Aussie senator’s ‘Anzac nostalgia’ challenged by security realities

That is not to say Farrell, who gained a law degree then became a unionist, is idle: rather, he’s a factional Godfather who has made and broken Labor prime ministers.

Now Australia’s rumpled Trade and Tourism Minister, he still rarely steps into the limelight. To his own bemusement, he set off a small firestorm when he answered a question in the Senate on March 18, saying that New Zealand was Australia’s closest international ally.

The opposition’s mirth and even the surprise of one or two of Farrell’s Labor colleagues came after Farrell took issue with his questioner’s description of the US as Australia’s most trusted international partner.

Farrell responded: “I’m not sure that the United States is our most trusted ally. I would have said New Zealand, in the whole history of time. I would have said New Zealand is our closest international ally.”

The blowback from Australia’s conservatives was instant. They accused Farrell of slighting the United States and belittling the security blanket it provides to Australia. “Fond as I am of New Zealand, New Zealand doesn’t do any of that for us,” said Dave Sharma, Australia’s former ambassador to Israel, who sits opposite Farrell in the Senate.

Australia’s shadow foreign affairs minister, Simon Birmingham, also chimed in.

“As much as we love our Kiwi cousins, it is the US who we are asking to share with us their most sensitive defence technologies,” Birmingham said.

Tellingly, none of Farrell’s colleagues in the Albanese government came to his defence and it was left to him later that day to add that his political opponents were “just playing juvenile political games”.

“Everyone knows the Kiwis are family,” he said, while conceding the US was Australia’s closest ally.