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3 The rhetoric of Australia’s regional policy James Cotton Discussing the evolution of Australia’s regional policy involves making some assessment of conflicting partisan claims as to its invention and promotion. Former Prime Ministers Paul Keating (1991–96) and Gough Whitlam (1972–75) both claim to have invented the idea of pursuing engagement or community in the AsiaPacific region and both wrote books advancing their respective claims (Whitlam 1981; Keating 2000). On the conservative side of politics, Percy Spender (Foreign Minister 1949–51) and R.G. Casey (Foreign Minister 1951–60, later head of state) paid great attention to diplomacy in the Asian region and also wrote books on this theme (Spender 1969; Casey 1955). Nor is this a matter only of historical interest. In the 1990s one feature of election rhetoric has been the charge that one side of politics or the other cannot be entrusted with government since they did not have regional credibility or, alternatively, could not advance Australia’s regional interests without compromising important values. Setting aside these partisan questions, Australia’s regional policy rests on several key geo-political legacies. Australia is a largely European derived society on the fringes of the Asian land mass. It is sparsely inhabited yet its armed forces must defend an entire continent. Australia’s security has traditionally been sought through alliances or cooperation with extra-regional powers, first with Great Britain and from 1942 with the United States. This strategy has generally served Australia well, and it is popularly believed that only the US commitment to defend Australia prevented a Japanese invasion during the Second World War. However, there have been important occasions when there were doubts that these partners had Australia’s security as their highest priority, a historical record that has also perpetuated a sense of strategic uncertainty. Perhaps the most famous episode was the attempt by British Prime Minister Churchill in February 1942 to divert Australian troops returning from the Middle East for the campaign in Burma when the Australian government was expecting their return for the defence of the homeland (Grey 1999, 168). Similarly, Australian policy-makers were 30 Asia-Pacific Security disappointed to find, in 1961, that the United States was prepared to support the Indonesian acquisition of West Papua in the interests (as was the perception in Washington) of keeping Jakarta out of the communist bloc even though this was anathema to the Menzies government (Pemberton 1987, 70–106). As a consequence, Australia then came to share an ill-defined border with Indonesia under the unpredictable and increasingly leftist leadership of Sukarno. Australia’s commitment of troops to the Vietnam War (despite the domestic turmoil this generated) can be partly understood as an attempt to help secure long-term US involvement in Australia’s immediate region (Edwards 1992, 358–62). At that time, of course, it was not imagined that once committed, the US would not prevail. The other legacy that has had an enduring impact has been the radical reorientation of economic linkages. Even in the 1930s, signs emerged of economic complementarity between Australia and Japan, though at that time Britain accounted for more than half of all Australia’s trade and the majority of foreign investment. In the immediate post-war period Britain resumed its role as chief trading partner, but through to the 1970s this predominance of British linkages progressively declined. By 1970 Japan had become the single largest destination for Australian exports, a trend encouraged further by the loss of major markets when, to the dismay of many in Australia, Britain joined the (then) EEC in 1973. By this time trade with the US was very significant, and investment from the US and (later) from Japan grew to rival levels of British investment, an issue vital in a nation traditionally dependent upon the importation of capital (Meredith and Dyster 1999, 192–221; Tweedie 1994). These security and economic developments need to be seen in a social context. For almost the first half of its life, the Australian federation was avowedly an Anglo-Celtic country. By degrees this position was abandoned, first regarding immigration from the European area, and then from Asia. By 1966, exclusions on immigration on the grounds of race were abandoned and in 1973, an explicitly nondiscriminatory definition of Australian citizenship was enacted. By the early 1980s ‘Asia’ outpaced ‘Europe’ as the largest source of immigrants, and of the former group those from Hong Kong were the most numerous (Mackie 1997, 18–24). The era of...

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