Voters in Australia and neighboring New Zealand have just given profound confirmation of a basically conservative trend in their countries, which will have significant strategic importance in several areas.
In the regional sphere, the two votes would be less than welcome in Beijing because the intrinsic conservatism of the Australasian voters reinforces rejection of communist China’s expansionist activities in the region. This, particularly the New Zealand vote for a new government, will strengthen the West’s position in the South Pacific, bolstering the anti-Beijing line being reinforced by states such as Fiji.
In Australia, the government’s massive loss of a referendum on a domestic issue won’t cause the administration of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to fall (although there have been calls for the prime minister to resign). Still, it served as a cautionary message not to assume that the urban-left sentiment in Melbourne and Sydney prevails throughout the country. More importantly, the loss of the referendum on such a profound scale meant that Mr. Albanese would almost certainly not attempt another promised referendum on whether to transform Australia into a republic from a constitutional monarchy.
A referendum on becoming a republic was attempted in 1999, and 54.87 percent of voters rejected the proposition at a time when the monarchy was at a low ebb. Significantly, the Labor Party won the general election on May 21, 2022, with a primary vote of only 32.58 percent—less than a third—of the electorate; even the losing Liberal/National coalition took more: 35.7 percent of the primary vote.
Both major parties lost votes in the previous election. So it isn’t as though the Albanese government is on solid ground. Nonetheless, the election highlighted dramatically how Australia’s preferential form of mandatory voting hardly reflects the national sentiment. Small, mostly urban-left parties determine the outcome, as votes for them are usually then passed to the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
Referenda in Australia are usually rejected by the electorate because they are a direct and actual reflection of voter sentiment, while the complex, preferential form of vote-counting used in general elections is anything but a reflection of the majority vote.
In the latest event, the “Australian Indigenous Voice” referendum, a cornerstone of the virtue-signaling ideology of the Albanese government, was held on Oct. 14, and it failed spectacularly: 60.78 percent of voters rejected the terms of the referendum; 39.22 percent of the population voted in favor of it.
On the same day, neighboring New Zealand went to the polls in a general election, which also comprehensively rejected the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.
Australian voters had been asked whether they approved an alteration to the Australian Constitution that would recognize Indigenous Australians in the document through a proposed body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, which “may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”
The new body, the Voice, would have lacked legislative capability but set Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders apart from the rest of the Australian population. Significantly, the Voice proposal was opposed by many Aboriginal leaders.
Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand voters had gone to the polls to vote on the six years of Labour governance and essentially on the five years under the leadership of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, then 42, who announced in January that the election would be held on Oct. 14. She then announced that she would resign, effective Feb. 7, explaining that she no longer had the energy to contest another election.
But she, a confirmed Republican, resigned. Her chosen successor nominated her as Dame Jacinda Ardern, Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (GNZM, New Zealand’s second highest honor), in the King’s Birthday Honours announced on June 5, despite her having pledged to support the transformation of New Zealand into a republic. Significantly, honors are granted by the King of New Zealand through the governor-general on the prime minister’s recommendation.
What was notable about Ms. Ardern’s award was that it was for her service to the nation during the COVID-19 crisis and for her leadership during the March 15, 2019, Christchurch terror attacks, when she was also minister for National Security and Intelligence. She made considerable political capital out of the attack at the time. Still, it resulted from a massive intelligence failure on her watch, including a failure to heed indicators noted by Australian counterpart intelligence services shared with Wellington.
However, the reality behind Ms. Ardern’s resignation was that, by early 2023, polling showed that support for the opposition National Party was at 38 percent. In contrast, support for Labour stood at 33 percent, with the likelihood that Labour’s decline would continue. She handed it over to her party’s choice of successor, Chris Hipkins, on Jan. 25. Mr. Hipkins, however, was relatively unknown and had little time to change Labour’s chances or the policies that had generated the decline in its policies.
Indeed, Labour was locked into extreme left positions that it couldn’t abandon. Indeed, Ms. Ardern’s citation for her GNZM included her leadership during the COVID-19 crisis, which subsequent analysis showed to be a draconian imposition of autocratic constraints on New Zealand’s traditional democratic freedoms.
The National Party, under new leader and former businessman Christopher Luxon, delivered 50 seats in the 122-seat Parliament—an increase on the 34 seats in the outgoing Parliament—to Labour’s retention of only 34 seats, down from 62 in the previous Parliament. Mr. Luxon immediately began negotiations with two other conservative parties—ACT Party (11 seats) and New Zealand First (eight seats)—to form a coalition government, which would take office, it was expected, on Nov. 3, giving time for coalition differences to be sorted.
The Australian and New Zealand outcomes were against parties naturally inclined to support the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden. Yet, the overall results were beneficial to the United States. They particularly helped reinstate the importance of the ANZUS (Australia–New Zealand–United States accords) and the Five Eyes intelligence agreement (UK, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) because New Zealand is moving back into a more significant position to resist China’s regional operations in the South Pacific and to support the United States and Australia.
The question of New Zealand’s possibly joining the tri-nation AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance will now come to the fore. However, the incoming Luxon government may have to rebuild faith in the country among its allies and implement structural changes to ensure that strategic policy fluctuates widely with each election.
In Australia, with the domestic theater of the Voice referendum—a preelection commitment by Mr. Albanese—out of the way, the government may now begin to focus on the growing crisis of containing the Chinese regime to avert a major war starting over the Taiwan issue. It must, as well, having now done all it could to deliver the extreme left of the ALP’s agenda on the Voice issue, start to rebuild what support it can among Australian voters, and this will entail more sober approaches to Australian energy prices, which is an issue of demonstrable importance to voters, concerned over constantly rising family energy costs.
At the same time, although Mr. Albanese inherited the new AUKUS treaty and the Australian move to acquire U.S. Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines as well as the British Astute-class successor, the SSN-A, it must now determine how this can be achieved while maintaining true operational readiness and conform to budget demands in a time of declining economic standards.
One Senior Fellow at the International Strategic Studies Association noted: “My concern is that there is a period where it looks like there is one Collins-class, two Virginia-class and two AUKUS (SSN-A)-class submarines [in service with the Royal Australian Navy]. Logistically, this is a nightmare and unsupportable/unaffordable for the RAN.”
This problem must be addressed on Mr. Albanese’s watch, assuming he survives calls for his resignation in the wake of the Voice debacle. He—like incoming New Zealand Prime Minister Luxon—will need to step up, rather than taper off, defense spending and deployment in the face of a growing urgency from the potential threat from communist China.
Indeed, the government of the Philippines, with which Australia has increasing security relations, has made it clear that it expects Mr. Albanese to follow through on his September 2023 commitment to support the Philippines in its growing direct confrontation at sea with the Chinese navy and coast guard. This will particularly apply around the Ayungin Shoal in the Spratly Islands in the “nine-dash line” island chain.
