QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Mr MARLES (Corio—Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence) (14:15): I thank the member for her question and acknowledge her service in the Australian Army, as I also acknowledge the service of the ADF officers on the parliamentary exchange. Last week was the 75th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty, and it was my great privilege to be in Washington, DC, to commemorate the event.
On 27 December 1941, in an opinion piece entitled 'The Task Ahead', published in the Melbourne Herald, John Curtin wrote the most consequential words in the history of Australia's strategic and foreign policy: Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.
These words began the formal alliance with the United States, an alliance which was enshrined by the Menzies government in the 1951 ANZUS Treaty. It was an alliance which was in part based on geography. Unlike the UK, Curtin saw the US as a Pacific power, and it has been an enduring passion of every Australian government, from then until now, to emphasise to US administrations and lawmakers the profound significance of America's exceptional role in the Pacific.
But it was more than that. It was an alliance with a country with whom we shared values—a fellow democracy, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. We saw a people with a shared love of freedom who spoke words which resonated with our own sense of egalitarianism and our own identity of mateship, and, as a result, in both world wars, in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan, Australians and Americans have fought side-by-side, in every major conflict.
Defence spending matters. Defence capability really matters, but what matters most is showing up, and, uniquely, Australians and Americans have been there for each other for more than a century, in the darkest of times, including the one occasion where the ANZUS Treaty was formally invoked, when Australia came to America's aid in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
In a difficult world, our alliance with the US has never been more important, and so, in the context of the past and with the promise of the future, it is the role of every Australian government to be the custodian of the present. In that respect I can inform the House that our alliance with the United States is in the very best of order.