US proxy or Asia’s trusted partner? Australia can’t be both

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s planned trip to Beijing this weekend represents the latest in a series of positive steps towards getting China-Australia engagement back on track. In spite of this, the uncomfortable truth is that, unless Australia rethinks its deep lack of independence from Anglo-American interests, it will be unable to establish itself as a trusted partner to other Asia-Pacific nations, not least China.

Australia’s ongoing failure to engage sustainably with China, and Asia in general, stems from its historic inability to build genuine trust with its would-be Asian partners. At the root of this problem is a perceived lack of sincerity, compounded by some Australian decisions that have eroded trust, such as the Aukus pact. This is well understood by Australia’s Asian neighbours as being its track record.

Australian politicians of all stripes look at Asia through the lens of a “China Emergency” narrative – a term coined by international relations scholar Chengxin Pan and political scientist Linus Hagström in their influential 2021 article in the Australian Journal of Politics and History. Pan and Hagström call Australia’s puzzling “fixation” with the China Emergency one of the “mysteries in contemporary world politics”.

Indeed, in releasing a report on Australian engagement with Southeast Asia recently, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong spoke in ominous tones of “great competition” in the region, where “complacency is not an option”. This is a continuation of the country’s pronounced strategic anxiety fuelled by populist politicking on the so-called China threat.

Wong’s positioning ignores the messages coming from Southeast Asia, where nations are charting a far less hawkish policy on China in favour of strategic pragmatism.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong speaks in the Senate chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on October 16. Wong spoke in ominous tones of “great competition” in Asia, where “complacency is not an option”. Photo: AAP / dpa

Speaking at the Asia Future Summit on October 5, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Asian countries do not see China as a competitor, unlike the US.

He also reflected a less-than-comfortable view of Australia among Southeast Asian nations in his usual artfully polite manner. Lee believed Southeast Asia would not be “split between two camps” amid US-China rivalry. While touching on Sino-Australian tensions, he highlighted the recent signs of improvement and pointedly noted that “even countries that are not like-minded allies need to learn to cooperate and coexist”.

In his 1992 speech, “Australia and Asia – knowing who we are”, former Australian prime minister Paul Keating acknowledged Australia’s struggles to be trusted by its Asian counterparts, by saying: “I am pleased, though not surprised, by the positive reaction in Southeast Asia to the recent surge of independent and republican thinking in Australia.” He was pointing to the uncomfortable truth that the country’s strategic and cultural allegiances with the West have led to a trade-off in trust with its Asian neighbours.

Allegiances and interests have surely shifted since Keating delivered this speech over 30 years ago, but the salient point remains as true today as it was then. In Asia, Australia is not perceived to be an independent stand-alone nation that prioritises the stability, peace and prosperity for all the 4.3 billion people who inhabit the region.

The central question to all of this – Australia’s national identity and its place in Asia as a responsible independent Asia-Pacific partner nation – is just not something successive generations of Australian politicians in the post-Keating era see political value in tackling. Australia is just not willing to grapple with reshaping its geopolitical and cultural allegiances to be seen by its Asian partners as an independent nation they can trust.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong speaks during an Asean summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on November 12, 2022. In an October 5 speech, Lee said Southeast Asian countries have “long sought to build a dense web of cooperation, interdependence, and having overlapping circles of friends”. Photo: AP

In his October 5 speech, Singapore’s Lee articulated this challenge, stating that Southeast Asian countries have “long sought to build a dense web of cooperation, interdependence, and having overlapping circles of friends”.

I don’t believe Australia features meaningfully in this dense web of Asia cooperation or in the overlapping friendship circles due to its perceived lack of strategic autonomy. Asian countries don’t believe that Australia places the stability and prosperity of the region as a higher-order priority over its other competing allegiances and self-interests. Some may indeed see Australia as an egregious transgressor of such objectives.

Australia wants to court Southeast Asia, but its affections seem to be skin-deep

Australia’s lack of an independent identity in Asia also means that, to its neighbours, it is not seen as a worthwhile geopolitical hedge in the context of US-China tensions. Rather than make the effort to deepen ties with Australia, which is essentially a proxy nation for Anglo-American interests, why not focus directly on the two major powers?

Aukus epitomises Australia’s trust deficit in Asia. No doubt it also reflects former prime minister Scott Morrison’s more combative approach to China. The Albanese government has since taken a more rational stance. Still, the nuclear submarines are as good as in the order book. And, in a great irony, Albanese will visit China just after a US trip where he lobbied Congress to cement the deal.

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Historian Manning Clark once talked of modern Australians as having been freed from the “fate of being second-rate Europeans”. Clark’s hope is as wishful thinking today as it was then.

We Australians may not be second-rate Europeans any longer, but perhaps we are now proxy Americans. This is uncomfortable to hear but will certainly be the elephant in the room when Albanese visits Beijing this week.

Damien Green is a Hong Kong-based Australian-born financial services executive. He is a member of the board of directors of the Hong Kong Financial Services Development Council and the non-executive chair of Manulife Financial Asia Limited

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