This week’s public row between Australia and south-east Asia has thrown into sharp focus a truth that many in the region have realised for some time: after years of living as a peaceable power a new, more aggressive Australia is emerging.
The dispute was prompted by a television interview given by the Australian prime minister, John Howard, on Sunday in which he said he would be prepared to carry out a first strike in neighbouring countries were a terrorist group found to be planning an attack on Australia.
”It stands to reason that if you believe that somebody was going to launch an attack on your country, either of a conventional kind or a terrorist kind, and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it,” he told Channel Nine.
The comment resulted in rebukes from Australia’s traditional allies the Philippines and Thailand, as well as its more spiky neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia. Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohammad, yesterday said: ”If they used rockets or pilotless aircraft to carry out assassination, then we will consider this as an act of war and we will take action according to our laws to protect the sovereignty and independence of our country.”
Howard yesterday stood by his comments. ”I made those remarks very carefully, in a very low-key fashion. They were quite accurate, they were not directed at any of our friends… I don’t resile from them in any way.”
Such fighting talk contrasts with the image Australia cultivated for much of the 1980s and 90s, as a diplomatically neutral country at pains to please its Asian neighbours.
Under the leadership of Howard’s predecessor Paul Keating, the country spent years redefining itself from an outpost of Anglo-Saxon imperialism to a multi-cultural south-east Asian country. While the process of economic and cultural integration has continued unbroken, the tone of public rhetoric nowadays suggests that Keating’s political vision is dead.
Most hope that, as with previous rows between Australia and its neighbours, things will eventually return to normal. But across the region, there is a growing suspicion of a more belligerent Australia which appears to be shedding its pro-Asian consensus in favour of a closer alliance with America.
For several years Canberra has been ramping up military spending, from A$9,9-billion (3,5 billion-pounds) under the last Labour budget in 1995 to 4,5-billion pounds in 2001 and 5-billion pounds this year.
To some extent, the affair is a storm in a teacup. No one seriously expects Australia to start launching strikes against south-east Asian countries: as military figures privately concede, the armed forces are simply not up to the job.
The shadow foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, said the comments arose from a desire to act ”hairy-chested” for the domestic political audience. The difficulty is that what plays well in Howard’s core constituency often goes down very differently in east Asian political circles.
Just as Australians see Mahathir’s intemperate comments as tarnishing the image of Malaysia, so Asians despair of John Howard’s populist rhetoric. ”He has seized the opportunity to appeal to all the disagreeable instincts in Australian society which we thought we had grown out of,” Glenn Barclay of Australian National University said.
Many have been shocked at how far the government has drifted from the bipartisan policy of engagement with south-east Asia, and Australia’s keen support for the US on issues ranging from the Kyoto protocol to the war on Iraq has further isolated regional allies.
Of course, the truth is rarely as simple as the surface prickliness makes out. Australia’s business ties with the region have continued to grow through the Howard years, and the investigation into the Bali bombing has produced the remarkable spectacle of Indonesian and Australian police collaborating on a politically sensitive case on Indonesian soil.
Some analysts argue that Howard’s drift away from Asia has had economic rather than political motives. ”With Asia going into an economic slump after 1997, its relative political importance naturally goes down,” Alan Oxley of Monash University said.
Others disagree, saying that the east Asian slump was all but welcomed by the Howard government. Greg Barns, a former Liberal party senator, says that he remembers the prime minister and treasurer Peter Costello ”gloating” over the fate of the Asian tigers during the 1997 crisis.
Howard’s repositioning of Australia goes against both economic trends and popular opinion.
Polls conducted in June last year put defence behind inflation, women’s issues, family affairs and the environment in people’s priorities. Even the death of nearly 90 Australians in the Bali bombing has failed to make defence a core issue, although the number of people regarding it as important has risen from 38% to 63%.
But Howard has managed to keep support for his defence policies, with his ruling Liberal-National coalition consistently receiving 40-50% support, against 20-30% for opposition Labour policies.
The secret of Howard’s success is his ability to detect mood swings in the electorate. Many Australians were left cold by Keating’s pro-Asia politics, and Howard has deftly exploited a vein of xenophobia which gave rise to the One Nation party in the late 1990s.
This constituency has always thrown in its lot with the US and Europe rather than Asia, and in many ways the current policy is less a departure than a return to previous form. Until the early 1970s, the country had hitched its fortunes to a distant superpower — Britain until 1942, America afterwards. In the 1960s it was one of the few countries to join America in sending troops to Vietnam.
But for a small and isolated country, kowtowing has often been the best way of making friends. According to ANU’s Professor Ross Babbage, Howard’s comments are more than anything a refreshing removal of the kid gloves which Australia has so often used to deal with south-east Asia.
”Many people in this country have gone out of their way to understand the nuances of south-east Asian politics,” he said. ”Well, it’s time they made some effort to understand the nature of Australian politics as well.” – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001