Prime Minister Albanese recently remarked, ‘I think it was Confucius… who said, “If you think you’re the smartest one in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”’

Albanese is presumably boning up on Confucian quotes ahead of his meeting with Xi Jinping during his visit to China, which starts on Saturday, as Xi likes to quote the sage.

There’s only one problem. Confucius never said it. He was both more profound and more humble, saying in Analects 7.22, for example, that he had something to learn from everyone; ‘When I walk with two others, I always find a teacher among them. I observe their good qualities and follow them, and their faults, which I try to avoid.’

Xi’s frequent references to Confucius are intended to lend a patina of moral and cultural legitimacy to his dictatorship, an act of gross revisionism given that Confucius stresses humility and compassion, saying, ‘Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself’; hardly a hallmark of Xi’s despotic reign.

In a speech in Sydney recently to mark the 80th anniversary of the death of Labor prime minister John Curtin, Albanese engaged in his own attempt at revisionism, claiming that it was Curtin who was the father of the Australia-US alliance.

It’s an absurd suggestion.

Curtin pivoted to the US in the dark days of 1941. As allies fighting a common foe in Imperial Japan, it would have been foolhardy to do otherwise, but once the war was won, an alliance with the US was anathema to Curtin’s foreign minister, Herbert Vere ‘Doc’ Evatt, who sought to create a multilateral Pacific Pact, not dominated by any power, which went precisely nowhere, leaving Australia vulnerable in the increasingly dangerous context of the Cold War.

When Menzies came to power in 1949, the Soviet Union had just exploded its first nuclear bomb, Mao Zedong had claimed China for the communists and in 1950, backed by China and the Soviet Union, North Korea invaded South Korea.

Alarmed, Menzies’ Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, persuaded the US to engage with Australia, for their mutual benefit, securing the Anzus alliance that remains central today.

Albanese praised Curtin for giving Australia ‘the confidence and determination to think and act for ourselves’, a claim belied by Albanese himself, who has been cowed into mute submission by China, while crab-walking away from the US alliance without the courage to say that’s what he is doing.

The latest edict from Beijing delivered by China’s Ambassador to Australia proclaimed in flamboyant Wolf Warrior style that ‘some countries, steeped in Cold War mentality’, had ‘hyped up the so-called China threat’ ‘slandering’ China’s ‘normal military build-up’ of only 1.5 per cent as an excuse to drastically grow their military spending, and had ‘incited Australia to follow suit’, undermining its efforts to improve livelihoods, fuelling a global arms race and threatening world peace, all so that ‘certain countries’ could ‘continue plundering the world through hegemony while funnelling benefits to their backers’.

In reality, China’s military investment is north of 3 per cent, it is rapidly expanding and modernising its armed forces, and using them to threaten any nation that challenges its annexation and militarisation of reefs in the South China, not to mention monstering Taiwan.

Yet the only discomfort Albanese evinced was when a journalist inquired whether Australia’s ambassador to China would write a similar article in a Beijing newspaper. Albanese snarled, ‘I don’t know. Your newspaper published the op-ed.’

Not only has Albanese refused to criticise Chinese aggression towards Australia in the South China Sea, the Tasman Sea and in circumnavigating Australia, but Foreign Minister Penny Wong claimed during the federal election that criticism of Beijing by the Coalition was a racist attack on Chinese Australians.

Beijing must be thrilled. Unlike the leaders of Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand, Albanese did not attend the 2024 Nato Summit, placating China, which froths at the mouth at Nato discussions of Indo-Pacific security.

Albanese also refused to send a warship to join the US-led coalition protecting shipping in the Red Sea from attacks by the Houthi, an Iranian proxy and thus part of China’s anti-Western axis of autocrats. China claims Western naval deployments in the Red Sea are ‘provocative’ and blames the conflict on US ‘overreach’ and Israeli ‘aggression’.

Australia’s repeated attacks on Israel, driven by Albanese and Wong’s leftist ideology and Ministers Tony Burke and Chris Bowen’s determination to pander to Islamists in their electorates, play into Beijing’s narrative of growing reluctance to follow Washington’s lead and the splintering of Western strategic unity.

Albanese’s refusal to increase defence spending despite Trump’s request is the most audacious threat to the US alliance. Beijing will be delighted if this leads the US to renege on the Aukus agreement to sell Australia nuclear submarines. If this is what happens, one must assume that it was Albanese’s intended outcome.

Labour prime minister David Lange took New Zealand out of the Anzus treaty with his refusal to allow nuclear-capable ships into New Zealand’s territorial waters in 1985. Albanese behaves as if he wants to follow suit, but he is playing a dangerous and immoral game.

Australia’s security is built around the US alliance, including intelligence, logistics and strategic capabilities. It hosts US military assets and participates in joint war planning. These US-led deterrence structures are vital to preserving regional stability and peace; weakening them will only embolden China, which is already becoming increasingly aggressive.

If Albanese resembles anyone from the Curtin government, it is Evatt, who was so bizarrely naive about the threat of communism that when it was revealed there were Soviet spies in his office he wrote to Soviet foreign minister Molotov and read out Molotov’s assurance that of course there were no spies to the amazement of the parliament which was followed by raucous laughter across the aisle.

Albanese needs to wake up. Australia cannot be neutral between an aggressive and brutal regime with a record of wholesale human rights abuse and a democratic alliance system that has underpinned regional peace.

China’s openly stated 2049 vision is to restore China’s ‘global greatness’ with a world-class military that surpasses the US, and to become a global economic, technological, and geopolitical superpower in a China-centred international order, guided by CCP norms. This is utterly incompatible with Australia’s survival as a sovereign nation in a liberal, rules-based international economic order. When Albanese visits communist China, he should reflect on what Confucius said in Analects 2.24, ‘To see what is right and not do it is the mark of a coward.’