“Albanese has railed against the neoliberal movement to abandon domestic manufacturing in favour of imports… He is determined that we will once again be a country that makes things,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
THE longer Anthony Albanese remains in The Lodge, the more difficult it is to decide just how complete is his mastery of the prime ministerial demands.
Does he just look good compared to his awful predecessor (and his current Opposition Leader)? Or does he fulfil what a major defence contractor friend asserted confidentially last week: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”.
All we can say for sure is that more than a year into his prime ministership he doesn’t appear to have put a foot wrong.
We can agree that he has a pretty strong team of individual ministers, starting with Penny Wong, who leads his Senate team the way Sam Kerr runs the Mathilda forwards. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is one of the better economic comptrollers since Paul Keating snapped the budget reins; Don Farrell has exceeded all expectations in Trade; and Tony Burke is conducting parliamentary business with the grace and charm of an antipodean Simon Rattle.
They all work together (so far) like a team headed for the premiership, while Albo himself is leading the show in the great international councils with a natural assurance that eschews the inherent pomposity of the old (and absurd) inspection of the guards and handshakes for the cameras.
But the area of greatest surprise is the way he and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles have turned what all the defence experts expected to be his Achilles heel into a potential gold-medal winner. It is an exercise in subtlety that combines two pillars of Labor’s aspirations into one that no one expected from either man.
Albanese has railed against the neoliberal movement to abandon domestic manufacturing in favour of imports long before the Libs took the final decision to shut down the Australian car industry.
He is determined that we will once again be a country that makes things. But he’s not about to invest the national treasure in an industry like electric vehicles that is now fully developed elsewhere and where we lack the natural advantage of a massive home market (such as China or the US).
However, we do have access to some of the vital ingredients for high-tech industries – lithium, rare earths etcetera – and that’s an area wide open for innovation.
Combine it with our nuclear-powered submarines and the obvious next step is to enter the field of home-grown missiles, which Minister Marles promises will be effective initially 300 kilometres north of our continent… extending all the way to, say, Taiwan just in case we’re called upon to “deter” aggression in that area.
If so, it is a masterly exercise in misdirection. Truth is, our RAAF with its 72 F-35s (and another 28 arriving soon) its 24 Super Hornets and its amazing battlefield-controlling Growlers could successfully conduct warfare against any aggression in that zone right now. But missiles don’t have to be refuelled en route and a bellicose Opposition will applaud from the sidelines.
At the same time, of course, Albanese will be doing his level best among the AUKUS and QUAD partnerships to lower the aggressive temperature so that the research and skills gained in the high-tech arena can be translated – like NASA research – across the broad spectrum of peaceful activities.
Maybe the PM is playing a long game. He didn’t invest all those 27 years in parliament – most of it in opposition – to squander the chance to make a difference. The real surprise is the thoroughness of his planning and the depth of his reflection.
When Donald Horne coined the term “the lucky country” he was exercising his bitter powers of political irony. Could it be that Albo is the exception that proves the rule?
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