Speculation is presently rife, however, that a significant recalibration of Australia’s
‘hedging’ approach is set to occur under the Rudd government. China is said to be the major beneficiary of this anticipated policy shift and Japan the biggest loser. The Straits Times of Singapore, for instance, reports that:
Mr Rudd has a deeper understanding of China.
He will recognise that to keep the Australian economy going, ties with China would have to be very close. He might seek more cooperation and dialogue with China on economic as well as security issues.34
In similar vein, an editorial printed in the Japan Times suggests that:
Under Mr Rudd, who has a strong affinity with China, Australia’s approach towards its relations with China may change. He was stationed in Beijing for two years in the 1980s and speaks fluent Chinese … If Mr Rudd moves to accommodate China’s growing influence, Japan should seriously consider how to use it as leverage in lessening conflict and friction with China and getting the country to play a constructive role in Asia.35
The Yomiuri Shimbun is less up beat, however, observing that:
There are views there could be a setback in Australia–Japan relations under the new Rudd Administration.36
While such sentiments are understandable, my view is that they are also misplaced.
Indeed, for at least three reasons I would argue that, when it comes to Australian approaches to Asian security, the subtle changes which may occur under the Rudd government should not obscure the fact that much will remain the same as it was during the Howard period.
First, Rudd has made no secret of his continued commitment to the American alliance. Indeed, Rudd’s first words on foreign policy during his election night victory speech indicated that the alliance would remain central under his watch.37 This, of course, is entirely consistent with the Labor Party’s longstanding commitment to the alliance, notwithstanding the aberration of the Mark Latham candidacy.
To be sure, Rudd’s approach to the alliance will certainly not be identical to Howard’s.
Michael Fullilove, for instance, has recently speculated that Canberra will now be less likely to participate in any future US unilateral adventures. In his terms ‘Australia will remain a robust and familiar ally to America, but it may no longer be the best redoubt for outlaws.’ He also suggests that a Rudd government will more actively seek to influence Washington’s attitudes and behaviours, in sharp contrast to the often unswerving loyalty of the Howard years.
Nevertheless, Fullilove also goes on to posit that Rudd may actually move Australia closer to the US.38 While this, from Rudd’s perspective, ought not to preclude Australia from simultaneously developing more intimate ties with Beijing, the reverse may not necessarily be true. The Chinese, who remain intent upon further softening US alliance relationships throughout the region, continue to view the America–Australia tie as a fundamental impediment to their developing any genuine strategic relationship with Canberra.
Second, while the depth of Australia’s economic engagement with China can hardly be called into question, its engagement at other levels remains relatively shallow and underdeveloped. Engagement, of course, is a multi‑layered, multi‑dimensional process that also encompasses a wide spectrum of people‑to‑people contacts and personal linkages. Yet Australia and China remain very different societies: we speak a different language, our cultures are diametrically opposed and our values are fundamentally in conflict. Trying to develop the same level of trust and intimacy that currently exists in the Australia–US or, for that matter, the Australia–Japan relationship is therefore likely to be a long‑term project and one that will almost certainly encounter a good deal more trials and tribulations than has thus far been acknowledged in either Beijing or Canberra.
Indeed, two areas of potential difficulty are already apparent. The first is in relation to the proposed FTA between Australia and China.
Where negotiations were notoriously slow during the Howard years, they have virtually ground to a halt under Rudd’s watch. The new Prime Minister has already controversially cut resources allocated to these FTA negotiations.
Added to this, China is increasingly focused upon growing its own domestic consumption and on ‘going global’ in the area of investment. Trade is thus becoming less of a priority in this environment—a factor which does not augur particularly well for the future progress of the FTA.39 The second area of potential difficulty is human rights.
Despite Rudd’s pro‑China credentials, he has previously criticised China in this area. He is also likely to face pressure from the left‑wing of his own Labor Party to press Beijing on this front. Hence, where the Howard government was able to largely insulate the Sino–Australian relationship from difficulties over human rights issues by conducting discussions regarding these matters in the
context of a private bilateral dialogue, Rudd may not have this luxury.40
Third, and most importantly in the context of this discussion, is the continued importance of Japan to Australia. Japan remains Australia’s second largest trading partner and there is very little to suggest that its economic centrality to this country will soon diminish.
The longevity of the Australia–Japan security relationship should not be underestimated either. Greater strategic collaboration between our two countries, we should recall, began during the 1970s and has been expanded substantially from the 1990s onwards.41 To be sure, some rebalancing of the Australia–Japan relationship is likely to occur following Howard’s noticeable tilt towards Tokyo which took place at the beginning of 2007. In my view, that tilt was driven primarily by domestic political considerations and was an attempt on the part of Howard to differentiate himself from Rudd in an election year.
Against that backdrop, rather than executing any fundamental re‑ordering of Australia’s approach to Asian security, my view is that we will see the new Rudd government revert to the delicate ‘balancing act’ that was such a defining feature of Australian foreign policy throughout most of the Howard years.
America and Japan will remain central here, in my view, as Canberra continues to ‘hedge’
against some of the less savoury potentialities associated with China’s (re)emergence. In the words of my colleague Robert Ayson,
‘the countries of Asia will find that the Rudd government, and especially its leader, is committed to regional engagement and to positioning Australia wisely in the emerging great power picture … But Australia’s 26th prime minister will be under no illusion that old‑fashioned relations of power between states are being sidelined in the region or that Asia is destined for increasing peace as well as prosperity. The region’s realists, and there
are many of them, will find that Kevin Rudd is someone who can understand and speak their language. They will find, in short, that Rudd is fluent in much more than mandarin.’42
Endnotes
1 Alan Renouf, The Frightened Country, (Melbourne: MacMillan, 1979).
2 Prime Minister the Hon. John Howard MP, address at the opening of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney, 31 March 2005.
