For much if not all of Australia’s history, the foreign ministry has been a place where over-talented cabinet colleagues and defeated leadership rivals can be parked in the hope they find the job an interesting enough distraction from bread-and-butter, vote-winning domestic policies. They might even impress the foreigners too.
It is usually a one-way street. In the decades since 1945, Billy McMahon is the only foreign minister who has gone on to win the prime ministership. Doc Evatt became Labor’s opposition leader but failed to enter the Lodge. Of the others, the more intellectually prepossessing — Dick Casey, Paul Hasluck, Bill Hayden — were appointed governor-general. Others — Gordon Freeth, Alexander Downer, Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd — were given a good ambassadorship.
Then there is Australia’s recent succession of female foreign ministers. The first two — Julie Bishop and Marise Payne — battled to get heard in cabinet, in part because of the blokey mansplaining that pervades Australian politics (as much else).
Bishop has said that colleagues started looking at their phones when she began speaking, and then sometimes repeated her idea as if they had thought of it themselves. She was forced to diminish her department by dissolving AusAid and absorbing its remaining staff, though she did get the New Colombo Plan started.
Marise Payne was too factionally moderate to hold much clout with her prime minister, Scott Morrison. She had a hawkish adviser inserted into her staff to ride shotgun, and then that ex-robodebt enforcer, civil servant cum Army Reserve general Kathryn Campbell installed as her department secretary despite possessing little foreign experience.
But Wong is different.
On moving from Sabah to Adelaide as an eight-year-old with an Australian mother whose marriage to a Malaysian architect had broken up, she won a scholarship to a top private school. She excelled at studies and debating then took a good law degree, advocated for a trade union, and from 2001 gained and held a seat in the Senate, elbowing aside senior colleagues on three occasions to get a winning place on the ticket.
She aligned herself with Anthony Albanese’s powerful left faction and was instrumental in his selection as Labor leader after Bill Shorten’s defeat at the 2019 election. When Labor won office in May 2022 she was given her pick, foreign affairs, but retained a second role as government leader in the Senate that kept her across most policy areas. Coming into government with authority, she immediately had Campbell replaced as her department secretary.
Unusually for a foreign minister, her next moves on foreign policy could conceivably turn the 2025 election, which is widely predicted to result in narrow margins and enhanced power for crossbenchers.
After the atrocious Hamas break-out from Gaza and the harsh Israeli military response, Labor has come under intensifying pressure to recognise a Palestinian state. The young Western Australian senator Fatima Payman quit Labor over the issue. Muslim voters in hitherto secure Labor seats have threatened to run separate candidates. The NSW Labor machine worries that more seats will opt for a locally based candidate, echoing the election of independent Dai Le in Fowler in 2022 after the party complacently parachuted former state premier and senator Kristina Kenneally in from her northern beaches home.
In a wide-ranging speech at ANU’s National Security College in April, Wong said the international community was “now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Norway, Ireland and Spain had recently recognised Palestine, and reports suggested Britain’s then foreign secretary, David Cameron, was considering following their lead.
Speculation intensified that Australia might follow suit, possibly alongside Canada and other allies. Wong depicted recognition, and a reformed Palestinian Authority, as the way to rob Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran of their cause and ultimately help secure Israel. Recognition would come at the start, not the end, of serious negotiations.
Having flown that kite, Wong and the government have hung back in public, focusing on immediate goals: ceasefires, release of hostages, aid to civilians. But intense work on recognition continues behind the scenes in consultation with other governments.
Labor’s former foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr urges the Albanese government to move quickly. “It would be a major failing of the government if it goes to the next election and it hasn’t recognised Palestine,” he tells me. “If they face minority government it would be an indigestible piece of unfinished business. If they move then it will look like they’re only doing it to get support from the crossbenches. It will look like the election result forced them to do it.”
If she agrees with that timetable, Wong hasn’t been able to convince her cabinet colleagues. On one hand, the government has come under fire from the Israel lobby and an almost unprecedented campaign by the Australian for “betraying Israel” and failing to protect Jews from antisemitism. On the other, Wong was heckled off the stage last week and accused of condoning genocide by pro-Palestinian protesters during a speech at the University of Tasmania.
