Only a genuinely anti-imperialist independence will protect our people.

Written by: Nick G. on 4 April 2025

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s recent address to the National Press Club, in which he called for Australian politicians to “get up off your knees and stand up for Australia,” represents a further strengthening of the movement for Australian independence.

Turnbull said that there should be a retaliation against Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Australian exports to the US, and that the Albanese government “could start with the $3bn or the $2.5bn left being handed over to support the US submarine industrial base.”

Attacking the AUKUS arrangements, he said “Australia was unlikely to ever receive submarines from the US given production challenges in America’s shipyards and there was a bipartisan lack of transparency about the risks to Australian sovereignty and defence capacity from the deal.”

He also said the government should consider withdrawing American access to naval bases in Perth.

He called on both Labor and the Coalition to stop being so timid and deferential, and said that “Australia needed to be more independent in the new world of brute power politics and reclaim sovereignty from the US.”

Of course, there will be some on the Left who will reject Turnbull and remind everyone of his role as Coalition PM between 2015 and 2018 when he did nothing to reclaim our sovereignty from the US, or make any reference to the need for Australian independence. 

He was then, and is now, a supporter of the so-called US-Australia “alliance”.

A person’s background and political record must not be forgotten, but whether their change of heart occurs sooner or later, the important thing is that it does occur.

The same may be said of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser who was the beneficiary of a US-managed parliamentary coup. Whitlam had ruffled US imperialist feathers by talking of revealing the CIA role in Pine Gap, so hatchet man Marshall Green was despatched as US Ambassador to Australia to lay the ground for Whitlam’s dismissal.  Fraser secured the Australian state within the hold of US imperialism and launched attacks on the working class.

Yet in his later years, he had his own “road to Damascus” awakening and wrote the book “Dangerous Allies” in which he criticised the US hold on this country, warned about US plans to make us take Virginia class submarines, and called for the closure of Pine Gap.

Some on the Left extend their rejection of new-found allies on the Right to those progressive persons who try to establish an alternative to the US stranglehold.

The various Trotskyite groups, for example, have blasted the Greens for proposing a defence policy based on rejection of ties to the US and the development of a policy of armed neutrality, limiting Australian armed forces to the defence of Australia’s territorial integrity.

One Trotskyite organisation pilloried the Greens for “suddenly positioning themselves as defenders of the realm against an undefined enemy”.  The organisation conceded that the Greens had called for the scrapping of AUKUS, but criticised them because the demand “is not particularly progressive”.  It accused the Greens of “floating with the tide when every left-wing organisation ought to be swimming against the current.”

Another group which emerged out of the Trotskyites went further, slamming the Greens as “imperialism’s left-wing”.  

This group aimed its attack at the independence movement, in which it lumped the Greens, saying “Support for an “independent Australia” policy is not anti-imperialist in practice. Rather, it seeks to facilitate an independent Australian imperialism, liberated from its sub-imperial status under the American nuclear umbrella… An independent Australia would simply be an imperialist Australia.”

As long-time supporters of an independent Australia, we know that the question of Australian independence is fundamentally a class question.

Which class will win the right to lead the movement for independence will determine whether it moves in a genuinely anti-imperialist and socialist direction, or whether it suffers defeat and the strengthening of the grip of imperialism and reaction.

We are implacably opposed to bourgeois nationalism. But we are not opposed to strengthening and widening the anti-US movement and do not support sectarian rejection of allies who, whatever their shortcomings as firm anti-imperialists, are nevertheless welcome participants in the movement in which we are trying to establish a proletarian revolutionary main force.

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