Donald Trump’s Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, was reported to be pressuring Australia this week to ramp up its military budget. Pressuring? He did tell his Australian counterpart, Richard Marles, that he wanted the Australian defence budget to be increased from today’s 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent of GDP as soon as possible. Which would equate to about $40 billion a year, extra.

But for the Albanese government, that’s not pressure. That’s an opportunity. An opportunity to say “no”, politely but clearly, to Trump. “We’ll determine our defence policy,” retorted the prime minister. “They’re entitled to express views, but we’re entitled as a sovereign nation to ensure that we look after Australia’s national interest.”

Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit:

It’s an easy hero move. Anyone who paid attention to the Australian election saw that resisting Trump was a winning stance for Albanese to take. And that appearing to accommodate him was a losing position for Peter Dutton.

Even Hegseth himself couldn’t have expected his demand to succeed. If he’d wanted to be effective, he’d have made a persuasive case in private. By publicising it, he was merely performing for Donald. Look, boss, I hit those dumb Aussies!

Albanese refuses to allow Australian policy to be defined by the US. Shortly after his election victory last month, he applied a new construct to his political style. He described it as “progressive patriotism.”

“We spoke about doing things the Australian way, not looking towards any other method or ideology from overseas,” he told this masthead’s Inside Politics podcast, an unsubtle yet unspoken contrast with Trump’s destructive chauvinism.

“Progressive patriotism” is a rubric that ties together Albanese’s domestic policy with his foreign. We can expect him to touch on it at the National Press Club next week in the scene-setting speech for his second term.

It’s also a way of claiming patriotism for Labor, rather than allowing the Coalition to retain its traditional default ownership. Tim Soutphommasane, formerly Australia’s race discrimination commissioner and now at Oxford, has been writing on this for over a decade.

“In today’s Australia, the new default should be that patriotism is a love of country that is democratic and egalitarian. It is something that includes those of different races and backgrounds,” he wrote in this masthead a couple of weeks ago. “With his political authority........

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