At nearly 70, Don Farrell is the oldest minister in the Australian government – a wily backroom tactician who has spent 16 mostly invisible years in Parliament.
That is not to say Farrell, who gained a law degree then became a unionist, is idle: rather, he’s a factional Godfather who has made and broken Labor prime ministers.
Now Australia’s rumpled Trade and Tourism Minister, he still rarely steps into the limelight. To his own bemusement, he set off a small firestorm when he answered a question in the Senate on March 18, saying that New Zealand was Australia’s closest international ally.
The opposition’s mirth and even the surprise of one or two of Farrell’s Labor colleagues came after Farrell took issue with his questioner’s description of the US as Australia’s most trusted international partner.
Farrell responded: “I’m not sure that the United States is our most trusted ally. I would have said New Zealand, in the whole history of time. I would have said New Zealand is our closest international ally.”
The blowback from Australia’s conservatives was instant. They accused Farrell of slighting the United States and belittling the security blanket it provides to Australia. “Fond as I am of New Zealand, New Zealand doesn’t do any of that for us,” said Dave Sharma, Australia’s former ambassador to Israel, who sits opposite Farrell in the Senate.
Australia’s shadow foreign affairs minister, Simon Birmingham, also chimed in.
“As much as we love our Kiwi cousins, it is the US who we are asking to share with us their most sensitive defence technologies,” Birmingham said.
Tellingly, none of Farrell’s colleagues in the Albanese government came to his defence and it was left to him later that day to add that his political opponents were “just playing juvenile political games”.
“Everyone knows the Kiwis are family,” he said, while conceding the US was Australia’s closest ally.
Although it might be said that Farrell’s belated acknowledgement that the US is Australia’s closest defence partner is merely a statement of the obvious, the stoush suggested attitudes held by younger Australians towards New Zealand are more ambivalent than those held by their seniors.
Australians of Farrell’s generation are the baby boomers raised on the Anzac legacy, forged over two world wars and a shared history of two nations at the bottom of the world finding their way from beneath mother-Britain’s skirts in the relatively benign post World War II decades. They saw New Zealanders as mates and natural partners in times of adversity.
That appears to be changing. Claire Chandler, the opposition senator who first put to it to Farrell that the US was Australia’s most trusted international ally, is half his age. Sharma is 21 years Farrell’s junior and Birmingham just a year less. Sure, they are Farrell’s political opponents but Sharma and Birmingham are known as moderates, not given to extreme positions.
They might be warm towards New Zealand but are no longer as wedded as many older Australians. For them, the US rates ahead of New Zealand as a mate.
They matured amid the 9/11 attacks on New York 221/2 years ago and the forever wars that followed.
They have seen China’s military rise and Beijing’s attack on Australia’s economy with trade sanctions.
There is a new wave of harder-nosed Australian politicians, less sentimental towards a New Zealand that clings to Australia’s security blanket while denuding its own defence forces – to the point that it struggles to get the country’s prime minister across the Tasman.
Australians are nothing if not realists.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
