Public Speeches

Australia and Asia: Between Arrogance and Deference

Asia Link Seminar Series in association with Radio Australia, 14 March, 2001

Only a few short years ago, back in what might be called the salad days of Australia's engagement with the region (late 1980s, early 1990s), H.G Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven brought their Triple J radio show, This Sporting Life , to ABC TV. From memory, it lasted a couple of seasons, and was slotted in before the nightly news.

Apart from the fact that it appeared to be entirely unscripted, the most remarkable feature of the 30 minute program was its opening. Each night, H G Nelson would - in a serious tone and a flurry of waving arms - greet the audience with "Hello Asia". Having recently departed the DFAT, I was never sure whether I was the only viewer to chuckle each night, but I was in no doubt what H.G. was getting at - his was a satirical reference to strenuous Government efforts at the time to reconstruct Australia's national identity in the region - the humour of the salutation was its recognition of the gulf between official edict and popular self-perception.

This gap was no deterrent for some. Few will forget foreign minister Gareth Evans's new map projections which allegedly proved that Australia was indeed "an East Asia hemisphere nation", providing you held the map sideways or upside down. None, if any of us, however, seemed convinced.

Canberra's belated discovery of Asia during the period of the Hawke Government was driven by its chronic balance of payments problem, and the belief that expanding export markets in East Asia was the only likely solution.

However, the true flavour of Australia's regional engagement under Labor can be tasted by examining elite attitudes to former Indonesian president, General Suharto.

Loving Suharto

Let's briefly recall how the CIA described Suharto's rise to power in 1965-6:

"in terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20 th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War and the Maoist bloodbaths of the 1950s."

Historian Gabriel Kolko concurs, suggesting that "the 'final solution' to the Communist problem in Indonesia was certainly one of the most barbaric acts of inhumanity in a century that has seen a great deal of it; it surely ranks as a war crime of the same type as those the Nazis perpetrated."

Given the routine demonisation of ideological enemies during the Cold War and after (Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein make interesting contrasts), how did Australia's political leaders, diplomats and senior journalists in the 1980s and 1990s regard the world's worst living mass murderer?

Gough Whitlam, who had a number of crucial meetings with the Indonesian President, thought he was "a reasonable and honest man."

In 1994 Prime Minister Keating praised Suharto as a "nation-builder", a leader who produced a "tolerant society" and brought "stability" to the region - though he failed to detail precisely what Suharto had stabilised in Indonesia.

Four years later, Deputy PM Tim Fischer recommended that "when magazines look for the man of the world of the second half of this century, they perhaps should not look much further than Jakarta", though one suspects that Suharto's many victims feel they should look elsewhere.

Praise for Suharto by the Jakarta lobby - the foreign editor of The Australian thinks that "even in human rights there is a case for Suharto" - was matched by attacks on his critics. According to former DFAT head Richard Woolcott, criticism of Suharto was "racist" and "anti-Indonesian" - an injunction with serious implications for those in Australia who are critical of the government of the day - presumably they are by definition anti-Australian .

For others, the unfortunate aspects of the dictator's record have been effaced from history. Again, according to Greg Sheridan, Suharto was "a monster of the Left's imagination." Former Ambassador to Jakarta, Rawdon Dalrymple, is already expressing nostalgia for the good old days: "I fear we shall not see the like of him again", he laments.

Unsurprisingly, these remarks were offensive to many Indonesians struggling for their freedom under Suharto's brutal rule, including human rights lawyer Buyung Nasution who in response to Mr Keating's remarks pleaded that

"if you were in our position, people who were oppressed, harassed, some of us were arrested unlawfully, even tortured....of course we could not expect too much - that foreign countries will jump in and help us or get relief but that at least we would expect that foreign governments would not praise oppressive measures."

He didn't realise, that for the Hawke and Keating Government's, praising the dictator was one the the rules of regional engagement.

Hating Howard

From the moment Mr Keating suggested that Mr Howard would not be taken seriously in Asia, it appears that many of those closely identified with what we might call Asian Engagement Mark 1 , set out to prove Keating's claim.

How else can we explain some of the bizarre remarks prompted by Howard's decision to liberate the East Timorese from their tormentors in September 1999?

According to former diplomat Tony Kevin, the way to repair the bilateral relationship with Indonesia in the wake of its collapse after the Timor ballot, is for Canberra to say sorry to Jakarta. But, says Kevin, "the Howard Government would not know how to apologise for the way in which our diplomacy exploited and aggravated their [Indonesia's] president's misjudgement and the TNI's subsequent brutality" - the "president's misjudgement" being his decision to allow the East Timorese an act of self-determination.

