Should Aus join Canada's middle power fightback? | Insiders On Background

0:00ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. Hey, I know you're here for David Spears. First though, I'm Dominique Bans, host of Experts, the Nanop 4. In 2007, a charismatic Englishman who ran a doomsday cult from his living room in remote WA vanished. With his partner, their child and a friend. I was starting to think this is not going to end well. This season, I dive into a murky world of cults, control, and secret identities. Search Experts on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has only been in office for a year, but he's already made his mark on international diplomacy. From rebuffing US President Donald Trump to leading efforts for middle powers to act together. The Central Banker Turn politician has been at the vanguard of the new global order. In his brief visit to Australia, Mark Carney addressed the Australian Parliament,

1:03expanding on his vision of a post-rupture world as he describes it. So how can countries like Canada and Australia navigate the most powerful nations exerting their strength, whether it's the US and Israel launching strikes on Iran or China monopolizing critical minerals? I'm Melissa Clarke, filling in for David Spears, here on the lands of the Nunna War people. This is Insiders on Background. As well as addressing the Australian Parliament, Mark Carney also gave a speech to the Louis Institute during his visit. Sam Rogovine is the director of the International Security Program at the Louis Institute. Sam, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thank you, Melissa, nice to talk to you. So, Mark Carney's visit has been one that's been very warmly welcomed by both the government and the opposition. He gave an address to Parliament that really built on the themes that he's been talking about, about the role for middle powers. It's something that certainly the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was keen to express his shared vision in the role for middle powers to work together.

2:07What did you make of Mark Carney's message to the Australian Parliament? Well, the warmth appears genuine and clear from the pictures that we all saw. It's not only a warmth between two very similar nations that share a historical bond and a very similar size and very similar stature and characteristics, political characteristics on the modern stage, but clearly also from the pictures are kind of a great personal warmth between the two leaders. I would say though that the Australian reception for Mark Carney, whether that's for the government and the opposition, as you say, is built on a certain level of not listening quite closely enough to his message. Because if the government did care to listen, I think the message that Carney delivered on this visit is pretty confronting at the core of Carney's message since Davos, that now famous speech at Davos. This is back in January at the start of the year. Back in January where he announced the end of the International Rules-Based Order

3:12and where he talked about the United States and China, and other great powers acting much more, but being much more muscular on the world stage and the need for middle powers not to get pushed around. That was his message here again in Canberra and in Sydney, the evening before at the Lower Institute. And Carney's solution to that problem, which he also laid out, was that countries like Canada need to spread their risk. There were a middle power, he said, and we need to look to other middle powers like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and others, in order to spread our risk to not over-invest in our relationships with great powers. Because if you over-invest in those relationships, you're in danger of being coerced, and you're in danger of being subordinated. That was his message. Well, in Australia, that's exactly what we're doing. We are over-investing in our relationship with the United States, and that is not only the policy of this government, but the policy of the opposition as well. Now, the Australian government would say, and they have said, we've heard from Penny Wong, as foreign minister,

4:12from the Prime Minister himself, that Australia has been active in looking to improve its networks and relationships with other countries that there's been a lot of effort expended on developing security deals with Pacific nations, for example, of upgrading arrangements with near-nabbers like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and that that is evidence of their look to other middle powers and a spreading of the risk. Do you think that does not meet the kind of standard that Makkani is suggesting is required? No, I think the government deserves tremendous credit for those initiatives. I should also say that I don't want to concentrate purely on the United States here. Coercion comes from all great powers, as Kani said. Kani didn't pin everything on the United States by any means, even though Canada has been in the Trump administration's sights, but Australia on the other hand has been in China's sights. So we suffered a three-year-long economic coercion campaign at China's hands.

