Howard's very foreign policies

Relations with Indonesia

Managing relations with Jakarta is no easy task for any Australian government. It is in fact so difficult that the foreign policy establishment gave up trying years ago, and fell back on the deceptively easy course of appeasement.

All through the bleak Suharto years a bipartisan succession of Australian foreign ministers pursued this policy: even the rape of East Timor was not enough to force their hands. Not until the Suharto regime, rotting from within, began to lose its grip did Australia perform its backflip over East Timor.

But of course Jakarta also has its West Papua problem. I have discussed this before, but after 40 West Papuans fleeing the oppression of the Indonesian military successfully gained asylum here, Jakarta embarked on a course of noise and bluster, successfully intimidating a supine Howard Government to accept an Indonesian-dictated revision of our asylum laws.

The year thus far was capped by the signing of a fresh treaty with Indonesia - the previous 1995 agreement, the crowning achievement of years of grovelling by Hawke, Hayden, Keating and Gareth Evans, was dumped in a huff by Jakarta over East Timor.

That treaty was basically a collection of meaningless platitudes with no substantive provisions; so is the new one: only the content of the platitudes is different. Both treaties boil down to: we recognise each other’s borders, and we will consult and co-operate when it suits us both.

Meanwhile several terrorists (involved in the Bali bombings) and Australian drug smugglers (caught in the Bali Nine sting) are on death row in Indonesia awaiting execution by firing squad. Australia has a bipartisan policy against the use of capital punishment; where will this policy lead us in these cases? Do we ask Jakarta to spare Amrozi and his ilk to try and save the drug smugglers? Certainly any inconsistencies in our position will be gleefully seized upon by those countries who still think that judicial killings are a good thing.

Relations with the Pacific

In 2000 the then Solomons Island Government requested assistance from Australia. It wanted troops to help head off a coup and stabilise the country. In its wisdom, the Howard Government declined the request. The feared coup duly took place, the country slid into chaos, numbers of people died violently and we eventually had to cobble together RAMSI (Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands) to try and clean up the mess to which Howard’s earlier neglect had contributed. The rest, as they say, is history and now we are confronted with a complete failure of policy in relations with the Solomons.

This has had spillover effects in relations with Papua New Guinea because of its involvement in the flight of the wanted Solomons minister, Julian Moti, from PNG to escape extradition to Australia. The government is of course right to be outraged at what appears to have an illegal act under both PNG and Australian law, but banning the PNG prime minister from visiting Australia hardly seems a constructive or even appropriate response.

Fiji is showing renewed signs of instability this year, with important issues only shelved. The Fiji military has been pursuing an anti-Australian line of rhetoric, including unfounded accusations of covert illegal shipments of personnel and equipment. This caps off a sorry year in our overall relations with Melanesia, which may yet get worse as corrupt and failing regimes resort to bluster and false indignation to fend off pressure for reform.

Tonga is Polynesian, not Melanesian, but its long-established monarchical regime is under pressure from a pro-democracy movement. Recent serious rioting has led to the despatch of a force led by New Zealand and including Australian military and police to restore order but, one hopes, not to help the monarchy suppress its pro-democracy opponents.

Wider international issues

If ever ideology blinded a government to a vital issue, it did so with this government to climate change. The refusal to ratify Kyoto, the niggardly allocations to alternative sustainable energy research and developments, the devotion to fossil fuels while simultaneously throwing the nuclear dead fish into the ring (safe clean nuclear energy? Don’t make me laugh - unless fusion power is ever realised, that is), all these things show clearly where this government’s sympathies, preoccupations and fundamental mindset lie.

Being the only major western Kyoto holdouts, Australia and the US have suspect environmental credentials, which probably didn’t help us fight the Japanese and Nordic whalers at the International Whaling Commission. Moreover, our refusal to accept the new realities only delays the day when real global action is taken to protect the climate. Let’s hope the blindness of the conservatives hasn’t cost us too much time.