The government’s recent pivot — maybe better described as a lurch — to South-East Asia, while welcome, has some major problems.
Three weeks ago it made a flurry of announcements designed, it appears, to let taxpayers know it was paying attention to the rapidly mounting fallout from the self-inflicted trade war with China.
South-East Asia got the chocolates in a package tailored for the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit.
In too many cases Australia’s relationships with South-East Asian nations have been in holding patterns because of its singular focus on China that has seen it put all its eggs in one monopsonistic basket.
Singapore and Indonesia have long been the exceptions — Singapore being a “safer” developed country and Indonesia being the potential clear and present danger.
Readers may remember the government’s last regional pivot — to the Pacific — also long neglected due to Australia’s insane economic obsession with China.
The Pacific has turned out to be something of a damp squib as its headline issue of climate change has been studiously ignored — and even thrown back in the islanders’ faces — by the pro-fossil-fuels Morrison government.
The South-East Asian lurch faces its own headwinds, not least of which that Chinese as well as Japanese and South Korean money makes our effort look like embarrassing small change.
A fundamental problem identified by former diplomats and Asia-wise business people for rebranding relationships with South-East Asia is that the government insists on equating the region and ASEAN.
Its ability to even speak with a single voice corrupted by China’s client states Cambodia and Laos, ASEAN is next to useless — but one look at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s website tells you we’re all-in on the wrong horse.
“We have done just OK with bilateral relations, but we have not done well commercially,” one former ambassador who served in a number of countries across South-East Asia and elsewhere said. “Unless you have strong commercial relationships you cannot have a strong relationship with a country.”
The lack of any national vision and cohesion in Australia in terms of its regional (and international) trade focus has actually damaged Australia’s standing. Diplomats work hard to help Australia businesses gain valuable licences in key areas such as financial services and telecommunications only to see corporations pull out.
“You lose political capital to get these benefits and then you lose even more when you sell out,” the diplomat said. “All of the big four banks and Telstra are cases in point.”
Small business has done better in South-East Asia but the steady decline in ministerial visits outside the end-of-year summit season, and the noticeable lack of many big name companies, provides a rod for their backs.
The rub with the government’s focus on ASEAN at the expense of bilateral relationships is an often frightening lack of understanding of local cultures and languages outside the diplomatic corps — and even there it can be stunningly lacking, as mid-ranking and junior diplomats in South-East Asian posts too often exist in cosseted expat bubbles.
A red letter case in point is the recent appointment of former Liberal premier of Tasmania Will Hodgman as the next high commissioner to Singapore, a classic job for the boys that drew plenty of sighs and eyerolls from experienced diplomats and Australians doing business in Asia.
It’s exactly the sort of contradictory, often inchoate foreign policy that we have come to expect from Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne, and the cabal of Home Affairs, Defence and the deep-state security apparatus that increasingly holds sway in Canberra.
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Michael, this is so depressing, especially coming on top of the news of a reduction in teaching Hindi and Indonesian. F-wit Morrison thinking he can con serious politicians with his marketing BS like he’s conned so many Australians is truly pathetic.
What came first the ‘militarisation’ of the South China Sea ‘rocks’ or the ‘Pivot to Asia’ or the “lurch” to South East Asia? – all very confusing
Long live incompetence the Coalition thrives on it !!
A tedious article for anyone with experience in the region. Try your luck as to edification with ‘the conservation’ or a wimins mag.
Contributer Terry got a hole in one. Analyse Obama (or o-blunder) in the region and proceed from there.
The ‘corporate memory’ of the Laotians is relevant here, as well. A payload every 8 minutes for 8 years, with oodles and oodles of unexploded munitions from those payloads still wreaking havoc, decades later, is very, very likely to continue to ‘shape attitudes’.
So too Vincent Blevins’ ‘The Jakarta Method’.
Without Blevins being specific, it’s rather difficult to escape the notion that ‘Radio Australia’ was modelled on ‘Radio Free Europe’.
As an Aussie student in Indonesia in 1972-76 I used to listen to Radio Australia in English and in Indonesian. They were both very good listening and the cheerful Indonesian language service was popular all over the country at a time when Radio Republic Indonesia and TVRI were both a bit boring. I’ve never heard Radio Free Europe but don’t know why the long established and well presented Radio Australia programs would be considered derivative.
Read Blevins, he lays it out root and branch.
You do know when and why Radio Free Europe was set up?
I’ve often thought that Australia could quite cheaply regain some of the goodwill it used to have in Indonesia by reestablishing Radio Australia Bahasa Indonesia with a strong AM transmitter on Christmas Island. In the daytime it would reach much of Java including greater Jakarta and Bandung and maybe a bit of southern Sumatra and at night it should reach much further. The programs should be streamed on the internet as well for better quality reception.
By all means broadcast a revitalised Radio Australia (in the future,when Scummo & his ilk are past nightmares) on AM/MW but the utility of S/W should not be forgotten.
A fractin of the power cost, for almost unlimited coverage.
