by PETER SYMONDS
The extraordinary political crisis that is tearing the Australian government and the Labor Party apart is due to come to a head on Monday with a leadership contest between Prime Minister Julia Gillard and ex-Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd. In the media, however, this fundamental rift is being portrayed, in the words of today’s Australian editorial, as “not about policy, nor about national interest… [but] about petty squabbles of the past, revenge colliding with retribution, and the politics of personality.”
In other words, the vitriol being vented by Rudd and Gillard supporters against their opponents in the leadership battle, unparalleled in post-war Australian political history, has nothing to do with fundamental policy differences. The Labor Party—the country’s oldest party, on which the Australian ruling class has relied in every major crisis over the past century—is supposedly imploding because of the overweening ambition of two individuals.
This version of events is simply nonsensical.
The underlying causes of the conflict are not to be found, primarily, in the sphere of domestic politics. Both Rudd and Gillard are committed to the austerity agenda demanded by finance capital and are pitching themselves to big business as the best instrument for implementing the required assault on the working class.
Rather, the fracturing of the Labor Party is bound up with powerful geo-political rivalries centred on the Obama administration’s growing confrontation with China. The Australian ruling class has been swept into this maelstrom, confronted point blank with the longstanding dilemma posed by its heavy economic dependence on China, on the one hand, and its geo-strategic reliance on its military alliance with the United States, on the other.
Rudd was removed as prime minister in June 2010 in an overnight inner-party coup carried out by a handful of factional leaders with close ties to Washington. At the time, Obama had just begun his foreign policy “pivot” from the Middle East to an aggressive diplomatic and strategic intervention in Asia, aimed at undermining China’s expanding influence.
The Obama administration regarded Rudd as an obstacle to its orientation. This was not because he in any way threatened the US-Australia alliance, as evidenced in a WikiLeaks cable in which he described himself to American officials as “a brutal realist” who recognised that a US war with China could eventually take place.
Rudd, however, did propose the creation of a regional forum through which the economic and strategic interests of the United States and China could be accommodated by deft negotiation and diplomatic summitry. This cut across Obama’s intention, which was not to ease tensions, but rather to heighten the pressure on China across the Indo-Pacific region. He did not want a diplomatic mediator in Canberra, but a staunch, unquestioning ally.
Nearly two years later, US-China tensions have dramatically intensified. Gillard has proven her worth by slavishly supporting every Obama initiative. She announced last November that the US military, including US Marines, would have access to Australian military bases across the north and west of the country, adjacent to highly sensitive shipping lanes through which China gains access to energy and raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
As foreign minister, Rudd has toed the US line on myriad issues, including the NATO military intervention in Libya. But he has also continued to proselytise in international forums on the need for a Pax Pacifica, as he told the Asia Society in Washington in January—“a peace that will ultimately be anchored in the principles of common security, recognising the realities of US and Chinese power.”
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