This is a truly surreal moment in the history of Australian diplomacy, one where the perpetrators of heinous crimes are entitled to apologies from those who exposed and curtailed their genocidal behaviour.

Absurd remarks of this kind were not confined to embittered former mandarins, though the target was always the same regardless of the author.

Mr Howard's problem, according to Indonesia analyst Bruce Grant, is his "lack of emotional commitment to the fortunes of the region". The Prime Minister is seen as "unsympathetic to cultures and aspirations other than his own", a character trait which places him in sharp contrast with leaders in Beijing, Rangoon, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur. Worse still, Howard is suspect in Asia because he is a monarchist, displays a liking for conventional family values and has "a love of cricket, which does not help in Indonesia." Presumably the love for cricket in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia (which hosted a cricket competition as a feature of its Commonwealth Games) also "does not help" their relations with Indonesia .

My particular favourite, however, is again from the foreign editor of The Australian who recently described InterFET as "a strategic disaster". It refers not to East Timor, but to the political culture of the region in general. It represents everything that is wrong about Asian Engagement Mark 1 . According to Greg Sheridan,

"Numerous East Asian societies have developed a basic civic compact between people and government that goes something like this. Citizens are free to do anything they like, except for the things that are banned, chief among which is serious political opposition to the government."

One is immediately reminded by this of Mark Twain's remark about one of the great military heroes of the mass slaughter campaign in the Philippines that opened the 20 th century, General Funston: he is "satire incarnated"; no satirical rendition can "reach perfection" because he "occupies that summit himself and all other applicants must be content with a stage below."

There were, of course, serious ethical implications flowing from this particular approach to regional engagement. Let me mention just one, briefly.

During the infatuation between Canberra and Jakarta in the mid-1990s, one group of Indonesians were conspicuously absent from the official version of events. T he inspiring and courageous dissenters who, at great personal risk, resisted the New Order regime and everything that it stood for, were all but invisible to official eyes in Canberra.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the acclaimed author of the Buru Quartet , who was a political prisoner on Buru island for many years, human rights workers such as Carmel Budiardjo who founded TAPOL , and hundreds of others with even lower profiles, such as the elderly sisters who run the Research Institute for Victims of the '65-'66 Killing s outside Jakarta while under constant harassment and threats of attack.   Why did these remarkable people remain anonymous when their counterparts in Eastern Europe - the 'refuseniks' such as Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky - were so publicly lauded in the West during the Cold War? The answers to this question tell us much about our own diplomatic culture, and more specifically the moral cost of Asian Engagement Mark 1 .

These were not the kind of prisoners of conscience on whose behalf Canberra liked to make human rights representations with the government in Jakarta. Pramoedya, Budiardjo, Colonel Abdul Latief and thousands of others were not only the victims of a cruel and sadistic regime, they shared another unfortunate fate. They had the misfortune to be the political prisoners of a government ideologically allied to the West. By definition they became invisible.

The Need For Belonging

Under Asian Engagement Mark 1 , Asia is seen by the guardians of our regional foreign policy as an exclusive club which we must seek to join. Our need for belonging, however, brings with it obligations of membership which require us to make changes to our ethical and cultural outlook. The price of admission to the Asia club, as inferred by its advocates, includes the sublimation of our European political heritage, a less assertive commitment to universal human rights, and a greater sense of cultural deference to so called Asian sensitivities. "We" must become more like "them". The onus is on us and us alone to change our ways - to adjust to Asia, with no suggestion of reciprocity.

According to leading Australian Sinologist Stephen Fitzgerald, "in the game of self-identifying regions" Australia must "commit to and find acceptance in Asia". Our "fundamental problem is that while we may have come to mouth the sentiment of belonging to the region, we have done too little to belong in human terms or to make the necessary cultural and intellectual adjustment".

Australia's exclusion from the ASEAN-Europe summits (ASEM) since 1996 and, more recently, the ASEAN + 3 group, should be, in Fitzgerald's view, a cause of much domestic anxiety.

But does Asia see itself this way, as a club? If not, should we? Are we not reinforcing perceptions of our differences from the region by conceiving of Asia as an homogenous unit? And what about public scepticism about these rules of engagement set by our policy elite? - concern that this approach seems undignified, even craven and further evidence of our own insecurity and lack of self-respect.

An alternative view - that we should arrogantly project our values into the region, both presupposes a sense of moral superiority and exaggerates our importance to others. This might have been tempting to those caught up in the euphoria of InterFET's success in East Timor, bit it is no basis upon which to build lasting relationships.

