Why won’t Australia promote its own interests, not America’s

Feb 23, 2022

Dutton is not merely promoting his own personal interests here; he is trying to save a government, not least given Morrison’s ineptness with most of the planned campaign points.

I was once talking to a very senior political appointee from the US State department, and made a sardonic reference to the “special relationship”.  He commented that he had heard this phrase recently, when Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister had been in Washington, asking for some favour under the Old Mates Act. One of the Americans to whom she was speaking had said, “Mrs Thatcher, you talk of a special relationship, and we get it. World War I. World War II. A common language and all that. You are our friends. But when we sit down to decide where our interests lie, we think of the needs and interests of Great Britain as often as you, in the British Cabinet, while working out your own national interests think of the particular needs and interests of the people on the Isle of Wight.”

If this were true of Britain, what did it say of Australia? China could understand both the principle and its implications, but says it remains puzzled that we seem unable to be more assertive of our own interests, and needs, particularly when they diverge from America’s. Our close friendship, and the fact that Australia was usually America’s most reliable ally gave us some moral credit in the bank. On China, in particular, our own mineral trading relationship gave us insights into Chinese thinking and interests that would not normally have occurred to analysts in the US. When, sometimes, we wanted American favours, we were asking little more than the sort of favours being given to particular special interests in the US — and without the loss of any American skin.

Our mateship, moreover, might have enabled us to act as a go-between when relationships between China and the US were dominated by spite or long-standing grudges. Our interventions could be disinterested — simply helping two of our partners to see a way through a conflict — or interested — in attempting to broker a compromise which also served our own interests. All the more so given the triangular nature of the trading partnerships, whereby Australia supplied China with raw materials, (at a net profit to us) which China manufactured into goods it sold to the US (with an export surplus to China) while we spent much of our surplus in buying American intellectual property.

I do not doubt that Australia has diplomats and analysts of skill who understand very well the difference between Australian national interests, the American national interest, and the broad interests of the western alliance. But I fear that their more calm, cautious and sober voice is being drowned out by a more hysterical element positively slavering for more tension in the relationship, perhaps to the point of armed hostilities. Some of the hysterical soolers can be described as lobbies and cults, out to identify and punish Australian deviants who cannot see just what has objectively changed in recent times. It is not new that China is authoritarian, and ruthless in suppressing domestic consent. It is not necessarily true that the tone of threats to Taiwan has recently increased. It is true that China’s conduct in persecuting Uighurs is  disgraceful — perhaps genocidal — but Australia and the west was (still is) long indifferent to the fate of Tibetans, or democracy activists, including once, those in Tiananmen Square, now in Hong Kong.  No group more indifferent over the years than folk of the ilk now located in the Australian Strategic Policy institute, funded by the weapons industry.

Shrill as such lobbies are, they are more than matched by government politicians, particularly in recent months. The noise is orchestrated by the Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton, who has long been attempting to ramp up a national security emergency as one of the most important election campaign points. Dutton is not merely promoting his own personal interests here; he is trying to save a government, not least given Morrison’s ineptness with most of the planned campaign points. As Morrison’s strategies have foundered, Dutton has become even more unbalanced in the way he is pushing the issue, more or less by insisting that only his government is hairy-chested to stand up to China. By comparison, Anthony Albanese and his side would be wimps — even appeasers. He says.

Labor is too cowardly to enter the defence, foreign policy and national security debate

There is a convention, of sorts, that political parties do not seek to divide the nation on broadly similar foreign policies lest the divide weaken the country, and its resolve over its national interests. Sometimes that convention is extended to saying that politicians should not criticise their own country’s foreign policies while abroad. I’m not sure that either is an inviolable principle — one that should be regarded as more important than the interest in a robust public debate, one in which the public is embraced within what consensus emerges.

Labor’s foreign policies are, on most matters, identical to those of the coalition. This is not because of a meeting of minds. Labor has been largely excluded from the debate, unable to introduce other facts and perspectives. Not unable because it is stupid, but because it believes it will be “wedged” as “unpatriotic”, or “wimps” or treasonous if it says anything that is not in lockstep with the government. So scared is Labor of this that it assents to hard-line policy positions coming from the extreme right without subjecting it to its own analysis. That a number of Labor spokesman — including Penny Wong and Kimberley Kitchen — are fiercely anti-China helps with this hostage situation. Likewise, Labor has its own home-grown authoritarians comfortable with the development of the illiberal surveillance state, and happy to adopt any rationale whatever for it. Yesterday’s terrorist as today’s paedophile. For tomorrow the threat to the state will come from anti-vaxxers without masks.

Labor’s policies on China are not more dangerous for Australia than those of the coalition. Neither is  likely to influence the approach China takes, although an Australia more determined to engage might well find that we gained in both influence and reputation, including among neighbours as flabbergasted by our role as American messenger boys as China is.

But if China wants to wage ideological war on Australia, or to use this nation as an example of a nation suffering for not adapting to change and to geographical and military fact, it might well prefer that it be confronted with a country as reactionary, obdurate and inflexible as possible. For much the same reason that Donald Trump preferred to deal with dictators than democratic countries where policy had to follow political process and general consent.  With corrupted public administration, and increasingly less transparency over public and private transactions. More and more like China, in fact.

This might not put Australia  at greater risk of invasion; that would still probably not be worth the effort. But it might make Australia’s  decline and ultimate collapse, of its own failings,  more inevitable.

 

Jack Waterford is a regular commentator and former Editor of The Canberra Times

 

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