That must have felt doubly unfair. Getting deeply involved in the Middle East snake-pit was never part of the agenda Wong set herself as foreign minister. In her six years as shadow foreign minister she’d had long talks with one of her Labor predecessors, Gareth Evans, with eminent former foreign policy and defence officials Hugh White, the late Allan Gyngell and Michael Fullilove, and with ANU economist Peter Drysdale and other academic specialists.
They instilled a deep appreciation of Labor’s post-Vietnam tradition of “security in Asia, not security from Asia,” active engagement with the region without a constant desire for American approval, and an emphasis on diplomacy rather than a defence–security approach. For much of this time her staff included a persuasive exponent of that viewpoint, the former senior defence official and Indonesianist Allan Behm.
Wong started work with an emphasis on the “centrality” of the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, making Indonesia her first destination and then visiting each of the other member states save for the junta-ruled Myanmar. Steadily she clocked up visits to all the members of the Pacific Islands Forum. Her aim was to re-engage on more respectful, less prescriptive terms than the previous government.
“She had a lot of mopping up to do,” says Janelle Saffin, a former Labor federal MP now in the NSW parliament who has deep connections in Myanmar, Timor-Leste and other parts of the region. Wong’s ethnicity undoubtedly helped, especially in Southeast Asia.
No problem more urgently needed attention than relations with China, which had been put into a deep freeze under Malcom Turnbull and Morrison. Ministerial visits had stopped, and China had blocked about $20 billion worth of annual Australian exports. Wong laid down a goal of “stabilising” the relationship, a term used again and again.
“When the Coalition was in power it was like every backbencher would talk about China — everyone chipped in,” says an insider who watched the transition. “When the Labor government came in, only very senior ministers were authorised to talk about China. The message was super-disciplined.”
The shift steadily yielded dividends for Wong and trade minister Don Farrell, another South Australian senator, helped perhaps by a growing realisation among China’s leaders that their punishment had failed to do anything but make unnecessary enemies. For them, Labor’s arrival was a convenient off-ramp.
Beyond “mopping up” and stabilising, though, Wong’s efforts to widen and deepen Australia’s interests in Asia have had limited success. She commissioned former Macquarie Bank chief Nicholas Moore to investigate why Australia’s investment in Southeast Asia was lagging that of Canada, the United States and other comparable economies, but big companies and banks don’t seem to have rushed to follow up his recommendations. She asked former Victorian premier Steve Bracks to come up with a plan for the long-stalled Greater Sunrise gas project shared with Timor-Leste; a year later, the deadlock remains. Indonesian-language studies continue to dwindle in schools and universities. An offer from Jakarta for teacher exchanges has not been taken up.
Meanwhile, media coverage of Southeast Asia has shrunk, most recently with the shuttering of the Australian Financial Review’s Jakarta bureau — once sustained by the Judith Nielson Institute — despite the looming presidency of the notorious Prabowo Subianto.
To be fair, these are all long-term trends, and they will take sustained effort by many arms of government to turn around.
What Wong has won is an expansion in her department’s total budget, from $7.68 billion in the Coalition’s 2022–23 budget to $8.93 billion in the current 2024–25 year, with staff numbers growing from 6475 to 6949. But Behm says it would take an extra $3 billion to restore the real spending power of the aid program alone to where it was before the Coalition took power in 2014. With many understaffed posts, Australia’s diplomatic footprint remains quite thin. The defence budget, by contrast, rose by $7.4 billion to $55.7 billion over the same years.
Behm, who is now at the Australia Institute, thinks Wong and her department are battling to prevail against the views of the Office of National Intelligence, or ONI — still led by Andrew Shearer, who was described by Labor as “too partisan” when he was appointed by Scott Morrison but nevertheless retained by Albanese — and of the China-hawkish wing of the defence establishment, echoed by defence minister Richard Marles.
“Senator Wong knows that the so-called China threat is over-played,” says Behm, whose recent book The Odd Couple argues that a US retreat is a more pressing risk to the rules-based order. “China generates lots of risk, but the idea that it’s threatening invasion is farfetched. Yet she finds it very difficult to hose down that narrative. My feeling is not that Penny is captured by ONI and the right, it is that she hasn’t got enough support in the cabinet to push back hard enough against them.”
