Australia, who ya gonna call?

On 8 December 1941, Australia declared war on Japan. It was one day after Pearl Harbour, and it was our first ever independent declaration of war as a sovereign nation.

When we’d gone to war against Germany in 1939, Australia still considered itself a vassal dominion of Great Britain and that it had no say in the matter. 

In the meantime, the conservative government of Robert Menzies had fallen and Labor Prime Minister John Curtin had taken office.

The Australian people gathered around their radios to hear Curtin’s New Year’s message on 26 December 1941:

“Without any inhibitions of any kind”, Curtin said, “I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

It was stunning, for a rigorously Anglophile country, to hear its leader break with the Mother Country in such explicit terms.

The reason was, proximately, Churchill’s shitfuckery – he had already made it quite clear that he considered our armed forces to be at his personal disposal and treated Australia’s leaders with contempt – but the geopolitical realities were undeniable no matter what anyone said.

Curtin was simply accepting the truth of our situation, 10,000 miles away in a different ocean we shared with rising Japan and the sleeping behemoth America, and he was vindicated a month later when Singapore fell, taking a large part of our small army with it. 

The Australian 7^th Division was at that moment sailing home from North Africa. Churchill demanded it be diverted to Burma to help defend the remains of Britain’s Far Eastern empire, but Curtin said no, and brought them home. There would be no repeat of World War One; our soldiers fought in the Pacific, with the Americans, until victory in1945.

I mention all this history for a simple reason: it is repeating, in reverse. Nobody hasn’t noticed what the orange idiot in the White House did last week, upending 80 years of post-war order and firmly repositioning the USA as enthusiastically pro-despot – a force for bad.

Trump is simply looking for shared values, just like all his predecessors. When he chats with Putin or Xi, or any of the tinpot versions of them in less consequential countries, he sees a reflection of the things that matter to him personally, wrapped in unchallenged and limitless personal power. What he sees, he likes.

That’s the world as it now is. It happened quickly, and the psychic shock is no less severe than the one the Japanese inflicted in 1941. We’re not at war, but yeah, we are, we just don’t realise it yet.

The United States is no longer our guarantor of defence, security and peace. It is no longer reliably there. Unpredictable as Trump will remain, nobody can be confident that it will honour its treaties, stand by its allies, reward loyalty or behave with honour.

That is the challenge for our leaders, Anthony Albanese most of all. For better or worse, he finds himself our accidental prime minister at this historic moment when everything we assumed permanent no longer is.

The opportunity for Albanese is to recognise the moment, and seize it, as Curtin did in 1941. That requires acknowledgement of reality, willingness to level with the people and speak uncomfortable truths, courage to determine our course by the light of our values.

The risk for Albanese is that he fails to grasp any of this. I don’t really doubt that that’s exactly what he’s going to do.

The signs so far are predictable in their banality. Door-stopped after the infamous Oval Office ambush of Vlodimir Zelensky, Albanese said we stand by Ukraine, but squibbed the opportunity to call out Trump’s and Vance’s appalling abandonment in their nauseating desire to suck up to Putin. Instead, he maintained his standard ‘won’t make a running commentary’ slide, gaslighting his way to what he thinks is safety.

Ask any Australian minister or shadow minister, in fact anyone in authority in this country, and they’ll insist that our relationship with America remains rock solid and there’s nothing to see here. Don’t worry, this too shall pass, they smoothly reassure.

Except it probably won’t, or at best it would be insanely reckless to pretend it will. There is at present a psychopath in the house. We turn to Albo for help. He responds, calmly, it’s okay, I’ll reason with him. Go back to sleep.

Personally, I think the nihilism in the White House will be the defining issue of our own looming election. Neither major party wants to know that, firmly committed as each is to a domestic small-target campaign. Both will be caught out, but the electoral trouble Labor is already in will become existential.

That’s the challenge for our national leader: step up, lead. Or don’t, and lose to Peter Dutton. Dutton, fake hero that he is, will benefit from the psychopath’s presence and Albanese’s refusal to confront it. Because, when there’s a murderer on the loose, you want a cop with a gun and the willingness to use it.