Is there another approach to Asian engagement, something between arrogance and deference?

Asian Engagement Mark 2

To some, engagement is regarded as a prelude to marriage. To others it describes the moment when armies meet on the battlefield. In the context of Australia's relationship with the region, our engagement with East Asia has recently swung between love and war. Assuming courtship is the preferred approach, there are four areas of Australian diplomacy which require new rules of engagement.

(1) Identity & Difference: Australia has two great advantages at the basis of its regional identity - the secular and multicultural nature of Australian society. In theory we are better prepared for engagement with such a heterogeneous region as East Asia than virtually any other state. And yet we have acted as a natural outsider desperately seeking both a sense of belonging amongst, and acceptance by, our northern neighbours. Few nations spend as much time worrying about how the rest of the world sees us.

Australia should occupy a position between arrogance and deference. We should not boast or lecture others about the superiority of our values.   Nor need we disguise our differences with other countries in the region - this is, in fact, what makes us attractive to them. A high degree of order and co-operation can exist between states which do not feel they belong to a common civilisation. An open dialogue can bridge many of the differences between nations. Diplomacy should be the means through which the different, the suspicious and even the hostile reach some common ground. Cultural convergence is neither necessary nor desirable.

(2) Boundaries of states: Secession and fragmentation are not the same thing. Just as independence for Tibet would not break-up China, neither would the separation of Aceh or West Papua ineluctably 'Balkanise' Indonesia. The secessionist movements in Indonesia's eastern and western most provinces are largely the creation of Jakarta's military brutality and economic exploitation. The future shape of the republic will depend on whether these citizens still feel their bond with Indonesian nationalism is worth salvaging, and will not be decided by the preferences of neighbours who reflexively favour 'stability' regardless of what is being stabilised.

Canberra's love of regional stability and the status quo may cause future difficulties elsewhere in the region. Is Australia, for example, opposed to the reunification of the Korean peninsula, or the return of Taiwan to Beijing's sovereign control? Both would involve shifting frontiers. If Mr Downer wants to be on the right side of history he should remember that the politics of contesting and redrawing political boundaries never ends .

(3) Political culture: As democratic rule takes root in the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan, the opportunities for deeper engagement with the region increase. Australia should explicitly encourage these and other democratic transitions, recognising that they require a change of political culture as much as they do the holding of free and fair elections. Pre-requisites for democracy include civilian control of the military and restrictions on any internal role for the armed forces. Neither of these conditions exist in Burma or Indonesia (or Pakistan), which will limit the potential for closer relations with these states. No one should be surprised by this.

Human rights concerns should contextualise Australia's regional diplomacy rather than appear as an agenda item in ministerial meetings. We must await systemic and leadership changes in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia before warmer bilateral relations ensue. Diplomatic choices are rarely as stark as love or estrangement, but almost always fall somewhere in between.

(4) Commerce: Discussion about a possible bilateral trade agreement with the US and efforts to kick start a new WTO round, should remind us of the essential political and economic functions which states perform. Far from being of marginal relevance to global commerce as the cheerleaders for globalisation suggest, the nation-state has the exclusive authority to both forge and bind the whole community to international trade and financial agreements. The ongoing quest for export markets in East Asia and the need to source students, tourists and foreign investment from the region will therefore continue to be a primary responsibility of governments in Canberra.

This can be done bilaterally and through regional fora. Though both APEC and ASEAN seem to be in decline, the ASEAN + 3 (Japan, China, South Korea) group which links North-East and South-East Asia economies together, may well design the blueprint for trade and financial co-operation in the region. Canberra should seek to make the organisation as inclusive as possible and join it, though there is no cause for panic about our current exclusion - on political grounds - by Malaysia and Indonesia.

The establishment of Australia's most important trade relationship with Japan in the 1950s and the immunity of our economic ties with Indonesia from events in East Timor during 1999, remind us again of capitalism's own internal logic. The expansion of Australia's economic links with the region depends, not on our perceived cultural identity, shared values or even friendships, but on our industrial relevance.

There are enormous challenges ahead and there are no quick fixes. Asian Engagement Mark 1 was the right idea pursued through the wrong modalities. Those who promoted it never took the public with them, believing it could catch up later. This was a fatal error. Only popular consent and consultation confers legitimacy on government policy.

But governments, like individuals, are not condemned to repeat past mistakes. They can learn from history. Like Radio Australia's broadcasts into the region, Australia now has the chance to start its policy of regional engagement again, to start afresh.

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