In an address to Australia’s Parliament that was something of a love letter to the country and its people, Prime Minister Mark Carney implored citizens in both Commonwealth realms to draw closer together amid a breakdown in the established global order.
Carney said Canada and Australia, linked by a common heritage and similar political institutions, are well positioned to partner on the challenges of our time, namely by codeveloping critical minerals and artificial intelligence and banding together on defence at a time when reliable allies are harder to come by.
Carney and his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, with whom he has developed a close personal rapport, inked deals on those issues but also a new “tax and investment treaty” to spur bilateral business investment.
After being welcomed with a 19-gun salute and a military band playing O Canada outside Canberra’s modern Parliament House, Carney met with Albanese and his full cabinet, a rare occurrence, before the speech as they considered these new initiatives.
While separated by geography, Carney told parliamentarians — nearly all 226 MPs and senators were in attendance — the two countries are rightfully “strategic cousins” who are poised to do a lot more together in the face of “hegemons,” like the U.S. and China, that are weaponizing their economic might and leaving middle powers vulnerable.
“With that global architecture now breaking down from consecutive crises, I have come to Australia to reaffirm our alliance, and to suggest where we can go next.
“Because it is my fundamental belief — the result of an optimism I may have picked up from this great country — that from this rupture we can build something better, more prosperous, more resilient, more just.”
While there may be an instinct to compete given the similarities between the two countries — Canada and Australia are both vast lands rich in natural resources the world wants — Carney said co-operation is a better path forward.
“We may look to different skies — the North Star in our hemisphere, the Southern Cross in yours — but we have the same orientation. We share a common heritage, have developed a common perspective and can build a common future,” Carney said.
Canadians and Australians have fought shoulder-to-shoulder in past wars, live under a common King and revere the same democratic values that are eroding elsewhere.
“The institutional depth we share, our friendship forged by shared values and common battles, creates a trust that is a strategic asset. A source of power,” Carney said.
While Carney has been critical of diplomacy and global institutions that have been feeble in the face of some challenges — he lamented Tuesday the United Nations’ inability to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program, for example — the prime minister stressed Canada is not necessarily taking a step back from multilateralism.
Rather he wants to develop what he’s calling “variable geometry,” working with a smaller subset of countries that come together to work on certain issues. One example is the recently constituted Australia-Canada-India technology partnership.
Carney said Canada is “choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience and strategic autonomy,” and he wants Australia in particular to be among those newly established partnerships whenever possible.
To that end, Carney and Albanese announced Thursday a joint critical minerals alliance, with a plan to collaborate on and potentially co-develop lithium, uranium and iron ore to try to block China and the U.S. from total domination in that space.
Taken together, the two countries control about a third of the world’s supplies of all three, which are used to manufacture things like cellphones and electric vehicles.
And, now that Carney has tasked himself with creating a massive trading bloc of countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the European Union — the prime minister said Australia can act as a bridging nation to get something like that across the finish line.
“These new connections between Australia and Canada are greater than the sum of their parts. This is alliance reaffirmed, a friendship strengthened and a partnership to build greater prosperity and security in the Indo-Pacific and beyond,” Carney said.
