Kim Beazley on Albanese's US trip, Biden in the Middle East, and the Voice's defeat

The prime minister heads to Washington next week for a state visit. Talks between Anthony Albanese and President Joe Biden will canvass progress on implementing the AUKUS agreement, Ukraine, China and the situation in the Asia-Pacific region, and of course the Middle East crisis. Biden will have just returned from his visit to Israel and will brief the PM on the situation, which has worsened by the day.

In this podcast, Kim Beazley, defence minister during the Hawke government, former Labor leader, and former Australian ambassador to the US, joins The Conversation to talk about the Albanese visit and the international situation.

On AUKUS, progress has been slowed by the need to get approval for the export of sensitive military technology, and there have been some dissident voices over the supply of US-built Virginia Class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

“We’ve got a lot to move along,” Beazley says. “The most important thing, at least to me at the moment, to move along is the process by which the approvals are given for the export of nuclear materials.”

On the Middle East, Beazley, from their contact in the past, is very impressed with Biden’s grasp of the detail of that fraught region.

I used to see Biden modestly regularly when I was ambassador to the US, and he was enormously impressive in his knowledge on Middle Eastern matters. I remember him having a most interesting discussion with then foreign minister Bob Carr, which I attended, on a shift in Australia’s position from opposing the Palestinian resolution in the UN […] to abstaining (which really infuriated the Americans when that was done). But Biden explaining his perception of Palestinian politics and attitudes – it was enormously sophisticated.

We all get caught up in this Republican propaganda […] that the president is mentally falling apart - has to be said that in this area he had great acuity. […] Biden moving into the Middle East is a totally confident man. He’s confident he knows all the nuances and confident that when he gets the intelligence about what is actually happening on the ground, he’ll have an erudite opinion on it.

On the Voice’s defeat, Beazley, a Western Australian, says he feels “terribly depressed”. He sees the result as damaging not just for Indigenous Australians, but for Australia’s reputation abroad:

This is not about government. This is about us, it’s about we as an Australian people and it’s not actually a good ad in the region around us that our response would be ungenerous.

Now the people come out and say, Oh, come off it, that’s just an elite thinking; it’s got nothing to do with the streets. That’s true. I don’t think anybody in the countries around us, or for that matter in the United States will be giving a minute’s thought to the referendum on its result. But every single elite will be. And it’s actually elites that make decisions.

You know, I was depressed by the way race seemed to be a factor in discussion about this whole proposition. This whole proposition had nothing to do with race. It had absolutely everything to do with originality. Who was here? Well, they have been here for 70,000 years.