International broadcasting used to be nearly all short wave but so many broadcasters have abandoned SW and there are now so many local independent stations on AM and FM I’m not sure how many Indonesians would still have SW receivers.
The point about S/W is that is easier to receive, a crystal set suffices.
It’s very good for distance, I’ve been listening to short wave off and on since I was in primary school (late 1950s). At that time I was listening on a big valve set on 240v, with a long outside aerial. These days a cheap multi band transistor radio is good enough, at least at night. I have a fairly good Sangean but can hardly get anything these days during the day. Most broadcasters have abandoned SW. At night I can get a few stations, mostly Chinese or run by Christian missionary groups. SW is directional so in a targeted area it would be better. Next time i go to Indonesia i might see what i can hear. But the good news is in the AM band. Last time I was in Broome, North West WA, we listened to Radio Republik Indonesia from Mataram, Lombok loud and clear at night.
Blevins was reviewed by the journal Jacobin. Apparently (I haven’t looked) it created a U. Tube channel recently. The rather high brow journal ‘Catalist’ is a product of Jacobin also.
For a hardened Marxist, Jacobin has its moments of political “unsoundness” but it is among the ‘better’ political journals.
Having made that point I agree, broadly, with Rais. I doubt that the ABC is up to it but the region does need a constructive regional perspective from Australia.
Without doing the calcs Rais, I’d say that the ‘skip distances’, given the area of surrounding salt water, would be rather large.
There are plenty of reviews of and references to Bevins’ book (I still mix up Blevins and Bevins from time to time), around the web.
To quote from a piece on Sept 10, at brutalsouthdotsubstackdotcom, titled “When they call you a communist”, subbed “On Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method and the world our country built’;
“In the fall of 1965, the U.S.-backed General Suharto (not to be confused with Sukarno) used a ginned-up communist coup attempt as a justification to launch his own coup. Six Indonesian generals were assassinated and found at the bottom of a well, and Suharto claimed that demon-possessed communist women had tortured and ritually killed them.
The BBC, Radio Australia, and the U.S.-funded Voice of America all ran with Suharto’s version of events, manufacturing an international consensus in support of the purge that followed.”
And, it was some ‘purge’.
Just read a review at Jacobin, by a Grace Blakely. To quote her;
“Part of the reason that so few have heard about the anti-communist massacres is that the truth was repressed by Suharto for so long. Bevins writes, “for more than fifty years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to go out and record what happened.” Meanwhile, Western journalists faithfully regurgitated the lines they were fed by CIA officials, casting the violence in Indonesia as a random explosion of atavism of the kind that was to be expected from a “backward” nation.”
That’s a pretty fair interpretation of what Bevins wrote. This didn’t require much interpretation;
“From Brazil to Chile, anti-communists began talking openly about their own “Jakarta plans.” Bevins is clear about what this meant: “the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States.”
As a ‘terror instrument’, the threats of being ‘Jakarted’ were put to great effect elsewhere, particularly in Chile.
Chile was the original 9/11, courtesy of DrK in 1973.
Would it surprise you, that once Suharto had made Indonesia ‘safe’ for American interests, there was a sudden influx of ‘oilmen’ turning up at the US Embassy in Indonesia?
On the contrary. I admire the scholarship of Kissinger but not the man. Similarly for the late Robert Hughes. The financial interests of Kissinger in the region are conspicuous by their omission when making an academic point.
The film ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’, with its faults, serves as an entree for the history.
And also for Sigourney Weaver in a bikini.
sigh…
Yes, back in the 1960s I used to listen at night for distant stations and sometimes picked up a Voice of America AM transmitter somewhere in SE Asia. I was in southwestern WA.
From there, if you take a look around for references to; ‘Nugan Hand Bank Indonesia’, you find plenty, incl from the CIA archives.
Drug trade, weapons trade, money laundering, lining Suharto’s and Marcos’ pockets, and in the opening of one Wall St Journal piece, from the ’80’s;
“Enough top raking US military and intelligence officers worked for Nugan Hand to run a small sized war”.
Another from the early ’80’s, written by the late, great Alex Cockburn (and James Ridgeway);
“I believe, I believe this will be a glorious, magical miraculous day. He is with me now, J**us walks. He is with me now. Visualise 100,000 customers world wide. Prayerise, actualise, G** is our partner in GNH & CO.”
The initials at the end of the inscription stood for “G**, Nugan Hand & Co.”
The inscription was found in a copy of the New Testament, on Frank Nugan’s body when it was found in his Mercedes, with the odd bullet hole in it.
Erasmus what is your point?
Really? Are you kidding?
I tend to think of that “Other Place” as ‘The Constipation’ – I have never, in 15yrs, seen a new or interesting idea/topic there.
Seriously, the region’s economic superpower, a complementary economy, our biggest trading partner twice the size of all ASEAN nations combined and willing, until recently, to pay top dollar for Australian products and you’re referring to “…Australia’s insane economic obsession with China”.