing. Agree or disagree with this, but they’ve made the right choice with AUKUS, and if some Aborigines feel better at the same time, then I for one am not the slightest bit worried.
There are some cracking films about Australia’s heroism in Vietnam being made at the moment too.
I just hope we manage to help them get those fleet submarines on time and on budget. Even 6 would be good.
Surely you mean bitter not better, or have I missed something?
As to Australia’s fighting record no one would doubt that from ‘ Breaker Morant’ onwards it has been superlative. Thus the astonishment at their draconian response to this Covid nonsense. Slouch Hats and Masks do not fit well together.
Better. Not every apology is the very worst thing ever. A WW2 Japanese pilot apologised for burning American forests during one of their only “successful” long-range air raids, and Reagan’s response was “thankyou, come and visit us again”. Western Civilisation did not collapse, and neither did Japanese civilisation either. If apologies for the past were always wrong, we would never have wiped out the slave trade.
As for COVID, it all depends on how many vaccines they bought and when. If they messed up like New Zealand, then they are in the do-do. Even so, they’ve done the right thing in sticking up to China and stopping mass-migration. Nations make mistakes but can still possess backbone.
Thanks for clearing that up.
They used to have a White Australia Act, but that was repealed many years ago.
When I was last there in 2018, based on empirical evidence, I thought they had probably already ‘lost’ the immigration battle.
If you are concerned about the extinction of the white race, immigration laws will not help- white families must have more babies. It is as simple as that. Families, not lawmakers, are the answer. If families don’t expand then whites (and the Japanese also, given their birth rates) will diminish rapidly in number.
White Australia was an unofficial name for discriminatory immigration practices supported widely but especially by unions and the Labor Party. There was no Act by that name.
In effect though, it was the same as the US Chinese Exclusion Act, which was an actual Act.
It echoes the original political camps in Australian parliament at Federation, the Protectionists vs the Free Traders.
Thank you for correcting me.
Oh go on. Let’s hear about how Australians stop at traffic lights again, unlike South Africa where it’s considered mad.
Labor’s case for Government incompetence rests on them not having been in federal government themselves for 9 years. Maybe the electorate will think fondly of the labor state governments Draconian lockdowns and think a Labor-Greens coalition is just the ticket to deal with rampant Chinese expansion. Or maybe it’s not even an issue and what the public really wants is more wind farms and fewer power stations.
Anyway:
Your numbers for election wins and losses would make more sense if you hadn’t omitted the fact that a federal term in Australia is 3 years max and often shorter.
Given the frequency of elections state and federal, Australia’s stability is quite remarkable.
Yes indeed, this is becoming a farce, perhaps deliberately.
Xi Jinping will be very pleased to see the ALP elected.