Albanese’s focus on the factional demands of federal caucus adds to the problem, says Behm. “He’s a good bloke to deal with, but way too cautious and not quick enough on his feet: you can feel that from his language. Put those things together, too much caution and too little agility, it’s pretty hard for somebody who is brainy and agile, like Penny, to get much cut-through.”
What the defence–intelligence combine is pushing is counter to the foreign policy Wong spelt out at the ANU National Security College. Hers is a policy that is active, exercises agency and contributes to “the balance of power in our region — so no country dominates, and no country is dominated.” Her aim is “a region free of hegemony. A region in balance. Where countries, large and small, have the freedom to decide our own futures. Where we operate by the same rules, and we have space to agree and to disagree.” She paid tribute in the speech to America’s “leadership” rather than its power.
This dichotomy in Australia’s strategic policy was picked up recently by former departmental secretary and top intelligence official Peter Varghese. “On the one hand, our foreign policy embraces a multipolar future where no country dominates,” he told Melbourne University’s Asialink. “Our defence policy, on the other hand, quietly conflates US leadership and US primacy, and is increasingly fixed around doing what we can to ensure the retention of US strategic primacy.”
Yes, Chinese hegemony has to be opposed, “but constructing a stable China-constraining balance does not turn on the retention of US primacy, although it certainly requires the US to be a keystone of that balance,” he said, adding: “Or to put it another way, the loss of US primacy may be regrettable, but it does not pose an existential threat to Australia. To assume it does is to handcuff ourselves to whatever the US decides it must do to retain its primacy. Those strategies may make sense for the US, but they might not always be in Australia’s national interest.”
No aspect of this defence push has been more contentious than the tripartite AUKUS agreement that Morrison sprung on Albanese some twelve hours before he announced it in a videolink with US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Boris Johnson. The pact has since been hammered by a host of Labor eminences, including Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Bill Kelty and Bob Carr, as well as by Melbourne University’s Ross Garnaut, Sydney University’s James Curran, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen and other strategic thinkers.
These critics see the pact abandoning the post-Vietnam “defence of Australia” principle in favour of the old “forward defence” model of helping big allies counter distant threats. If American nuclear submarines are spared for Australia’s navy, they say, it will be on the understanding that they operate as part of the US Navy, against China if required. As for the future British–Australian submarine, it may never happen, say defence technology experts like Derek Woolner, given that British shipbuilders have other priorities.
As well as a loss of sovereignty, critics see other downsides. “We have not only withdrawn from confident interaction with China, but from deep interaction with other Asian and Pacific countries as well,” Garnaut said at a recent Australian Academy of Sciences forum on AUKUS, adding: “We have drawn closer to US defence and strategic policy, which has had positive elements, but has also contributed to reduced intensity of interaction with our closer neighbours. Some strands of support for AUKUS can be seen as a contemporary reflection of yearning for security in the old and familiar [in] a changing world.”
While Wong herself is appreciated in Asia, says Behm, “they can’t work us out. My contacts in Malaysia and Indonesia are telling me they are very puzzled by us. They can’t see why we are welding ourselves even more to the declining ascendancy of the United States,” and still more to a wider Anglophone embrace including Britain. Curran, who is also the Australian Financial Review’s international editor, recounts the remark of a French official: “I can understand why you went back to Uncle Sam, but I cannot understand why you have gone back to Mummy.”
This is a fence Wong has had to sit on. But she has managed to make some gains against those who see everything through a military prism.
In June, she led a ministerial team to Papua New Guinea with attorney-general Mark Dreyfus and then home minister Clare O’Neill. The focus was on domestic security, programs to build up the capacity of PNG’s police and judicial system, and human development. Marles, and worries about the Chinese, were conspicuously absent.
Albanese was also persuaded to have Varghese review government funding for security and foreign policy think tanks. Seen by Canberra hawks as an effort to “get ASPI” — the government- and defence industry–funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute that has been hearing the same “drums of war” detected by disgraced home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo — Varghese’s report is imminent. While it is not expected to recommend cutting ASPI’s funding, it is likely to suggest its leadership be appointed by an independent panel rather than the defence minister.
