Asia Rising Australian Foreign Policy and Asia Welcome to Asia Rising, the podcast from La Trobe Asia where we discuss the news, views and general happenings of Asian states and societies. I'm your host. A sound foreign policy is crucial to the success and safety of any country, and governments are grappling with different ideals and agendas to maintain relationships in the current changing global environment. Joining me to discuss Australia's Foreign Policy and reflect on its interactions with Asia is Allan Gyngell. He's an Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Australian National University and he's the director of the Crawford Australia Leadership Forum. He has an extensive background in international policy making and analysis and amongst his previous job titles he was Foreign Policy Advisor in the office of then Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating. Thank you for joining me Allan. Professor It's a pleasure to be here Matt. That was a very truncated version of your extensive resume. How well did I do there? Well, you did pretty well considering that my career can be described either as extensive or eccentric depending on which way you look at it. But I've operated in most of the bits of the Australian Government which deal with the external world and also partly outside it in think tanks and now universities. So I've looked at it from all directions. You're on the podcast today to look at it today from a few different directions, but if you had to describe Australia's Foreign Policy in the form of emoji, which emoji would you use at the moment? I don't know what you call the one with the straight mouth, it's not a smiley face one at the moment, but the eyebrows are raised because I don't think we quite know what's about to happen to us. So if I could take you back then to the mid '90's and we could have a bit of a reflective look at Australian Foreign Policy. How did Asia look from an Australian point of view compared to how it does today? I think it looked very different because it was all heading in one direction. A number of things had happened, the Cold War had ended and that made possible a number of developments in Asia like the expansion of ASEAN and China's full entry into the world economy. So everyone was sort of marching in one direction, there were the stories of the Asian Tigers for example, China after Tiananmen Square had its head down and deeply focussed on development,
so you're beginning to see the emergence of the global value chains, which led to the phenomenon of factory China. Things which had not been possible to do until then like solving the problems of Cambodia, or establishing an organisation like APEC were suddenly possible. And has Australia changed its thinking substantially since about that time? Well Asia has changed substantially since that time and therefore Australia has had to change its thinking. The region has become much more complicated. China has grown hugely and is beginning to exercise political and strategic as well as economic influence in the region, but other parts of Asia like India have suddenly become much more important actors on the international scene. Security has become a larger issue as we begin to see the consequences of greater strategic competition between China and the United States. Now that wasn't the case in the mid 1990's of course but, as China has grown like any great power, it wants to exert its influence more than it has and we're seeing that now. So since the Keating Ministry, we've had many different policies and leadership styles come into play and very different relationships with Asian states. So as an observer of Australian Foreign Policy, whose leadership style do you think has been the most effective when dealing with Asia? Look I think any leadership style can be effective, it's the way you use it. We've had enormously energetic figures like Gareth Evans or Kevin Rudd who plunged right into things, we've had ministers who've stepped back a bit like Alexander Downer. Anything can work. The question is whether the ministers have understood the environment they're operating, they've understood Asian cultures and so on. A particular problem for Australian ministers generally I think is, their level of discomfort with silence. One of the things that I admired about Keating when I first started working for him; and this was a surprise to me given his reputation, was his ability to sit silently and wait for pauses in conversations to be filled by others. Australians have to learn how to deal with their Asian counterparts, but you can do it from a number of different perspectives. Do you think that's a considerable benefit when dealing with other states, a quality like being able to sit and wait silently? I think it's hugely important in many different environments, but particularly when dealing with Asia. China is Australia's biggest trade partner and is an emerging world power at the moment, so it makes for a very crucial and complex relationship and it's a priority of our national agenda I think. What's the best way to manage a relationship like that and how do you think it will evolve?
