What Australia REVEALS About The US Empire | Dr. Jeff Rich

Australia sits at an uncomfortable intersection of power, identity and external influence. Recent political convulsions reveal a country that has prospered under a US-centred security umbrella while simultaneously experiencing deep social strains at home: migration anxieties, fraying party loyalties, and growing doubts about who gets to decide Australia’s future. The recorded conversation with Dr. Jeff Rich frames these developments not as isolated domestic turbulence but as a revealing case study of how a middle power becomes both patronized and constrained within a larger imperial order. What unfolds is a portrait of a polity that is politically unmoored and strategically tethered—an instructive story about sovereignty in the era of great-power rivalry. ## Australia’s Political Upheaval The dramatic surge of One Nation from a fringe formation to a major player crystallizes the sense of crisis. In little more than a year after a federal election, the party’s voting share ballooned from single digits to the high twenties, redistributing the political map and forcing a five-party reality onto a system that still rhetorically clings to bipartisanship. That mismatch between institutions and political realities is generating instability: conservative defections, internal party collapse, and a broader public debate about national direction. The image invoked during the conversation—a little nation lost in the woods—captures the psychological dimension: a polity that no longer trusts its own map. This upheaval is not merely electoral theatrics. It reflects a deeper unraveling of the postwar consensus: the social contract produced under long-standing ties to the United States and a neoliberal domestic order is fraying. Voters disenchanted with economic precarity or cultural change are being shuffled into new political vehicles, some of which traffic in xenophobic rhetoric while simultaneously channeling business-friendly policies. The results are messy coalitions, unpredictable parliamentary math and a public conversation about who “Australia” is supposed to serve. ## Migration, Identity and Settler Colonialism Migration sits at the heart of the argument about national identity. Australia today is a majority-migrant nation in important respects: more than half of the population has a parent born overseas, with South Asian migration—especially from India—now the single largest grouping. That demographic transformation has unsettled older narratives built around a whitened settler imagery; it also brings into sharp relief the country’s unresolved settler-colonial history and the violence that accompanied nation formation. The conversation highlighted a paradox: parties and movements whose supporters are themselves often recent migrants—sometimes several generations removed—mobilize against contemporary migration. This is a phenomenon familiar elsewhere: anxieties about housing, public services, and cultural change get racialized into political programs promising “remigration” or severe cuts to intake. But the result is not simply xenophobia; it’s also an expression of competition over infrastructure and economic opportunity. Importantly, this is not a straightforward cleaving of city versus countryside—though geography matters—but a more complex layering of economic grievances, cultural narratives and political entrepreneurship. ## Electoral Mechanics and the Rise of One Nation Understanding the mechanics of Australia’s electoral system is crucial to interpreting the shock of One Nation’s rise. The lower house uses preferential voting, which tends to reinforce two-party dominance by ensuring votes for minor candidates are transferred rather than wasted. Yet the Senate’s proportional representation produces pluralism and gives smaller parties disproportionate leverage. Over decades, the combined effect has been a steady erosion in the major parties’ share of the vote: what once was an 80% two-party dominance has dwindled to far less. This structural fragmentation creates fertile ground for insurgent parties. Voters who feel unrepresented can channel their discontent into new organizations which, once buoyed by strategic defections or media amplification, gain real parliamentary influence. The interaction between institutional bias (favoring stable majorities in one chamber while allowing pluralism in the other) and social disaffection helps explain why a party long regarded as beyond the pale moved so quickly from the margins toward the center of politics. ## Neoliberalism, Class and Policy Failures Beneath the headlines lies a policy story: Australia embraced neoliberal reforms earlier and more comprehensively than many comparators. The idea that markets could be engineered to deliver social outcomes—through privatized services, marketized welfare, and competition-driven public provision—has been a dominant orientation since the late 20th century. That approach reshaped healthcare, aged care, disability services and housing policy. For many, it delivered growth; for others, it produced precarity. The conversation argued that the limits of this “market-first” orientation are now visible. Housing affordability crises, strains on service access, and the mismanagement of social supports have produced fertile resentment. That discontent does not automatically translate into leftist, redistributive politics; instead, it can be channeled into right-populist demands for cultural closure or into anti-regulatory agendas that paradoxically favor powerful business interests. In short, neoliberalism has hollowed out the political center, leaving class grievances vulnerable to cultural capture and elite realignment. ## AUKUS, Sovereignty and U.S. Influence Perhaps the starkest manifestation of Australia’s constrained autonomy is its role in U.S.