But the AUKUS agreement remains. What happened inside the meeting of Albanese and senior frontbenchers when Morrison sprung the AUKUS plan is known to few. One source close to Wong tells me that Albanese mainly focused on avoiding a “wedge” on national security, a field traditionally seen as a Coalition strength. Wong favoured holding back, suggesting a response along the lines of: well, this is an entertaining idea; we’ll look at it when we’re elected. “But they didn’t want to look at it,” this source said. “They didn’t want a continuing fight in the first six months of their government, and to be left with the original bloody albatross, reeking, around their necks.”
If this version is true, there must now be regret that Wong’s idea was not taken up, or that the AUKUS plan wasn’t scrutinised rigorously once Labor took office. It has still not been explained fully and justified, either to parliament or the public. The conditions Albanese sought for his assent — that the submarines would not be nuclear-armed, that non-proliferation would be upheld, and that no onshore nuclear reactors were required — pale beside the ongoing criticisms.
And Morrison was in a weaker position than they knew. He had assured Biden he had bipartisan agreement. Had Labor demurred, the announcement might well have been postponed. “It was a gamble on Morrison’s part,” said one retired senior foreign policy official. “Albo could have said: we can’t answer by 7am tomorrow. If you’ve told Biden otherwise you have to tell him we’re still thinking about it. Maybe Morrison could not have gone ahead.”
Inevitably, word would have got out and French president Emmanuel Macron might have found a way to scupper the project. America’s respect for France, a power in Africa and the Middle East as well in Europe, is often underestimated in Canberra. While Morrison might have had wedge possibilities in mind, he and his tight circle may also have considered an ambush the best way to get Labor across the line, avoiding a Labor backlash engulfing Albanese if assent was delayed.
For Wong, Albanese’s embrace of AUKUS and his obvious enjoyment of mixing with American, British and allied leaders — as well as a seeming tin ear for patronising statements like being “left the lane” for police development in the Pacific by US official Kurt Campbell — must rub uneasily against her personal loyalty. “Loyalty to him as a factional chief blocks out a left-wing instinct to challenge a federal Labor government on these security issues,” said one Labor figure. “None of his career prepared him for being prime minister.”
But that’s Albanese, “a political operator rather than a visionary,” as Curran puts it, whose “inability to persuade and sustain arguments is beginning to show.” Having appointed an international ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed, Wong would have been particularly struck by the PM’s failure in last year’s Voice referendum.
Being foreign minister may be the apex goal she has set for her political career. Going further, if she desired it, would require a switch to the lower house, which her factional position would make possible. She may be respected rather than liked: her biographer Margaret Simons reports epithets including clever, aggressive, ruthless, emotional, hard-working, chip-on-shoulder, sensitive on race and gender, different, smart, having integrity, a control-freak and scary. But a lot of that is in the make-up of many leaders.
Some of her mentors sense she has been downcast in recent months, with “the fight gone out of her” as one put it, and unusually quiet, as another said. Simons reported that she was thinking of leaving politics after the 2019 election defeat. With two daughters getting towards high school, she must be drawn more to home and family as well. If Labor, and Australia to her way of thinking, suffers the ignominy of a Peter Dutton win next year or goes into even more timorous stasis, she will no doubt think again.
But another term would allow her to pursue her ideas for deeper engagement in the region, to look beyond “stabilisation” and maybe pick up on opportunities for a major diplomatic exercise, as Gareth Evans did with Cambodia. The setbacks for the Burmese military and the hedging of support by China and India suggest one such possibility, perhaps by persuading Indonesia’s Prabowo to have a hard general-to-general talk with the junta’s Min Aung Hlaing.
Should Donald Trump become president again, she would be in the thick of regional efforts to save free trade, international law and alliances. For a time at least, this side of the Pacific would be like Byzantium keeping the faith after the Goths and Vandals invaded Rome and Western Europe.
On balance, as Simons found, she seems likely to be one for “staying in the room.” •
