Expert Panel-Fellows of the AIIA

A more populous and wealthier Australia will potentially be more powerful. However, if by larger is meant more influential that can only happen if we begin to move decisively away from our subservient relationship with the United States of America.

On Dr Fullilove’s three key observations:

The truth is most Australians underestimate our country’s weight class. We don’t punch above our weight; we punch at our weight’.

On the latter point, agreed – and perhaps we should keep it that way (see below: ‘military’).

‘Now more than ever, we need a first-rate foreign service and a more capable military’.

Australia already possesses a first-rate foreign service cadre. That service however needs the resources to do its job properly. As numerous studies – including the excellent work pioneered by the Lowy Institute and mentioned in the speech – have shown, in utterly convincing detail, those resources have to be restored to former levels if the best is to be expected from the service. Here the speech makes precisely the right point.

Australia’s military is sufficiently capable for its role. Its use in recent times as a foreign policy instrument – as distinct from as a defender of Australia’s sovereignty and essential interests – has led to uneven results, but that has been for reasons that have little to do with the military as such. A more capable military – in the sense of one possessed of greater ‘throw weight’, weapons systems of enhanced range and lethality, etc – would be a doubtful asset since it might well then be even better suited for distant foreign policy adventures (see below: ‘Northeast Asia’). In short, a more nuanced understanding of capability is required.

Australia needs a larger Australian foreign policy – one that is both ‘ambitious and coherent’.

The idea of an ‘ambitious’ foreign policy seems to be a Lowy perennial. The particular objects of the ambition discussed in Dr Fullilove’s text are however surprisingly limited and thus his remarks wear something of an old-fashioned habit. Australia could certainly do very much better in pursuing important national interests, notably working to address food, energy and disease security and to mitigate global climate change. There is nothing about these issues in the speech. For a quick guide to the latter issue, a past Lowy publication, Heating up the Planet, is to be recommended. As has already been the case at the United Nations, Australia should consistently speak for the disempowered, most of whom are women, especially in the least developed nations of the world. Women do not rate a specific mention in the speech; neither does global development.

On Indonesia, however, the speech does make some essential points about coherence, though the absence of any critical note amounts to a lost opportunity. Australia must indeed pay the very greatest attention to relations with Indonesia which should be managed at the highest level and with constant attention to the larger issues. Accordingly, a recent ministerial remark to the effect that Indonesian policy ‘had neither rhyme nor reason,’ while appealing to some domestic constituencies should have been a cause for a public and severe prime ministerial rebuke.

While the speech makes positive reference to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategic conception, India surprisingly rates as much attention in the text as Vietnam. Beyond Indonesia, the next relationship that requires much greater focus – though the rewards will no doubt be meagre for some time – is that with India.

The speech also includes some cautious remarks on China. Caution is certainly required. The idea that Australia should be more ‘ambitious’ in its relations with Northeast Asia however is to be rejected. Australia is neither large nor important enough to be a credible player in relation to China, Japan or Korea, absent the connection with Washington. That connection, however, makes it impossible to assume the role of a disinterested party. With more than a millennium of shared history, the complex relations between these nations have to be managed by the nations concerned.

Michael Fullilove, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute, has used his National Press Club address to send a very important message to Australia’s politicians, to the media and indeed to all concerned citizens. It is that if Australia wants to be secure and prosperous into the future it needs to grow much faster – in terms of population and economy. And it needs to equip itself with the diplomatic, defence and public relations capabilities to defend and promote its interests in a world and a region which will be much more challenging than what we have had to deal with since WW2.

But the lead-in to his message seems to get off on the wrong foot. He rightly criticises the “pernicious cliche” that “Australia punches above its weight” and argues that the opposite is often the case. The false idea arises, he says because “most Australians underestimate our country’s weight class”. That may be true and the Lowy poll due out next month will perhaps give us a read-out on that as well as many other important questions. But I doubt that Gareth Evans and others who used the punching metaphor were unaware of Australia’s place on the list of national economies – which Fullilove says is now 12^th in order of size, having gone up several places since the GFC and the commodities boom. It seems likely to go down a few places in the next few years if the Asian growth story continues.

A similar cliche of a lot of discussion of Australia’s place in the world has been that we are “a middle power”. I recall vividly having once used that expression in conversation with an American professor, Fred Teiwes, a scholar of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney. We were walking along a corridor and Fred swung round from his great height and exclaimed “A what power? A middle what?” The difference in power between the big powers and the sort of power Australia can muster is huge.

I think that what Fullilove has in mind is that Australia has great potential to promote its interests internationally to greater effect and to develop a far more effective capacity to defend itself and to influence others in the region to stand up against a regional superpower with expansionist ambitions. And he is right to say that there is urgency about this. We need to get on with it: with economic reforms, with recovery of diplomatic coverage and DFAT policy influence (as distinct from the opaque intelligence community) and the redevelopment of the ADF with special emphasis on the navy and submarines (ideally nuclear powered ones). He gives high praise to the current Foreign Minister noting especially her work with Fiji. But he does not seek to reconcile the announcement of the agreement to move some small Australian embassies into the UK embassies in the capitals concerned with his call for greater coverage and capability of Australia’s diplomatic establishment. The links with the UK are still valuable and in accord with the sentiments of many Australians. But we need to remember that our monarchical status is not well understood in this part of the world. “Why are you still under England?”

Perhaps Dr Fullilove reckoned that to emphasize that Australia still has a significant economy in world terms is a necessary prolegomena to an argument that we need to get moving on the task of making good the deficiencies in our capabilities to influence developments in this part of the world and to defend ourselves or join with others in resisting a predatory big power. And he is absolutely right that “we are facing unprecedented changes that will test us as a people”. A situation which will demand “in short, a larger Australia”.