3 Cited in Paul Dibb, ‘Don’t Get Too Close to Beijing’, The Australian, 2 August 2005.
4 Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon.
John Howard MP, Joint Press Conference with the President of the United States of America George W. Bush, The White House, Washington DC, 19 July 2005.
5 Geoff Elliott, ‘Stay cool on China, Ambassador tells US’, The Australian, 30 January 2006.
6 Jessica Irvine, ‘China now biggest partner’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 2007.
7 See Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, ‘People’s Republic of China Country Brief – December 2007’.
Available from the world wide web: (www.
dfat.gov.au/geo/china/cb_index.html).
[accessed 9 December 2007].
8 Allan Gyngell, Australia and the World;
public opinion and foreign policy, (Sydney, NSW: Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2007), p.13.
9 Ibid, p.5.
10 See Alan Dupont, ‘Benefits offset costs of US alliance’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October 2007.
11 For further reading see Michael D. Swaine,
‘China’s Regional Military Posture’, in David Shambaugh, ed., Power Shift: China
and Asia’s New Dynamics, (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2005), pp.266‑285.
12 Phillip C. Saunders, ‘China’s Global Activism: Strategy, Drivers, and Tools’, Occasional Paper 4, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Washington DC, October 2006, p.18.
13 See Hugh White, Beyond the Defence of Australia, Lowy Institute Paper 16, (Sydney, NSW: Lowy Institute for International Policy), pp.34‑35.
14 For further reading see US Department of Defense, Annual Report of the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, (US Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 2007), pp.18‑20.
15 See, for example, Commonwealth of Australia, Defence 2000: Our Future Defence Force, (Canberra: Department of Defence, 2000), p.23.
16 Coral Bell, ‘Australia and China: Power Balance and Policy’, in A.M. Halperin, ed., Policies Toward China: Views from Six Continents, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965).
17 Australian Department of Defence, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2007, (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2007), p.19.
18 Hugh White, ‘The limits to optimism:
Australia and the rise of China’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol.59, no.4, December 2005, p.476.
19 See, for example, Joshua Kurlantzick and Devin Stewart, ‘Hu’s on First?’, The National Interest, No.92, November/
December 2007, pp.63‑67.
20 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, vol.72, no.3, Summer 1993, p.42; and Samuel P.
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order, (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp.151‑154.
21 Patrick Walters, ‘Beijing plays spoiler on Asia summit’, The Australian, 6 April 2005.
22 Evelyn Goh, ‘Understanding ‘hedging’ in Asia‑Pacific security’, PacNet Newsletter No. 43, Pacfic Forum CSIS, Honolulu, Hawaii, 31 August 2006.
23 See Malcolm Cook, ‘Building on Strong Foundations: The Future of the China‑Australia Relationship: Outcomes Report’, Perspectives, Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney, July 2007.
24 See Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, ‘People’s Republic of China Country Brief – December 2007’.
25 See Australian Department of Defence, Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2007, p.35.
26 See Michael Wesley, ‘Australia‑China’
in Brendan Taylor, ed., Australia as an Asia-Pacific Regional Power: Friendships in Flux?, (London: Routledge, 2007), p.72.
27 Hamish McDonald and Tom Allard, ‘ANZUS loyalties fall under China’s shadow’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 2004.
28 See William T. Tow, ‘Sino‑American relations and the ‘Australia factor’:
inflated expectations or discriminate engagement?’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol.59, no.4, December 2005, p.454.
29 Patrick Walters, ‘Containing China a Big Mistake: Downer’, The Australian, 16 March 2006.
30 For further reading on the TSD and its objectives see William T Tow, Mark J Thomson, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Satu P. Limaye, Asia-Pacific Security: US, Australia and Japan and the New Security Triangle, (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
31 See Aurelia George Mulgan, ‘Australia–
Japan relations: New directions’, Strategic Insights, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, July 2007, p.2.
32 Patrick Walters, ‘Possibility of a bigger role in security architecture’, The Australian, 9 June 2007.
33 Mulgan, ‘Australia–Japan relations: New directions’, p.2.
34 William Choong and Sim Chi Yin, ‘Rudd govt expected to be closer to China’, Straits Times, 26 November 2007.
35 ‘Australia with a new face’, The Japan Times, 28 November 2007.
36 Cited in Choong and Yin, ‘Rudd govt expected to be closer to China’.
37 Available from the world wide web: (www.
alp.org.au/media/1107/spepme240.php).
[Accessed 9 December 2007].
38 Michael Fullilove, ‘Ally with a new attitude;
Australia’s prime minister, the staunchest of Bush supporters, is ousted’, Los Angeles Times, 29 November 2007.
39 For further reading see Rowan Callick,
‘China Free Trade agreement shapes up as an early challenge for Rudd’,
The Australian, 3 December 2007.
40 For further reading see Steve Lewis and Cath Hart, ‘Left to create China crisis for Rudd’, The Australian, 12 April, 2007.
41 For further reading see Brendan Taylor and Desmond Ball, ‘Australia–Japan’, in Brendan Taylor, ed., Australia as an Asia–Pacific Regional Power: Friendships in Flux?, (London: Routledge, 2007), pp.50‑59.
42 Robert Ayson, ‘Kevin Rudd and Asia’s Security’, PacNet Newsletter No.49, Pacific Forum CSIS, Honolulu, Hawaii, 29 November 2007.