Anthony Albanese must acknowledge the world order has fundamentally shifted under “bully” Donald Trump instead of pretending nothing has changed globally, Malcolm Turnbull says.
Turnbull urged Albanese to offer the same clear-eyed analysis as his Canadian counterpart, Mark Carney, who delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this month warning that the US-led global order is enduring “a rupture”, not a transition.
“I thought Mark Carney’s speech in Davos was outstanding … and yes, I think the Australian prime minister needs to give a similar speech, which is essentially acknowledging that the world has changed,” the former prime minister told Guardian Australia’s Full Story podcast.
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“I don’t think we’ve yet heard from our government the type of honesty and the clear, rigorous analysis of the world as it is as we’ve had from the Canadian prime minister.”
Carney, speaking before Trump backed down on his threats to take over Greenland by any means necessary, told the Davos forum it was time to “stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised”.
“Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion,” he said
Turnbull, the prime minister from 2015 to 2018, has been a vocal critic of Australia’s reliance on the United States and the $368bn Aukus agreement, which was signed by his successor and fellow Liberal Scott Morrison.
While he acknowledged Albanese had been right not to provide running commentary on Trump and the US, he said now was the time for a speech acknowledging that the world has changed.
“Carney doesn’t comment on everything Trump does either. But what you need to do is to give a speech. This is a good time to do it, Australia Day is over, everyone’s back at work. This is the time to really have a tour of the horizon set out,” Turnbull said.
“One of the things that Albanese has got to explain is why we are … putting everything into this US alliance at a time when the Americans are saying quite clearly, you have got to do more for yourself, you can’t rely on us.
“Australians can see that the United States under Trump is not the United States we’d grown up to know and respect and work with, and they’ll be looking to their leader to explain how we deal with that and how we relate to that.”
Turnbull claimed Trump had backed down on his Greenland threats, in part, due to Carney and European leaders standing up to him.
Turnbull said he was not advocating for “sledging” Trump, but that it must be acknowledged that the US president is a “bully” who will only negotiate “when there is pushback”.
“We can’t keep on pretending nothing has changed. And there is a tendency in Canberra to do that,” Turnbull said.
The former prime minister had his own run-in with Trump in 2017, forcing the US to honour an Obama-era agreement to resettle refugees detained on Nauru.
The federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, described Carney’s speech as “stunning” on Thursday and told the ABC it had been widely shared and discussed within the government.
“The powerful point that he made is that a lot of the old certainties are breaking down. We see that in escalating trade tensions, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, discussions in Nato, you see it in behaviour on markets,” Chalmers told ABC radio.
“So for Australia, and no doubt for Canada, the point that Prime Minister Carney was making is that our interests are best served by cooperation and by managing our differences within international law and international institutions.”
