When Anthony Albanese led Labor to a landslide victory in 2022, the stage was set for a transformative administration. Instead, Australia finds itself in the remarkable position of having witnessed one of the longest political honeymoons in contemporary history accompanied by remarkably little to show for it.
Albanese inherited a Liberal Party in ruins, a shell-shocked opposition still reeling from the political carcass of Scott Morrison’s premiership. The Coalition was not merely defeated; it was decapitated, directionless, and domestically irrelevant. In ordinary circumstances, such a weakened opposition would have allowed a government with a decisive mandate to reshape the nation. Yet now two years into his second term, the Albanese government has presided over a period of strategic drift that has left Australia’s international standing diminished and its domestic agenda conspicuously thin.
Nowhere is this failure more glaring than in foreign policy. The US-Australia alliance — the bedrock of Australian security for over seven decades has been reduced to its most precarious state in living memory. The AUKUS security pact, once heralded as a historic realignment, has instead become a symbol of Australian humiliation. Rather than securing a sovereign submarine capability on equitable terms, Canberra has been strong-armed into accepting a fleet of second-hand American nuclear submarines an arrangement that reeks of vassalage rather than partnership. The optics are impossible to ignore: Australia, a wealthy middle power, reduced to begging for cast-off military hardware from an unpredictable Washington.
“In Kevin Rudd, Australia managed to select, from a population of 26 million people, virtually the only individual equally despised by both the White House and Beijing and then dispatched him to its most important diplomatic posting.”
The China side also offers no respite. After initial signs of stabilisation following the diplomatic deep freeze of the Morrison years, the relationship has soured once again. The unresolved controversy over the Darwin Port lease continues to fester as a national security embarrassment. Meanwhile, Canberra’s moves to restrict Chinese investment in critical minerals and rare earths have only inflamed tensions in Beijing. The result is a relationship that has, if anything, acquired a more calcified sense of mutual suspicion.
Kevin Rudd’s appointment as Ambassador to Washington represents perhaps the most baffling diplomatic decision in the nation’s history. Here is a man who publicly called Donald Trump a “village idiot” hardly the credential one expects for a posting to Trump or even Trump-adjacent Washington. In Beijing, he is regarded with deep suspicion, viewed as a “forked tongue” operator whose Mandarin fluency masks an underlying hostility to Chinese interests. It is a decision that defies strategic logic and speaks to a government more interested in rewarding political allies than advancing the national interest.
Meanwhile, beneath these geopolitical failures, a quieter demographic revolution is underway — one that carries profound implications for Australia’s national identity. Under Albanese’s watch, Australians of Indian origin have overtaken those of British origin to become the nation’s largest diaspora group. This is no mere statistical footnote. It represents a historic tipping point in which the descendants of the nation’s original founding stock have been surpassed in number by a more recently arrived community.
Whether one views this as the natural evolution of a multicultural society or as a disquieting rupture with historical continuity, it is undeniable that Australia is becoming a fundamentally different country than the one its institutions were designed to govern. A government truly in command of its agenda would be grappling seriously with what that means. This one, thus far, has not.
