Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s hysterical assault on Labor leader Anthony Albanese for supposedly being China’s candidate, and his labelling of deputy Labor leader Richard Marles a “Manchurian candidate”, have been met with widespread derision and considerable criticism even in establishment circles.

Morrison’s “reds under the bed” style attack on Labor is a tried and tested Liberal ploy perfected by Bob Menzies back in the 1950s. In those Cold War days, the military top brass and the entire state security apparatus worked hand in glove with Menzies and the mainstream media to pillory Labor as a crypto-communist security threat.

This time around, Australia’s spy agency ASIO is taking a different approach. The security establishment want to keep Labor on board and ensure that escalating hostility to China in alliance with the US remains bipartisan. And ASIO rightly recognises that Labor is so right-wing that it poses no threat to the interests of the Australian state or capitalist class. This explains why, in a highly unusual public intervention, Mike Burgess, the director general of ASIO, hit out defending Labor against Morrison’s attacks. Dennis Richardson, the former boss of ASIO, was blunt, accusing the Morrison government of serving China’s interests, not Australia’s, by politicising national security ahead of the election and “seeking to create the perception of a difference [between the major parties] when none in practice exists”.

Even Greg Sheridan, the hard-right foreign editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian, declared:

“Marles is a perfectly patriotic Australian. Overall, the Albanese opposition, like the Bill Shorten opposition before it, has stood with the government in support of the US alliance, and against Beijing’s increasingly aggressive posturing. Labor has supported the government in every substantial position it has taken on the South China Sea, on resisting economic coercion, on democracy in Hong Kong, human rights in Xinjiang and on the recently announced AUKUS deal, under which Australia will eventually get nuclear-powered submarines. For Labor to embrace nuclear-powered submarines is a significant, perhaps historic, change. Anthony Albanese deserves some credit for this. There have even been a couple of times in more than eight years of conservative government when Labor has been tougher on China than the coalition. The Turnbull government made huge efforts to get parliament to accept an extradition treaty with China.”

Sheridan is correct—Labor has moved further and further to the right and is an entirely safe pair of hands when it comes to defending the interests of the Australian ruling class, in particular Australian capitalism’s imperialist interests. Indeed, you could add to Sheridan’s list Labor’s backing of the US government’s aggressive anti-China “pivot to Asia”, the build-up of US troops and military bases in the Northern Territory, the strengthening of the Quad (the military pact between the US, India, Japan and Australia), the sending of Australian troops and police to help suppress a popular revolt in the Solomon Islands and the increased military cooperation with Japan.

The increasingly strident militarism on the part of both the Liberal and Labor parties has nothing to do with defending the interests of workers or the poor. It is all about advancing Australian and US imperial interests in Asia.

Take AUKUS, the new alliance between Australia, the UK and the US against China. AUKUS is in no sense a defensive alliance. There is no threat of a Chinese attack, let alone a successful invasion of the Australian mainland, any time in the foreseeable future. The Chinese simply do not have that sort of military capability, and won’t for at least the next couple of decades.

AUKUS is not about “defending” the Australian population from being conquered by invading Chinese troops. It is an aggressive alliance beating the drums of war in order to maintain US imperialist domination of the vitally important Indo-Pacific region.

As part of the AUKUS alliance, the Australian government—again with Labor’s support—is set to spend as much as $100 billion on a fleet of six nuclear-powered submarines and another $145 billion in maintenance costs over their lifetime. The submarines are not being built to repel an invasion of Australia. They are being built for entirely aggressive purposes.

These submarines need to be highly sophisticated because their role will be to operate with their US counterparts for long periods off the coast of China, 5,000 kilometres from Australia. These incredibly expensive nuclear-powered weapon systems threaten to imperil all our lives by causing a war with China.

And it is not only that workers’ lives are being threatened by this relentless military build-up. It is also workers who will have to pay the hundreds of billions of dollars in extra taxes to cover the cost, especially now that taxes on the rich and big business are being slashed—again with Labor’s support.

Meanwhile, Albanese is offering next to nothing to advance working-class living standards. He is not promising to revamp the crisis-ridden health system, the long-standing inadequacies of which have been so dramatically exposed by the COVID-19 crisis.

Albanese is not proposing to boost wages that are failing to keep pace with inflation or to do anything to improve housing affordability. Labor won’t even commit to increase the miserable pittance that the unemployed are forced to live on. And its climate change policy is pitiful.

Given that Labor is so conservative politically and so very much in lockstep with the Liberals when it comes to advancing Australia’s imperialist interests and making workers pay for it, is it any wonder that the security establishment has no fears about the prospect of an Albanese-led government? ASIO recognises that cross-class national unity is essential to maintain popular support for a long-running imperialist conflict with China and are critical of Morrison for threatening to disrupt that national unity for possible short-term political gains.

We need to break with that pro-imperialist warmongering consensus. Labor’s appalling right-wing approach highlights the need for a socialist alternative that combines the struggle to advance the living standards and democratic rights of workers and the oppressed with strident opposition to war and militarism.