Toward a more relevant Australia (Part 1 of 2)
Paul Keating, Melbourne | Opinion | Mon, November 26 2012, 10:07 AM
Klipping The Jakarta Post
Paper Edition | Page: 7
When I was the prime minister of Australia, I gave enormous time and attention to the development of bilateral relationships, most notably with Indonesia. I think I grasped, perhaps more than any of my predecessors, the singular importance to Australia and to its security, of the vast archipelago to our immediate north.
I understood that the advent of Gen. Soeharto’s New Order government had brought peace and stability to our region, as it had to support for the building of ASEAN itself. It turned out I had been right in assuming that president Soeharto possessed a generally benign view of Australia, notwithstanding the preoccupation of the Australian media with the events in Balibo two
decades earlier.
I was completely determined to establish a totally new and durable basis for our relationship with Indonesia other than the one we had which saw everything through the prism of Timor Leste.
History has well recorded that this period was a high point in Australia’s relationship with Indonesia from which I was able to propose and then with president Soeharto, build a political relationship based around regular meetings of a broad ministerial forum and a new strategic relationship built around a defense cooperation treaty of a kind our two countries had never had nor earlier could have contemplated.
Called the Agreement on Maintaining Security, it was not simply a defense cooperation agreement — it had within it an active element — an agreement to consult one another in the event of adverse challenges and to consider individual or joint measures to respond.
In other words, the Agreement on Maintaining Security was, in effect, a contingent mutual defense pact and one negotiated with our nearest largest neighbor. The document was a strategic dream for Australia with at least as much realpolitik and clout as the treaty we have with the United States; ANZUS.
This was get-it-done foreign policy. Australia acting independently and in its own interests, pursuing its own objectives, filling the void which followed the thunderclap which ended the Cold War.
These were the kind of moves which Australian foreign policy was able to make in the 1990s. Gareth Evans, who was foreign minister in both the Hawke and Keating governments, also succeeded in a number of international initiatives; perhaps the most important being the ASEAN Regional Forum, the defense and security dialogue, operating within the aegis of ASEAN; the Cambodia Peace Accords and our sponsorship of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The point I want to make tonight is that, I believe, this era of effective foreign policy activism has passed. Our sense of independence has flagged and as it flagged, we have rolled back into an easy accommodation with the foreign policy objectives of the United States. More latterly, our respect for the foreign policy objectives of the United States has superimposed itself on what should otherwise be the foreign policy objectives of Australia.
The days when, as prime minister of Australia, I was able to wrest the Chinese premier into a multilateral body shared with the president of the United States, when I was able to bring the virtual head of the Non-Aligned Movement, president Soeharto, into a structure which included the United States, indeed into a structure with China to boot, are behind us.
The United States and China will now not encourage us to propose and build structures of the kind we have in the past. In the 20 years since I put the APEC Leaders’ Meeting together, China has become the second major economic power in the world; it does not need us to help construct its foreign policy, any more than the United States needs us to insinuate ourselves onto China to its account.
That is not to say we cannot be influential at the margin, on either or both of them — we probably can and should be. But we have been traded down in the big stroke business. Even states like Indonesia are dubious of us because they do not see us making our way in the world or their world other than in a manner deferential to other powers, especially the United States.
This became apparent during John Howard’s prime ministership; it has remained apparent under the prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. After playing the deputy sheriff, John Howard had us dancing to the tune of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, while upon the release of the WikiLeaks cables, the Chinese discovered that Kevin Rudd, as Prime Minister of Australia, had been advising the United States to reserve the military option against them.
During the current prime ministership, that of Julia Gillard, the US President Barack Obama, made an oral and policy assault on China and its polity, from the lower chamber of our Parliament House. This brought immediate pangs of disquiet from the Indonesian foreign minister and later from his president.
The fact is, Australia’s former sphere of influence is diminishing.
Our membership of the Anglosphere through the post-War years and down through the Cold War, did give us influence in the temples of power — but that power came from the victory of World War II and our associate membership of the West. That world has changed. Now, we have to be propelled not by regard of withering associations but by our enlightened sense of self. Knowing who we are and what we are and what we want. And not only what we want, having a solid idea about how we get it.
This discourse leads to one conclusion: We will always be best being ourselves, exercising our ingenuity where it matters most, where we are most relevant, where our interests mostly coalesce and that is in the neighborhood — the place we live. Recognizing that our general membership of ‘the West’ was most relevant to us while ever ‘the West’ was the dominant global grouping - but that that period is now passing. What is not passing and what will not pass is our geopolitical positioning. The immutability of our need to successfully treat with and adapt to the neighborhood — a neighborhood which, save for New Zealand, is completely non-Western.
The secular change in the diminished growth potential of the West vis-à-vis that of Asia and South Asia and the ‘catch up’ in productivity and living standards going on there will mean that, from now on, our security linkages with the West will seem more incongruous than during the post-War years.
While we will always have a close relationship with the United States based on our shared history and our similar cultures, it is obvious that the right organizing principle for our security is to be integral to the region — to be part of it rather than insulating ourselves from it, hanging on in barely requited faith, to attenuated linkages with the relatively declining West.
The writer was prime minister of Australia, 1991-1996. This article is based on his address “The Keith Murdoch Oration” with the theme “Asia in the New Order: Australia’s Diminishing Sphere of Influence” delivered at the State Library of Victoria on Nov. 14, 2012.
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