5:12But to return to your question, I do think the government deserves credit for crafting a diplomatic agenda, security partnerships and agreements. The headline one is Indonesia, that's the most important one. But the Pacific Islands region is also tremendously important and successive governments deserve credit for deepening our relationships with the Pacific Islands, at the heart of which is a desire to keep the Chinese out. And actually, I think that's a really good initiative and very important for Australia's long-term security. Now, against that, you have to weigh Orcas, which is this massive project not just to build submarines for Australia, but also to integrate Australia much more tightly with the United States militarily and strategically. And there, I think, in Karne's worldview, I think implicitly what the subtext that you're getting from Karne is, well, maybe you should be thinking again about quite that level of integration. If Australia still has some areas of its diplomatic relationships that are still very concentrated and Orcas being one of them,

6:13a very close and deep and expensive defense relationship with the US, what, in your view, could or should the government be doing to reduce the risk and spread the risk? Well, you know the old joke about the tourists who's driving around rural Ireland and asks a local how to get to Dublin, and the local says, well, I wouldn't start from here. So I wouldn't start from Orcas. If I had my way, we wouldn't have done it in the first place. Having invested now, it seems like there is no obvious off-ramp from Orcas. At the very least, I think, what I would like to see the government do is offer a bit more clarity about what kind of obligations Orcas is going to impose on Australia. So the government insists, for instance, that the submarines, when we eventually get them, will be sovereign. And I'm sure in purely legal terms, that's true. But in political terms, once you have a capability like this,

7:16once you've spent several decades investing in it and cooperating in the most intimate kind of partnership with the foreign power, it is very difficult to then say to them at the end of that period when they come calling and say, well, we need these submarines now for a campaign that we're launching, it's very difficult for Australia to then say no. I guess we already seen an example of that level of risk at the moment where we've seen a US submarine torpedo and Iranian ship. The Prime Minister's confirmed that Australian personnel were on that submarine, although they weren't involved in the operation itself, but I guess that's a preliminary example of some of the grey area of just what is Australia's involvement in a conflict that technically were not involved in, but nonetheless, some of our military personnel are there in the thick of it. On one level, this isn't a new problem. We've had people deeply embedded in American military commands, well, for decades, really, but particularly since the global war on terrorism where we had people in quite senior leadership positions in Iraq

8:17and also in central command headquarters, but also in a Pacific headquarters. It's not a new problem for Australia, but it's going to get worse. It's going to get more acute over time. These are extremely difficult questions, and my concern is not that... We could make principled decisions in the moment about all these issues, but the problem with such a long and intimate partnership as Orcas implies is that you're essentially making the decision decades in advance. You're making it very difficult to say no. Could be a very different strategic environment that you're looking at in that. And that is really the essence of sovereignty, right? Is there your ability to make decisions on your own for the Australian government to make decisions for Australians and in Australia's interests in the moment? Now Sam, I've been really struck by some of the language that Mark Carney has used, both in his address to the Low Institute and as well to Parliament. It seems to be a little straighter speaking than we sometimes get from the Australian government.

9:21And I think when we've had discussion around things like the legality of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, for example, you have Australia and Canada in fairly similar positions in how they've formally responded, but Mark Carney has been willing to say, well, there seems to be a prima facie case that it's not, but here's some of the complexity and go on to discuss it. But we really get that level of frankness from the Australian government. What do you make of that difference is Mark Carney able to, because of domestic circumstances at home be a bit more plain speaking, is that he's background being in a different industry other than politics that makes him more open in his language? What do you think is behind that difference? Well, not only is Carney able to speak more frankly due to domestic circumstances, I'd say he's almost obligated by domestic circumstances to do that, because you'll recall that when Trump was inaugurated in January of last year,

10:22Canada was in the middle of an election campaign and Carney was due to lose. And then, of course, the talk of Canada becoming the 51st state and so on and the fight between Trump and Trudeau, who was then Prime Minister, began and all of a sudden, the opposition in Canada, which was very much more Trump-aligned, maggot-aligned than the government, all of a sudden, they became on the nose and their polling numbers started to dive. So Carney owes his job to the fact that politics changed radically in Canada after Trump was elected. That's not the case here in Australia. Well, I should qualify that. It's the case in Australia to a lesser degree. So if you look back at our election campaign last year, you can see the opposition suffering from the fact that it was more aligned with the Trump administration than the government at the time was. In fact, that leaked report that the opposition that was released, the Liberal Party review actually says in black and white,

