Australia’s bid for a 2029–30 Security Council seat is all but certain to succeed. The harder test is the term itself, when Canberra’s reluctance to judge Washington’s use of force becomes a public voting record.
Anthony Albanese says Australia is in a “pretty strong” position to win a UN Security Council seat, and he is probably right. With Finland the only other declared candidate for the two ‘Western European and Others’ seats in 2029–30, the June 2028 ballot looks like a formality. When Switzerland and Malta ran unopposed for the same seats in 2022, they took 187 and 185 votes out of 193. It is hard to see how a campaign announced in 2015 loses from here.
That makes the campaign launched in New York less consequential than the term Australia is seeking. Australia’s pitch is sensible: conflict prevention, ocean and climate security, and safer digital technology. These priorities are broad enough to appeal across blocs without forcing Canberra to choose between Washington and the countries whose votes it needs. The Council’s agenda would inevitably demand that Australia make those choices.
Australia’s last Security Council term shows this clearly. On 30 December 2014, in the term’s final days, a Palestinian statehood resolution fell one vote short. Only the United States and Australia voted against it. Britain abstained. It was Australia’s first “no” of the term, and the Palestinian delegation in Canberra warned it would damage relations with the Arab world. Australia has since recognised Palestine, but the vote stays on the record.
These pressures—to back Washington or break with it—now arrive faster, and more often. Between November 2024 and September 2025, the US vetoed three Gaza ceasefire drafts, each by fourteen votes to one, and each written by all ten elected members. Their authors included Japan and South Korea, both American treaty allies. That is the job Australia is applying for.
Gaza is not even the hardest case. Australia backed the US and Israeli strike on Iran in February. Asked whether they were lawful, Albanese left that judgement to Washington and those directly involved. When US forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January, Albanese urged “dialogue and diplomacy”. That kind of ambiguity would be harder to sustain at a table of fifteen.
This isn’t just about Donald Trump. He leaves office less than three weeks into Australia’s term, but the 2014 “no” on Palestine was cast alongside Obama’s ambassador, and the first of those three Gaza vetoes came under Biden. The dilemma isn’t Australia’s alone, either. Mark Carney told Davos in January that middle powers can no longer expect compliance to buy them safety. Weeks later, Canada backed the strikes on Iran in almost the same words as Australia. That tension is easier to manage when Canada is not required to cast a Security Council vote.
None of this is an argument against the bid. Australia’s last term also showed what an elected member can do: after MH17 was downed, Australia drafted Resolution 2166 and had it adopted unanimously four days later. It worked because Canberra knew what it wanted before it walked into the room.
It helped that Washington wanted the same, though. Recent examples suggest that Canberra is more willing to diverge from Washington when acting alongside other partners. It sanctioned two Israeli ministers alongside Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, and formally recognised Palestine in coordination with Britain and Canada. On the Council, company is always present: Britain and France hold permanent seats, and Britain was among the fourteen on Gaza. The harder votes are the ones where the company scatters, as it did over Iran, when Britain, France and Germany hedged, and Spain objected. Those are the cases where fewer partners would be standing with Australia.
Canberra’s campaign promises a world governed by “rules, not by power and force alone”. In recent practice, however, Australia has often avoided explicit disagreement with Washington. For now, Australia can hold both. The General Assembly forgives ambiguity, press conferences reward it, and the alliance rarely obliges Canberra to say aloud what it thinks of Washington’s use of force. A Council seat would make that ambiguity harder to sustain for two years.
That matters because Australia’s commitment to a rules-based international order is also central to its position to China. In July, Canberra joined 13 other governments in declaring the 2016 South China Sea arbitral award legally binding. States, Australia has said, “cannot simply choose whether or not to abide by rulings they dislike”. That case is harder to press after declining to say whether an ally’s use of force was lawful, especially in front of Southeast Asian neighbours, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, which expressed grave concern over US actions in Venezuela. In 2026’s ISEAS survey, 52 per cent of surveyed Southeast Asian respondents said they would choose China over the US if ASEAN were forced to align.
Each time Canberra hesitates to judge Washington by the standard it applies to Beijing, that argument weakens. On the Council, those judgements become recorded votes, cast in front of the region Australia most needs to persuade.
William Chen is a Year 11 student in Sydney, with research interests covering the politics of multilateral institutions, and the degradation of the rules-based international order.
This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.
Photo: UN Photo, Cia Pak (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