I think the most important thing in managing the relationship with China is to have a very clear idea of what our interests are and what we want to get from the relationship, to put those points clearly to the Chinese, it has never seen to me a very difficult problem to deal with China. You sometimes hear people overly I think, complicating the relationship. Clarity in what you want from it, clarity in what we put to China and the understanding that we're dealing with two different systems, there are systemic differences which we have to take into account. So as John Howard used to say, 'raising the issues which we have with the Chinese, privately before going public with them'. Has that been something that's been hugely effective? I think engaging China in regional architecture like APEC, that was key to doing that, talking to them behind the scenes, understanding what their interests are, making a case for how their interests could be furthered by engaging in these developments. I think Australia's work with China in getting it into the WTO was another example of that. We've had problems like Chinese asylum seekers coming to Australia and dealing directly with China about ways of addressing those problems and repatriating people, have been some of the ideas. But the business of bi-lateral relations with China goes on every day and I think there are examples that any Australian diplomat could point to month by month and year by year. So Australia like many other countries has a foreign policy very much directed by our national agenda and we've seen recent interactions with Asia where it seems we're only in it for the money. So would you agree with this assessment? Is it a smart way to approach things when dealing with foreign policy? I think all our relations with every country in the world, not just Asia, involve a mixture of interests and values, it's very hard sometimes to distinguish an interest from a value. Foreign policy isn't humanitarian policy it's a whole combination of different things, those interests are defined from time to time by the government and in a democracy they're then judged by the voters in elections. But, interest is a very slippery concept because in any relationship, particularly ones with our neighbours. We have a whole variety of different interests at stake and we need to balance them so it's not simply a matter as pressing as hard as you can for the immediate benefits to you, it's also about thinking about how to construct broader relationships - both bi-laterally and with the region, which over time will shape the sort of region that we will find it most conducive to live in. I'm interested in what you think, is foreign policy something that you can put a lot of planning into because it seems to be a kind of reactionary think that you develop? You know, something happens, you need to put something in place to deal with what has happened. Is there something that you can put a lot of planning into or is there a certain amount of guesswork involved?
You can plan but you always have to be ready to turn and adjust and so on, I mean foreign policy is the way in which we deal with the almost incomprehensibly complex issue of the international agenda where everything is happening at the same time. You've got human actions; Donald Trump is an example of that, you've got long term economic and strategic trends and all the time you're trying to maximise the room in the world in which you can act and in which; as I said before, you can advance your interests and the values you believe in. So it will always be reactionary but it can't be simply reactionary, you've also got to have a destination point in mind, but be ready to turn and weave and duck and adjust and go backwards and forwards as you make your way across the messy contingent swamp of the international environment. In 2016, Julie Bishop announced the development of a foreign policy white paper, the first such in 13 years. What do you think needs to be addressed in such a document? I think it's extremely hard to do foreign policy white papers for all the reasons we've been talking about. White papers are designed to set out the government's policies for a period ahead and to engage the public in debate. The problem with a foreign policy white paper however, is that it's always going to depend on events which are unpredictable, if we'd had a foreign policy white paper in June 2016 there would have been no mention of the Trump administration which will preoccupy Australian governments for the next four years at least. We've had one example of that already when the 1997 white paper that the incoming Howard Government put out failed to predict; understandably enough, the Asian Financial Crisis which emerged soon after. So how you pitch a white paper at a level which is not so general as to be bland, or so specific as to be unbelievable is very hard. I think that it needs to address certain principles, certain ways of doing foreign policy and in my view anyway, it ought to, as the defence white papers do, also address the capabilities we have for pursuing our objectives in the world. Now whether the government will want to get into capability building at this time I don't know, but that would be the way I would be going I think. Paul Keating recently voiced his concerns at how Australia is approaching foreign policy and the relationship with the United States particularly given the impending Trump Presidency. Do you believe Australia should be dealing with the US differently? I think Australia has to deal with the US differently because we've got a very different US. Under the Trump administration as we've seen even in the interim period before he takes office, the uncertainties about the approach that the new administration will take, are very great and in a number of areas I think both interests and values are going to be tested. We've always said that the alliance with the United States rests on a coincidence of interests and values, well there are clearly some areas; for example the open international trading system
where Australia's interests and the US will differ from what we've been used to from the Americans and even on values and issues like the global environment and climate change, there are new uncertainties, so we've got to be much more alert to looking after our interests and values in this environment. But the uncertainties at this stage, are greater than I can remember at any period certainly in my professional life with an incoming US administration. And I think the whole world is trying to come to grips with that uncertainty at the moment and waiting to see what rabbit Trump pulls out of his hat really. Well I think one of the problems for us is that no part of the US establishment - pollsters, Wall Street, mainstream media - no part was more damaged by the Trump victory than the Foreign Policy establishment, which had almost to a person, Republicans as well as Democrats, opted for another outcome and that means that Australia is dealing now with great uncertainty, not only with policy but also with personnel. You can usually depend on knowing who the incoming people in a new administration will be, they've been occupying offices and think tanks around Washington, but so many people this time ruled themselves out. That's and he has a new book out in April 2017 called Fear of Abandonment Australia and the World Since 1942 and it's published by La Trobe Press. You've been listening to Asia Rising. If you like this podcast you can subscribe to it on both itunes and Sound Cloud. I'm and thanks for listening.