11:23well, we were hurt by Trump by our association with Trump and the MAGA movement. So you can see it to some degree in Australia. But look, to come somewhat to the defense of the government, it seems to me, if I were there, I would be thinking, there's no need to pick a fight right now. I mean, it probably is going to come to us at some point and it could be any issue. This administration is so unpredictable, and the president himself is such a singular figure. Let's put it delicately. That dispute could arise over any issue. And if I was in the government's position, I would be thinking there's not much to be gained from actually prompting a fight when there's a decent chance one's going to come to us anyway. Is there perhaps a cynical view that the government benefits from Mark Carney being a little more open? If there is another like-minded country that can be a little blunter with the US president, Australia can kind of follow in its footsteps without needing to be the one whose nose or jaw is out at front.

12:23Yeah, perhaps. And also, I think if I was the government, I would be thinking that we've managed this relationship pretty well. I mean, the Albanese's visit to the White House late last year was, I would imagine, more successful than even the government itself imagined, had hoped for. After all, Trump in that meeting said publicly that he wasn't too worried about Australian defense spending, where as previously, figures such as Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, had said, you must spend three and a half percent of your GDP, which is a figure Australia is not likely to meet in the near future. So, Trump kind of let us off the hook. He endorsed Orcas, which is what the government wanted. We got a critical minerals deal. I'm sure Prime Minister Albanese is feeling pretty good about the US relationship right now. What do you make of Mark Carney's ability to describe this moment? That we're seeing this moment of change in the global world order. His ability to describe it, to break through,

13:25to gather so many leaders' attention about what is happening, how it's happening, and how to respond to it. He's not the only one to identify the change and give up suggestions. I'm sure Emmanuel Macron would also like to be described to someone who's leading that discussion, but it does seem that Mark Carney has uniquely been able to make an impact in this space. Why him? What is about Mark Carney that's able to have this level of impact? Well, first of all, to Carney's credit, he did say at the Lower East Institute, the other night, that he admitted that he wasn't nearly the first person. In fact, he'd had meetings in Asia where, in his words, his interlocutors were saying to him, what took you so long? And in fact, Singaporean leaders have been saying this for some time about the breakdown of international order. Why Carney? I mean, I must admit, I'm surprised as anyone, because Carney, in a sense, is an extremely unlikely political hero at this moment in time. When you consider the fact that he is an economist, a central banker, someone who is deeply invested in the globalized economy,

14:31is almost the ideal technocratic elite figure of the kind that the populist figures such as Trump and the European populists oppose. And so, in a way, Carney is a kind of a man out of time. He's an old-fashioned sort of 90-style technocrat who did very well in that world, but nevertheless, the backlash against Trump, as I was saying earlier, it was so strong in Canada that it lifted Trump, excuse me, lifted Carney up to almost unheard-of levels of popularity. And since then, I mean, this speech in Davos has clearly galvanized people in ways that Asian leaders have not been able to do. So, a bit of circumstances, a bit of timing, which probably give him some political credit, but I guess a couple of those things have to align to be able to capture the moment the way he has. And a certain kind of charisma, if you've seen him on his visit here,

15:33I mean, it's quiet and it's sort of indefinable, but he does have a way of capturing the room. He's got good humour, he's incredibly intelligent. And, you know, I think one sort of effect of the populist wave around the Western world is that these populists, while they are very good at gaining attention and gaining popularity, they're not that good at governing. And so, I think there is a craving around the Western world to turn to competency, and maybe Carney represents that. I think on that's a good point to wrap up, Sam Rogovan. Thank you very much for talking to me on For Insiders on Background. Thank you so much, Melissa. And we are keen for your thoughts on this conversation and any of the other topics that came up during the course of our discussion, you can email us at insidersatabc.net.au and please follow and subscribe if you've enjoyed this conversation. Now, David Spears will be back for insiders on Sunday. He'll be on the couch and he'll be chatting to Penny Wong,

16:33the foreign minister, so that's at 9am on ABC TV. And of course, Patricia Carvellis will be back in your feed for politics now on Monday, so make sure you click follow and subscribe so that you don't miss an episode. You making us all feel very excited about being here.