Why AUKUS Divides Australia's Labor Party

In mid-August Australia’s Labor Party held their national conference. Since inheriting the agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States from the previous Liberal and National coalition government, Labor has proceeded with fleshing out the substance and details of AUKUS, with its senior leadership enthusiastically embracing the deal. In recent years two prominent figures within the Labor Party – former Prime Minister Paul Keating and former Foreign Minister Bob Carr – have both become vocal critics of AUKUS and the broader U.S. alliance. The opinions of both men have been severely compromised by their post-political careers: Keating has been on the advisory council of the China Development Bank; Carr became the head of the Australia-China Relations Institute, a think tank funded by Huang Xiangmo, a Chinese Community Party-linked billionaire, who was subsequently stripped of his permanent residency in Australia on national security grounds. Pat Conroy, the minister for defense industry and minister for international development and the Pacific – himself a member of the party’s Left faction – caused a scene by asking whether AUKUS dissenters wished to be on the side of Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party and a supporter of appeasement toward Nazi Germany during the 1930s.