Image Credit: Peter Dutton
Nick Dyrenfurth
Executive Director of the John Curtin Research Centre
The 2025 budget handed down by Jim Chalmers is not just an economic statement or a debate about whether Aussies deserve a tax cut or Peter Dutton’s crude, pun intended, promise to halve fuel excise—it’s a test of patriotism. Hence Labor’s “buy Australian” plan to back local industry, using government procurement to support our businesses and encourage households to buy local.
With Donald Trump’s tariffs threatening our exports, American big pharma circling the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Elon Musk and ‘Tech Bros’ oligarchs coming after our social media laws and local journalism, with this budget the Albanese government has sent a clear message: real patriotism isn’t about empty rhetoric but protecting Australia’s sovereignty, our economy, and our people in these uncertain times. Real patriotism is loving Australia, believing that our egalitarian democracy is the greatest country on earth, and being willing to defend it against threats.
Trump’s America First agenda will hit Australian exporters and workers hard. Politicians like Liberal leader Peter Dutton love to wrap themselves in the flag, but when it comes to standing up to foreign threats, they fall silent. Australian steel and aluminium imports into the US were targeted a fortnight ago. Now big American pharma, emboldened by Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ trade policy, are ramping up pressure to weaken our PBS, potentially forcing Australians to pay higher prices for essential medicines. If Dutton’s chest-beating patriotism meant anything, he’d be fighting these threats—not enabling them, the precise effect of his attacking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as “limp wristed”.
Australia has a proud tradition of wielding patriotism as a force for progress, not reaction. From Andrew Fisher’s assertion of Australian independence in the era leading up to World War One, creating our Navy, to the only West Australian MP to serve as prime minister John Curtin rallying the nation in its darkest hour in the 1940s, Bob Hawke’s revitalisation of national pride and nation’s economy in the 1980s and Albanese’s emphasis on Medicare. Liberal grandee John Howard would have stared down Donald Trump. True leaders know that patriotism is about strengthening the nation, not pandering to billionaires and foreign interests.
That means defending what makes Australia strong—our democracy, our egalitarianism, and our cherished national institutions. Our PBS is one of them. So is universal Medicare. So is a strong economy and fair go workplace laws. As Howard might have explained, we decide what is great about this country and the circumstances by which it can be made greater.
“True leaders know that patriotism is about strengthening the nation, not pandering to billionaires and foreign interests.”
Then there is the patriotic duty of climate action. A clean energy transition isn’t just about cutting emissions —it’s about defending Australia from worsening bushfires, droughts, and floods, and more wild weather including flooding, cyclones and hailstorms. Yet Peter Dutton’s strategy is to delay and deny, doing the bidding of his benefactor Gina Rinehart, a Trump devotee who partied with Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago on US election night, while blocking investment in renewables. What kind of “patriot” leaves Australia more vulnerable to disaster while selling out to billionaires?
And consider, too, the Port of Darwin, leased in 2015, on the Turnbull government’s watch, for 99 years to the Chinese Communist Party owned Landbridge Group, despite national security concerns such as the proximity of the port to a base where US marines are stationed and to Darwin International Airport. It should never have been countenanced and both major parties have erred in not re-nationalising the port. Why did Peter Dutton, the tough talking Minister for Defence, not tear up the lease when he had the power to do so in 2021-22?
The election will be won or lost on the economy, as always. But patriotism, or lack thereof, shapes as another crucial contest. In 2025, real patriotism means protecting our institutions from those who would weaken them to curry favour with powerful vested interests.
Real patriotism means confronting foreign powers, including allies like the US as presently led by Trump, when they threaten our economic security. And it means reminding Australians that the greatest act of patriotism isn’t waving a flag or forcing supermarkets to sell Aussie flags—it’s making this country stronger, fairer, and better for future generations.
That’s the test of patriotism in 2025. Are you on Team Australia or Team Trump and Musk?
Patriot or pretender? Dutton’s budget-in-reply tonight will either pass the test or fail the nation.
