Climate: Aussies back in step
Labor’s victory in Australia gives the big Indo-Pacific powers more in common, writes Peter Hartcher.
When US President Joe Biden phoned Anthony Albanese on Sunday to congratulate him, he spoke the unspeakable. Climate change. This had been taboo, the standout topic where Biden and Scott Morrison simply could not agree.
Biden took power determined to be a climate action leader. His administration had been quietly furious with Morrison’s climate recalcitrance. The US president went to the climate conference in Glasgow in November pledging that the US would double its 2030 target for cutting emissions.
By contrast, Morrison went to Glasgow to repeat exactly the same target that Tony Abbott had set five years earlier. Australia’s only change was Morrison’s promise that Australia would update its longer-term goal, to reach net zero by 2050.
‘‘We were looking to a close ally for support at Glasgow and Morrison gave us just f ...... bullshit’’, a senior US official said.
The election of Albanese as prime minister removes this neuralgic point. Australia’s new emissions target of a 43% cut by 2030 isn’t as ambitious as America’s 50%. But now, Australian and American leaders can talk about climate change as a point of agreement rather than argument.
When it comes to China, however, Australia and the US remain where they were during Morrison’s term – determined to oppose Beijing’s drive for dominance in the Indo-Pacific.
Albanese struck a note of resolution on Monday before leaving for the Quad summit in Tokyo. Asked whether he saw a chance to take a bit of heat out of the relationship with China, he replied: ‘‘The relationship with China will remain a difficult one. I said that before the election. That has not changed. It is China that has changed, not Australia, and Australia should always stand up for our values, and we will in a government that I lead.’’
This is the unifying purpose behind the Quad group. And while it was Biden who first convened it at a leaders’ level, the Quad’s true author is Xi Jinping. Australia, India, Japan and the US were drawn into the Quad by their common desire to resist China’s aggression. And the more aggressive China becomes, the firmer the Quad’s stance.
Indeed, that’s almost exactly what Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said after their meeting on Monday. They agreed to step up their security co-operation and deterrence capability in response to ‘‘China’s increasingly coercive behaviour’’ and a growing nuclear threat from North Korea.
Biden went a step further. ‘‘Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if China were to attack it,’’ he was asked, ‘‘even though you didn’t do so to protect Ukraine?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ Biden answered. ‘‘It’s a commitment we made.’’ It’s the third time in recent months that he has given such an unequivocal commitment to defend Taiwan. Each time, his administration has tried to soften his remarks, to add ambiguity. Now ambiguity is out.
The Quad has been careful at every summit to make sure it has a positive agenda, creating common goods for the Indo-Pacific, and not just a defensive one against Beijing.
Its first summit pledged to deliver one billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines to the poorer nations of the region. The latest is expected to announce, among other things, the creation of a satellite-based system for tracking illegal fishing activity in the IndoPacific.
The dominant illegal fisher, by far, is China. So while this is a step for the common good, it’s also a way to try to curb Beijing’s waywardness.
But what if Beijing blindsides Albanese, not with aggression, but with conciliation? What if its first move is to try to achieve a reset or rapprochement of some sort?
China’s embassy officials in Canberra have been probing quietly in recent weeks to see if there’s a face-saving way to ease its coercion of Australia; to remove some of its punitive measures if Australia makes some concessions.
There are three vital points. First, so long as Xi’s 14 demands on Australia’s sovereignty remain, no Australian government, Labor or Liberal, can offer any concession. Second, these soundings have been coming from the Chinese side. Australia is under no political or economic pressure to yield. Third, it’s clear China is under enough pain from food shortages and an economic downturn to remove bans on food imports regardless – in other words, relenting unilaterally. No reciprocal concession required.
Albanese and his ministers should take note.
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.