-led security architectures, exemplified by AUKUS. Ostensibly a trilateral partnership for advanced defence collaboration, the deal’s practical outcome—submarine technology transfers and expanded basing rights—illustrates a classic trade-off: strategic guarantees in exchange for operational dependency. The conversation pointed to a symbolic and material dynamic in which Canberra secures privileged access and shared capability while surrendering degrees of choice about how, when, and where those capabilities will be used. This is the crux of the sovereignty dilemma. On one hand, alliance membership affords protection and geopolitical clout. On the other, it narrows the range of politically acceptable options and increases the domestic costs of diverging from the patron’s line. The participants framed U.S. allies like Australia as essentially “privileged dominions”—partners with special benefits who nonetheless occupy subordinate positions within an imperial hierarchy. Such a framework challenges liberal narratives of equal alliances and points instead to asymmetric sovereignty exercised through security dependencies and institutionalized access. ## Media, Elites and Imperial Hierarchies Media ecosystems and elite networks are central to how politics gets refracted. The conversation drew attention to the role of influential owners and conglomerates in amplifying particular narratives—anti-migrant sentiments, culture-war frames, and pro-business policy solutions. When major media houses and wealthy patrons invest in certain parties, the electoral tilt can be decisive. That dynamic dovetails with elite circulation: politicians who defect, oligarchs who fund campaigns, and networks that normalize first-approval policies all reproduce the architecture of control. Elite alignment with foreign partners compounds the problem. When political and business elites benefit from the security and market arrangements offered by a great power, their incentives to sustain those arrangements tend to outweigh national debates about long-term autonomy. The result is a form of governance that is responsive to a narrower coalition of in

What Australia REVEALS About The US Empire | Dr. Jeff Rich The USA sold Australia a Submarine that will never be delivered. In return, they got a Deep See submarine port that they can use in perpetuity. Well played, Washington! Or was it maybe not? Jeff Rich joins Pascal to examine Australia’s political upheaval and its place within American power. They discuss One Nation’s rise, migration, neoliberal reforms, and growing doubts about national autonomy. Rich argues that AUKUS strengthens foreign military access while constraining Australia’s choices, and proposes understanding US allies as privileged dominions within an imperial hierarchy. The conversation also explores media influence, elite networks, relations with Asia, hostility toward Russia, and the changing meaning of national identity in an increasingly interconnected world. Jeff's Links: The Burning Archive on Substack: https://jeffrich.substack.com The Burning Archive on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzmI2CEnbKq0yswTpqdQfyg Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Australia’s political crisis 05:20 Migration and settler colonialism 10:11 Voting systems and One Nation’s rise 20:28 Neoliberalism and the limits of market reform 26:27 AUKUS and Australia’s autonomy 37:41 US dominions, elites and media power 47:26 Australia’s relationships with Asia and Russia 52:47 National identity and the Burning Archive #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. Today, we have an update with my friend and colleague, Jeff Rich from the Burning Archive. Jeff, welcome back. #Jeff Rich Good to see you again, Pascal, if not in person this time. #Pascal We were together in Istanbul, and it was absolutely lovely. And now we want to talk a little bit about some of your recent observations. In particular, you wrote a piece on Substack. And again, everybody, your Substack is called The Burning Archive, just like your YouTube channel, if anyone wants to check it out. And that latest piece is called “Australia, a Little Nation Lost in the Time of Monsters,” which I loved very much because I just held a conference with a similar title, “Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters.” Jeff, we actually didn't discuss Australia much at the conference, although -- 1 of 16 -- we did have Warwick Powell there. But Australia itself didn't feature that prominently. So can you maybe catch us up on where Australia sees itself and why you used this picture of a little boy lost in the woods? Yeah. #Jeff Rich Well, Australia's really going through quite a crisis at the moment. I mean, everyone's aware of the AfD in Germany and its sort of sudden surge, that sort of thing. But people may not be aware of what's happening in Australia because it doesn't get a lot of airtime, you know, either in, I guess, mainstream international news or in the alternative media. Australia is seeing a similar surge in support for a sort of new right-wing party called One Nation, which is fundamentally an anti-migrant party, and it's been around for quite a while. But over the last year or so—a little bit over a year, since the last federal election in May 2025—its voting preference share has increased from 6.5% to 28%. So it's more than quadrupled in a little over a year. And this has led to quite a crisis because One Nation is talking about turning Australia, which is a deeply multicultural society, into a monoculture, with a lot of the same sort of rhetoric about Western civilisation and that sort of stuff that you get from the American right, and even things like remigration, but certainly reducing the level of overseas migration to Australia. So it's quite, I guess, countercultural to what has been the mainstream consensus in Australia. But it's also totally disrupted the political system because there's now, I think—let's see—One Nation, the Liberals, the Nationals, the Labor Party and the Greens. So there are five effective parties within a political system that still tells itself it's governed by two major parties. It's sort of a bipartisan system, or a two-party system. And the whole political system is struggling to adapt to this extraordinary surge of a party that has been seen as beyond the pale for decades to almost the top position in voter preference polling. And this problem in politics is also reflected in other issues, particularly in foreign policy. There's a growing sense that Australia has chained itself to the United States and has done well out of that. But it's now no longer really in Australia's interest to maintain U.S. primacy if the U.S. is going to be very, very aggressive about it. So across society, culture, politics, and Australia's perception of its role in the world, it's lost all of its fundamental assumptions about what it should be doing. So it's really quite a crisis. And that's why I talked about “A Little Nation Lost.” And the image that went with the article is a famous painting by one of the Heidelberg School painters, an early Impressionist painting school from the early 20th century in Australia. They painted not so far from where I live, in