Who is the shadow defence minister? Ostensibly Angus Taylor, but no-one has heard from him for more than a week, marking a return to the days of the Morrison government when he was permanently kept in an undisclosed location except to emerge occasionally to rage at the closure of coal-fired power stations. After his performance during the recently concluded election campaign, we now know why.
Luckily for the smouldering remains of the Coalition, it has a back-up: Andrew Hastie, whose day job is now Home Affairs, is the shadow shadow defence minister.
That’s the impression from the flurry of activity from the West Australian MP over the past few days. After getting Peter Dutton’s old Home Affairs computer from James Paterson to issue a pro forma condemnation of Tony Burke for letting criminals run free in the community, Hastie went back to more familiar territory on the weekend, with several media apparances, including on Insidersin the wake of Trump’s assault on Iran.
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Prior to the election, I suggested Hastie would be a far better defence minister than the Labor incumbent; in his Insiders interview, he exemplified what he might have brought to the role.
First was his observation about the unintended consequences of intervention in the Middle East — made safely before the bombs started falling and the Coalition had to fall into line and back the US.
I think it’s very dangerous and risky. We could see regime change. We could see a collapse of the Iranian regime. We’d see large scale migration and refugees across the world, but particularly Europe. We don’t know who would fill the power vacuum, and if there’s one lesson that I take out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya: be careful what you wish for. You know it’s sometimes better the devil you know, particularly for stability. Once those structures of order — as bad as they might be under a tyrannical regime like that in Iran — when there is no order at all and it’s just chaos, it’s a very dangerous situation for the people of Iran, but also the rest of the world.
From someone with a different background, and especially a Labor frontbencher, such comments would see them portrayed by News Corp as a simpering wimp unprepared to do the hard work of destroying enemies of freedom. But there’s no point even bothering to try that line with Hastie, given his military experience.
Unlike many of the commentators and hawks who gleefully dispatched Australians to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hastie also appears to have learnt some of the lessons of the failed 20-year War on Terror and the perils of thinking the West can simply bomb its way to reordering whole countries.
Hastie went on to reveal that he disagreed with Peter Dutton’s Trumpian dismissal of possible Australian peacekeeper involvement in Ukraine. But his most interesting remarks were in relation to the US alliance. Asked about what role Australia should have regarding US operations conducted using Australian bases, Hastie replied:
We need to have a much more mature discussion about our relationship with the United States. I think we need greater transparency. Secretary Hegseth appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week or last week, rather, and he talked about the Indo Pacific. He named ‘communist China’ as the pacing threat — they’re his words, not mine. And he talked about the US building up its forward posture in the Indo Pacific and he spoke specifically of Australia, Japan and the Philippines. And so we’re very much part of the integrated deterrence that the US is building in the region. And I think the government needs to be clear with the Australian people what that means. We need greater transparency. I think we need to talk about operationalising the alliance, building guard rails for combat operations, and of course defining our sovereignty. And this will make things clearer for us so that we can better preserve our national interest. We’re not just a vassal state, we’re an ally and a partner and I think it’s time that we had a good discussion about what that looks like.
Such is the bizarre nature of politics in 2025 that it’s impossible to think the Albanese government — and especially Richard Marles — would ever say something similar. Greater transparency from a government obsessed with secrecy. Building guardrails for combat operations when Labor won’t even state whether we’ve played a role in them. Defining our sovereignty rather than undermining it by pre-committing Australia’s geography to a China-US conflict.
We’re not just a vassal state — what heresy.
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For good measure, Hastie repeated his point: “It’s about time we started to mature the model and we’re open and transparent with the Australian people about what that means for us, particularly if a war were to break out in the Indo-Pacific region … we have this long-standing relationship, but I think it’s time we matured it and understood it better.”
Whether this is actual Coalition policy is impossible to tell. Hastie isn’t the shadow defence minister, and there are no actual Coalition policies currently anyway. Previous Coalition governments were scarcely models of transparency, too — exhibit A: the AUKUS disaster. But however rusted on to the United States the Coalition will always be, at least there’s someone within the major parties prepared to talk about changing the Australia-US relationship in the context of our sovereignty.