Curtin would have rejected AUKUS

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Lead Editorial

19 April 2023
Vol. 25 No. 16

Our government has committed us to war, by hitching our nation without question to Anglo-American provocations against China. In her 17 April address to the National Press Club, on the topic of “Australian interests in a regional balance of power”, Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong twisted history beyond recognition when she claimed that by sticking with its US alliance, Australia was reinforcing “Curtin’s wartime turn to America”.

Wong’s assertion is more akin to the decision of Prime Minister Robert Menzies on the eve of World War II. In April 1939 Menzies declared, with reference to that other “dangerous ally”, the United Kingdom: “If she is at war, we are at war.” Opposition Leader John Curtin veritably breathed fire on the matter, warning: “It is the responsibility of the Australian government and of no other ... [to engage] the people of Australia ... in war.”

When Curtin broke from Britain in December 1941, two months after becoming PM, he was breaking from an unquestioned alliance identical to our alliance with the USA and UK today.

In a pre-echo of today’s $370 billion AUKUS submarine deal, Menzies had pledged to support Britain “to the last man and the last shilling”. He had stripped Australia of all its manpower, relying on the British pledge to send assistance from Singapore in the event of a Japanese attack.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, Curtin moved, knowing Australia was defenceless and that we desperately needed to bring our troops home. On 27 December he declared: “I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free from any pangs about our traditional links of friendship to Britain.” The USA—then under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, very different to his post-war successors—would be Australia’s “keystone”, instead. Firmly asserting Australian sovereignty against Churchill—a concept foreign to our leaders today— he said: “We refuse to accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle is a subordinate segment of the general conflict. The Government regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia should have the fullest say in the direction of the fighting plan.”

Just over six weeks later, on 19 February 1942, Darwin was bombed by the Japanese. Curtin also initiated emergency economic programs which transformed our industrial and military capacity and set the stage for decades of growth and development after the war.

A war in the Pacific today would make this horrific chapter look like a picnic. Wong’s invocation of Curtin to justify our Anglo-American alliance is an outrageous falsehood—Curtin broke with the established alliance for the sake of Australia’s security; Wong and Albanese are sticking with the established alliance, our “dangerous allies” as Malcolm Fraser warned, that most threatens our security.

Wong went on to cite the critical role of the USA in maintaining “strategic balance” in the region, blocking out the reality that the world has changed with the rise of China, the Western exclusion of Russia, and the rise of the “global majority” behind them. “America is central to balancing a multipolar region”, she asserted. Former PM Paul Keating is lately dismissed as “yesterday’s man” for his incisive reflections on Australia’s subservience to the USA and UK, but in fact it is Wong and her colleagues who are dragging Australia back to the past.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the shift. This week even US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNN that America’s financial sanctions “could undermine the hegemony of the dollar” and are driving China, Russia, and Iran’s desire “to find an alternative”. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, discussing the fragmentation of the current financial order with Bloomberg, said, “I think there’s a growing sense that ours may not be the best fragment to be associated with.” Australia also has a choice, but the one Wong is making will consign us to disaster.

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In this issue:

• 64 more towns in NAB’s regional bank firing line 
• Time to legislate the right to use cash 
• An Australian cash and banking guarantee 
• Further FOI evidence reveals consumer protection cover-up
• Absurd ‘foreign interference’ laws jail businessman 
• ASIO under investigation for misconduct 
• Never before has a Labor Government been so bereft 
• The incredible shrinking ASPI 
• Is Australia currently at war? 
• To reunify, rewind to Bretton Woods, American System 
• Brazil, China set course for new international order 
• Tell your council to make a submission!
• The secret of China’s economic success 
• The looming quadrillion dollar derivatives tsunami
• Banking crisis 3.0: Time to change the rules of the game

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