When Washington wants to deliver marching orders to Canberra, it no longer needs to rely on cables, diplomatic speeches or Pentagon briefings to Defence. These days, it can simply use Rupert Murdoch’s Australian flagship as the loudhailer.
Late last week, The Australian carried a Pentagon demand that Australia lift its defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, a figure slightly different to the 3% floated in March, but consistency has never been Donald Trump’s hallmark. The message was explicit: without the increase, Australia would “struggle to field the forces required to defend Australia but also to make good on its commitments to others” under AUKUS.
The conduit was telling. News Corp is an American company with an American owner, and its Australian mastheads function less as independent newsrooms than as relay stations for instructions from the imperial capital. The Australian has repeatedly been used to chide Canberra for not spending enough, by which Washington invariably means not spending enough on US-built weapons systems.
News Corp is hardly alone. The Australian Financial Review recently ran an intervention by the chairman of Austal, urging greater investment in the Henderson shipyard in Western Australia in the name of “shoring up AUKUS”. Austal has been designated “sovereign” by Canberra, but the company’s chair, Richard V. Spencer, is a former US marine, Wall Street banker, member of the Pentagon’s Defence Business Board and Donald Trump’s first Navy secretary.
Around this chorus are a cluster of Washington-linked thinktanks and lobby shops. The United States Studies Centre, headed by ex-Bush White House adviser Michael Green and bankrolled by the first Trump administration in 2019, is regularly cited in The Australian in support of Pentagon positions. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, generously funded by the US State Department and major US defence primes including Raytheon and Huntington Ingalls Industries, provides a steady flow of hawkish commentary.
Beyond that are the former Australian defence and security officials whose worldview aligns so neatly with US priorities that they can be relied on to recycle the same talking points on cue. Strategic Analysis Australia, run by Peter Jennings, is just one example. The result is an artificial ecosystem in which US strategic and commercial interests dominate the airwaves and op-ed pages, while dissenting perspectives, particularly those that might prioritise Australian sovereignty or economic independence, are pushed to the margins.
This would be troubling enough in any context, but the United States is no longer simply a military ally; it has become a direct economic rival, willing to undermine Australia’s trading position and interfere in domestic policy, from pharmaceutical pricing to industrial regulation. It is also a principal source of the strategic instability it claims to be containing.
Despite this, Washington’s network of influence in Canberra has never had a better deal. In Anthony Albanese, it has the most rigidly pro-US defence prime minister in Australian history - a leader who has taken Scott Morrison’s AUKUS pact, deepened it, and refused to countenance any alternative even as the risk grows that neither the US nor the UK will deliver the promised submarines. Albanese has already pledged to lift defence spending to 2.33% of GDP and has integrated Australia more tightly than ever into US military planning for confrontation with China.
His defence minister, Richard Marles, is equally committed and, as some in Canberra quietly note, has a post-political career on defence industry boards all but assured.
Yet in the pages of News Corp, and from the mouths of pro-US commentators, Albanese and Marles are still painted as soft on China and insufficiently hawkish - a narrative so at odds with reality that it amounts to political gaslighting. But in a media-policy ecosystem dominated by US corporate and strategic interests, there are few with either the platform or the appetite to call it what it is: the ceding of Australia’s defence sovereignty to an economic adversary and the enrichment of US weapons manufacturers who see AUKUS not as an alliance, but as a business model.
Notes:
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Thinktanks such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the United States Studies Centre (USSC) receive funding from several of the above companies, providing policy research and commentary often cited by News Corp and Nine mastheads.
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Media amplification is concentrated in The Australian and The Australian Financial Review, which frequently run pro-AUKUS narratives quoting US defence industry executives or aligned former officials.
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