Anthony Albanese to champion ‘Australian independence’ within US alliance

By Stephen Dziedzic

Anthony Albanese will use a speech lionising Labor Prime Minister John Curtin to champion Australian independence within the US alliance, saying the legendary wartime leader is remembered “not just because he looked to America” but because he “spoke for Australia”.

The speech comes at a delicate moment in Australia’s key strategic relationship, as the federal government grapples with an unpredictable White House, along with uncertainties over the Administration’s tariffs, the AUKUS pact, and America’s trajectory under Donald Trump.

On Saturday night the Prime Minister will deliver a speech at the John Curtin Research centre marking the 80th anniversary of the former Prime Minister, who is often called the “father” of the Australia-US alliance.

Successive Labor Prime Ministers have claimed the Alliance as a signature achievement for ALP foreign policy, and have lavished praise on Curtin for turning to America in the wake of the United Kingdom’s catastrophic defeat in Singapore in 1942.

While Mr Albanese will praise the Alliance as a “pillar” of Australian foreign policy and the nation’s “most important defence and security partnership” he will also say that it was “product” of Curtin’s leadership and “not the extent of it.”

“Curtin’s famous statement that Australia ‘looked to America’ was much more than the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another, or swapping an alliance with the old world for one with the new,” he’s expected to say.

“It was a recognition that Australia’s fate would be decided in our region.”

The Prime Minister will also say that Curtin recognised that Australia realised that its security “could not be outsourced to London, or trusted to vague assurances from Britain.”

“We needed an Australian foreign policy anchored in strategic reality, not bound by tradition,” he will say.

The Prime Minister will also praise Curtin for withstanding pressure from both Roosevelt and Churchill to send Australian troops returning from the Middle East to Burma, rather than back home to defend Australia.

He’ll say if the US and UK had got their way “hundreds if not thousands of Australians would have been killed, or taken prisoner” as Japanese forces took Burma, and John Curtin’s assertion of sovereignty prevented “a disaster every bit as crushing to national morale as the fall of Singapore.”

The Prime Minister will also seek to frame his government as the inheritor of Curtin’s economic agenda, comparing the government’s moves to bolster manufacturing to Curtin’s wartime industrial program.

While the Albanese government has doubled down on the AUKUS pact and its ambitious plan to develop nuclear powered submarines with the United States, it has also expressed deep frustration over the Trump Administration’s Liberation Day tariffs, pushed back against Washington’s demand that Australia radically increase defence spending and fretted privately about the impact of the massive cuts to US aid programs.

And while Mr Albanese has had three phone calls with Donald Trump he is yet to have a face-to-face meeting with the US President after Mr Trump departed the G7 in Canada early ahead of US strikes on Iran.

‘Easily the most significant’ speech

Professor James Curran from the University of Sydney told the ABC the speech was “easily the most significant” one Mr Albanese had delivered in office.

“It’s significant not just for the way in which Albanese invokes the Curtin legend, but the time in which he is doing it – when Australia is again under significant pressure from a great power to adopt policy courses not necessarily in Australia’s interests,” he said.

“He says Curtin’s wartime leadership was fundamentally about the defence of Australian sovereignty, that it was about safeguarding Australia’s security in the Pacific, and that Curtin, like other Australia leaders before him, was all too aware that great powers can play fast and loose with Australian interests. That it was simply not an option to rely on assurances from London or Washington as the basis for making Australian policy.”

Professor Curran said Mr Albanese was using the Curtin story to send a signal to both Washington and to Australians that “being in a close alliance does not mean you cannot stand up for Australian self-respect and self-regard.”

“(Also) that leadership is as much about tending to the domestic hearth and what we have built here as it is in safeguarding the continent’s security,” he said.

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