Barnaby Joyce is engaged in what may be a hopeless task, that of persuading the Australian head of government to prefer a defensive alliance with the United States to whatever it is that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is pursuing with China (“ ‘Hundreds of billions’: Price of China threat,” News Core Australia, July 6, 2025).
A Coalition heavyweight has called on Anthony Albanese to prioritise the US alliance, warning that countering China without Washington’s backing would cost Australian “hundreds of billions”….
Mr Albanese will meet Xi Jinping for a fourth time since 2022.
Meanwhile, a firm date for a face-to-face with Donald Trump is yet to be set.
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce said on Monday Mr Albanese was playing a “very dangerous” game.
“The Prime Minister must have a great hand of cards because he has really got the chips on the table on this one,” the former deputy prime minister told Seven’s Sunrise.
“You need to understand the United States is the cornerstone of our defence. It is not going well.
“This is the fourth meeting he has had with the leader of China, but that is a totalitarian regime.”
Yes, China is an aggressive totalitarian regime, and Australia is more or less in its backyard. And if “things go pear-shaped,” says Joyce, Australia is “in trouble—real trouble.” Unwillingness to harden Australia’s defenses against Red China right now could turn out to be a multi-hundred-billion-dollar mistake, Joyce believes. And that’s looking only at financial cost.
But China is pretending to be a better friend to Australia than the United States can possibly be, and it looks like Albanese is willing to be fooled, or to pretend to be fooled.
Reporter Joseph Olbrycht-Palmer quotes an article by the Chinese ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, lauding China’s economic ties with Australia. The two countries can benefit from greater cooperation not only in agriculture and mining, but also, the ambassador says, in “emerging fields like artificial intelligence, healthcare, green energy, and the digital economy.” China’s involvement in these fields is elsewhere raising concerns—in Australia too, though perhaps not in the prime minister’s office—about surveillance, censorship, cyber attacks, and other Chinese Communist Party threats.
The China that wants to help Australia in the areas of artificial intelligence, healthcare, green energy, and the digital economy is the same China whose ships menacingly circled Australia for nearly a month not long ago as a way of showing who’s boss.
“The Chinese are showing us up in our own backyard,” said one former Australian defense official at the time. “We can’t even sail around our own country.”
RBC-Ukraine asserted that “Australia’s navy is at its weakest since World War II, with its two refueling tankers out of service for months. Meanwhile, the Chinese vessels had nearly as many missile launchers as Australia’s entire fleet combined.”
Albanese could not have forgotten this episode. But he may have drawn the wrong lesson.
