Antinuclear

Decolonisation V – Can Australia Ever Be A Middle Power?

Or, Why Australia chooses to live in the lies of an American world

Burning Archive, Substack, Mar 07, 2026

Australia feinted on the global stage this week when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney went to Canberra. Offered dignity as a middle power, the Australian Government acted the pawn in another USA-run war.

Disappointing, but what I have come to expect, and we have to deal with the world as it is, right? Or, so the realist fictions say. But let me tell you a stranger history of the plural Australian experience, and how this decolonised nation came to be that way.

Contemporary Australia’s muddled national sovereignty is the product of three botched decolonisation projects:

• Federation as White Dominion, 1890-1920;
• USA Agent in a British Commonwealth, 1930-50;
• Deputy Sheriff and Starlet in the USA’s Liberal Empire, 1968-1999.

You may not have heard these labels; I devised them for this essay. But don’t worry: I explain the history and evidence behind them at the end of this post on Australia’s experience of decolonisation.

Mark Carney’s Wake-Up Call to Independence

In each of the three botched decolonisation projects, Australians – both élites and masses – chose belonging to an empire, which claimed global supremacy, over modest, gregarious co-existence as a middle power of one earth.

Now, in 2026, another historic opportunity for decolonisation has arisen. It was announced to the Australian Parliament by the Prime Minister of another decolonised dominion, Mark Carney of Canada.

“Yes, the world will always be driven by great powers, but it can also be shaped by middle powers that trust each other and act with speed and purpose.

Mark Carney, Address to Parliament, Hansard, 5 March 2026

Will Australia seize the moment? Will we act with speed and purpose? Will Australia ride, or get dumped by, a fourth wave of US American decolonisation, by the unravelling of the USA Empire?

My hunch is: we will get dumped, and then sucked out with the rip into the most dangerous waters. Like a bad cocky swimmer in rough surf, we have not been paying attention to the world “as it is” around us, and not even swimming between the flags.

At least, the mainstream élites in politics, business and culture in Australia have not been paying attention. The omens of this opportunity for a new decolonisation have been noticed in the Great Southern Land, for a decade or more, by a few dissident, reviled voices. Like antipodean Havels, we have tried to live in the truth, and point out the lies and slogans our leaders ask us to hang in our shop windows, like the indispensable American Alliance, our great and powerful democratic friend, and the ‘liberal rules-based international order,’ exposed as a sham by Mr Carney at Davos. But Australian leaders have suppressed all readings of the omens. They have blocked their ears and masked their eyes. They refuse to see Australia as anything but the Deputy Sheriff of the USA’s Empire or some B-grade celebrity starlet aspiring to be enriched by Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire.

The Closing of the Australian Mind

The Australian mind is closed and colonised, like few around the world. It may be because Mr Murdoch has so successfully counter-colonised the political and cultural networks of imperial masters, Britain and the USA. It may be because we botched our past three attempts at decolonisation, and the gulfs have washed us down. It may be that we have been unlucky in our leaders. But I suspect, most deeply, it is because, in each attempt at independence, we neglected one crucial truth: colonisation begins and ends in the mind.

Few of our intelligentsia see the opportunity for decolonisation that so many other countries have seen around the world with multipolarity, the redistribution of power, and the redirection of the currents of global exchange of people, resources and ideas. Even this week the admirable Korean-US American commentator, KJ Noh, saw this opportunity amid the disasters unfolding around the world……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://jeffrich.substack.com/p/decolonisation-v-can-australia-ever?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=247469&post_id=189618000&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

March 7, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international