Heidelberg, a suburb of Melbourne. And it shows a little child lost in the bush around the city in Australia, which was a very, you know, typical traumatic experience, I guess, for late 19th- and early 20th-century urban Australia. But it's also a symbol of the innocent young nation, lost in the time of monsters. #Pascal -- 2 of 16 -- This picture and the identity of Australia are quite interesting because, of course, this shows a white boy, right, in the 19th century, lost in the woods. It doesn't show an Indigenous person here. And how big is that issue today? You know, this fact that Australia, the way it exists today—political Australia, I mean, of course—is a nation of immigrants from various places around the world, and that immigration wasn't always peaceful. I mean, on the contrary, it was very violent. I think Australia did a lot of grappling with its own past, right? How it treated the Indigenous population and so on. How big is that aspect today for the political development of the continent? #Jeff Rich So you mean the sort of Indigenous issue and, like, settler colonialism? #Pascal Yes, settler colonialism. And, you know, you're saying this is an anti-immigration party, but it's made up of people who are themselves immigrants, or whose grandparents or great-grandparents were immigrants. How does that shape a nation? I mean, the United States, again, has a bit of a different history, also with slavery bringing so many people over there. But Australia had a lot of migration, including from Asia. And if I remember my discussion with Hugh White correctly, then currently, you know, the Asian share of Australia's population is growing while the white share is going down. And it seems that that also creates a lot of anxiety that's not even expressed explicitly, but seems to be simmering. #Jeff Rich Look, absolutely. And I think Australia is what's now called a majority-migrant nation. So more than half of the population has a parent born overseas and comes from a migrant family. And I think something like a third of the population—I'm a little bit rusty on the statistics, but roughly a third— are themselves migrants. Currently, the largest overseas-born group is from India. And if you also include Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, et cetera, you know, South Asia is by a long way the largest group. I think the next largest group might be Britain or China. But India, China and the South Asian countries are sort of overtaking Britain, which is, you know, increasingly declining as a sort of legacy source of migration. #Pascal Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on neutralitystudies.com. Links below. See you there. #Jeff Rich -- 3 of 16 -- So, you know, compared to when that painting was done, when there was still lots of migration to Australia, including actually quite a lot of Chinese migration up until the late 19th century, migration is now largely from Asia rather than Europe, and that's profoundly affected things. And the One Nation Party began in the mid-1990s, really with a lot of rhetoric about Australia being “swamped” by Asian migration. And, you know, I'm using those words in quote marks. That's not my view. And over time, that hasn't really proved to be the case. But in recent years, there's been more agitation in the community around South Asian migration, Indian migration, a lot of which is somewhat exploitative for those South Asian migrants. But there's also a lot of tension over, I guess, access to infrastructure, access to government services. So there's a similar dynamic to what you see in Europe, I guess, with resentment from some parts of the community about, you know, the cost of living being high, blah, blah, blah, and yet we're bringing in a lot of these migrants. So there's a lot of pressure, actually, on all sides of politics to reduce the migration intake in response to that. Right. #Pascal Can you catch me up, though, on the political system, actually? Because, you know, when we see a two-party system in Parliament, usually the reason for that is a first-past-the-post voting system. First-past-the-post just creates that, and there's almost no way around it. Whereas if you have a proportional system where, in each district, you have several seats that can be contested, then usually what we see is a parliament made up of four or five parties, usually two around the 20% to 30% mark and the others around the 10% mark or so. That's just what the voting system produces. It's not even a preference issue. So, what's the voting system for your parliament, actually? #Jeff Rich So, Australia has a bicameral system, and in the lower house, it has a member-based preferential system. So, you vote for a candidate, and then you go down the list, expressing your preferences. It ends up being like there's a two-party-preferred count, so to speak. So, rather than a first-past-the- post thing, your vote doesn't get wasted. If you vote for the third most popular candidate, you can express a preference for who you want to be number one. That has a tendency to support the two- party system, but it also leads to results like, for example, in the 2025 election, when the Labor Party got roughly a third of the vote, but it got roughly, you know, 60% of the seats in the parliament. So it sort of biases things to support a strong governing majority, I guess, in the lower house. But then in the upper house, it has a proportional representation system, with all the different states, with their different populations, being equally represented. That means, you know, I guess smaller states and regional Australia are more broadly represented in the Senate than they are more widely. -- 4 of 16 -- It's a pretty common sort of system. And that means the party that has controlled the lower house of parliament hasn't really controlled the upper house of parliament for a long, long, long time in Australia. And what's also happened over the last, I don't know, 50 years, or even more than 50 years, is that there's been a reduction in the share of the vote that goes to the two major parties: the Labor Party, the sort of left party, and the Liberal National Party, which is a kind of coalition of the Liberal Party and what used to be the Country Party. Those two major parties' share of the vote has declined from over 80%, you know, in the late '60s and early 1970s, to now, by some measures, actually less than 50%. This is part of the significance of the emergence of One Nation, I guess. Yeah. So effectively, we have a kind of two-party syste