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Inside Out | Australia’s Asia-Pacific security and climate challenges thrust to the fore
- Albanese’s whirlwind week, from attending the Quad summit to responding to China’s sudden overtures to climate-affected Pacific islands, highlights the complex brew of foreign policy issues facing the new Labor government
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Britain’s Labour prime minister Harold Wilson famously said, “a week is a long time in politics”. For Australia’s Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese, his first week has been a whirlwind – with ramifications for the Asia-Pacific.
On May 20, he was still campaigning for voters to oust Scott Morrison’s government. By Saturday night, Morrison had acknowledged defeat. Early on Monday morning, before the final results were in, Albanese was sworn in as Australia’s first Labor prime minister in a decade – so he could rush to Tokyo to join his counterparts from Japan, the US and India in the second Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summit.
At Albanese’s elbow was his foreign minister, Penny Wong, also sworn in on Monday morning, who had to rush from Quad diplomacy in Tokyo, after spending a night back in Australia, to Suva in Fiji, where she addressed the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and tried to blunt the impact of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s surprising and unprecedented 10-day, eight-nation diplomatic tour through the central Pacific.
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Albanese’s Labor Party campaigned against the Morrison government on climate change and domestic issues linked to inflation and rising living costs. Few imagined that he and Wong would be diverted with such brutal urgency into so complex a brew of foreign policy challenges.
02:20
Australia’s new PM Albanese vows to rebuild unity and trust after Labor Party election win
Australia’s new PM Albanese vows to rebuild unity and trust after Labor Party election win
The brief for the Tokyo Quad summit was familiar enough, even if there had been little opportunity to rehearse. The new Labor government will not diverge far from the Liberal coalition on the US priority to use the Quad to “contain” China with new institutions like the still-sketchy Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
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