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.
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”.
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.
“as mid-ranking and junior diplomats in South-East Asian posts too often exist in cosseted expat bubbles.” And the example following is Will Hodgman? In my admittedly limited experience, the DFAT second and third secretaries are busy learning, improving, their language and culture knowledge and cultivating local middle class contacts. They are not as out of the bubbles as would be ideal but they are way beyond the mandarins.
And certainly, compared to your average Australian business people “doing business in Asia”, they are streets ahead. Australian businesses are usually so incompetent and cheap they will happily rely on those they are negotiating with to provide the translators or go into a room where they are monolingual and their interlocutors are not. I suspect that in any dealings with non-Anglo countries Australians perform about 60-80% below where they actually could. Another example of the Lucky Country in action.
Absolutely!
Kinda. There is a good deal of variation. Dutch and German companies go the extra mile. What such countries lost by way of colonies they retained in terms of their companies.
I have made this point (I will leave it to two principles) to those scrawling about HK and such like.
(1) ascertain what is important and (by corollary what is not important) and stick to the convention. In getting to this stage the ‘social’ is no less significant than the ‘formal’.
(2) Matters pertaining to the important are always long term.
Oz has very definitely f.ed up on the 2nd because it was probably too lazy to get the 1st principle right in the first place or became over influenced by uncle Sam And so it is with companies. As an aside, there are some damned loose canon expats in Asia, Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Long live incompetence the Coalition thrives on it !!
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