Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his predecessor Kevin Rudd, now Australia’s Ambassador to the US, have many political skills, but only leftist political correspondents and their readers imagine that “shrewd negotiator” is one of them.
Backstabbing, duplicity, hypocrisy, narcissism and spite, sure! But eyeballing an international adversary across a table and cunningly negotiating the best possible outcome for Australia? That’s like imagining Jeffrey Epstein would make a good babysitter because he spends lots of time with underage girls.
Conservatives instinctively know that Albo and Rudd have this shortcoming. You only have to see them at work to notice it. They surround themselves with compliant acolytes, always seek resolutions by consensus and are nauseatingly eager to agree with whatever the bullies at the United Nations, European Commission or World Economic Forum tell them to do.
President Donald Trump isn’t like that, obviously. That’s why we conservatives knew even before Rudd accompanied Albo to the White House this week that, whatever the outcome of their meeting with Trump, it would not be on their terms. If the outcome produced any benefits for Australia, they would be the fortunate byproduct of Trump’s superior deal-making.
Going into the meeting, there were two items on the agenda: AUKUS and rare earths. AUKUS is low-hanging fruit. Trump gets to sell us overpriced submarines and has an English-speaking ally in the South Pacific should China take Taiwan, as it says it will one day. And Albo’s supporters get to expound his superior skills in keeping the US alliance alive.
Rare earths were the real purpose of the meeting. Malcolm Turnbull apparently offered them to Trump in 2018 but couldn’t get a bite. China has since squeezed the world supply of these minerals, and got a jump on the US in processing capabilities. It has about 38 per cent of the world’s reserves, but is currently producing 70 per cent of supply.
These minerals are now crucial in everything from LED screens to precision missiles. So Trump is keen to close the gap. Australia has only about 5 per cent of world reserves, but is a stable country and is poised to begin production. Albo and Rudd were pushovers because Trump knows neither has any appetite for industry, and would welcome the US taking control. Like most Australian politicians, Albo and Rudd are both happy to just dig stuff up and sell it unrefined or unprocessed to a more advanced or ambitious nation.
Trump, ever the opportunist, added another item to the agenda: what to do with Australia’s enormous pile of superannuation funds. He would know that Australia’s economic activity and productivity are both in rapid decline, and that these super funds are eager to find a more profitable economy in which to invest.
This outcome too was a no-brainer for both sides. Trump got more investment, and the super funds will wind up with better returns than if they invested in overpriced Australian infrastructure projects or Australia’s Ponzi real-estate scheme.
But the chutzpah of Rudd and Albo here is off the charts. Compulsory superannuation was created by then prime minister Paul Keating in 1992. He and ACTU boss Bill Kelty negotiated a nationwide pay rise, which was diverted immediately into compulsory super. Most workers didn’t realise they’d received a pay rise because they never saw it.
Ever since, successive governments have been happy for workers to perceive their compulsory super accounts as some kind of bonus to be received upon retirement. This is an illusion. It was their money all along. They government simply passed laws saying they were not allowed to touch it until they were retired.
This is one of the stupidest, most authoritarian ideas ever to come out of Canberra, and the fact that it has survived this long is testament not to its brilliance, but to Australian workers being gullible enough to believe that the money wasn’t theirs from the start.
Every “conservative” government since 1992 shares in the culpability for this government intervention in people’s private financial affairs. In a genuinely free country, every worker can do with his wages what he pleases. That only a handful of MPs in the past 43 years have opposed it is a travesty.
Even worse, the current Labor Prime Minister and one of his predecessors have now opened the door for $1.44 trillion of these funds to flow out of the country and into businesses in the United States instead. It is a sign that even Labor has lost faith in Australia to produce anything other than new mosques and Diwali festivals. Only the thieves who climbed through a window of the Louvre and walked away with priceless crown jewels matched Rudd and Albo this week for criminal audacity.
The highlight of the meeting, of course, was Trump humiliating Kevin Rudd for having said nasty things about him in the past, which we have all seen by now.
Leftist commentators fell for Trump’s conceit, that he didn’t know who Rudd was or even whether Rudd was in the room, and have resorted to the usual contortions to pretend that Trump’s offensiveness was all harmless banter.
Trump is one of the greatest media players in history. Nothing he does in front of cameras is an accident. He knew that Rudd’s response to the humiliation would be to cling to the ambassadorship more desperately than ever. This is exactly what Trump wants because Rudd is a total patsy with weirdly effeminate vibes, a pushover.
The man whose most famous moment as prime minister was to apologise to the Stolen Generations for something he never even did, has now made sure that his most famous moment as US Ambassador is for apologising to Trump for a couple of stupid tweets five years earlier.
If all that sounds like I am putting Australia down, then yes, guilty as charged. Australia has squandered the respect it once commanded on the world stage. We have sold our economy to China and opened our borders to hordes of Third World peasants. We have some of the world’s greatest mineral resources but are afraid to use them for our own benefit, lest we somehow change the climate. And we have abandoned what was once a unique, likeable, robust and wonderful culture for the vibrancy of “diversity”, which these days manifests in machete fights, carjackings, hate preachers, ethnic ghettos and even a Senator who wants to burn down the building in which she works.
This won’t be the last time Trump plays Australian politicians to his own advantage. All we can hope for, under these circumstances, is that there continues to be accidental benefits for us ordinary Australians.
