Trump-focused Labor voids promise of better Asian relationships

There was a comical amount of media coverage about Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s will-he-won’t-he meeting with US President Donald Trump at the recent G7 conference in Canada. Then there was the kerfuffle about the PM’s non-attendance at the NATO meeting last week.

That has now extended to Penny Wong’s visit to Washington for this week’s Quad meeting (with the US, India and Japan), but ironically lost in all the white noise has been the government’s failure to deliver on its promise of better engagement with Asia.

When the Labor government took office in 2022, one of its early initiatives — set out by Wong in a landmark July 2022 speech in Singapore — was to set out a (well overdue) plan to better engage with Australia’s Asian neighbours, especially our closest neighbour in South-East Asia.

“Our trade is not keeping pace with growth, and it is insufficiently diversified to maximise benefit. Our investment is similarly underweight,” she said, highlighting the fact that Australia’s direct investment in South-East Asia had declined both in relative and absolute terms since 2014, despite the region’s significant economic growth.

The US (2), UK (8), New Zealand (7) and Germany (13) are the only non-Asian nations in Australia’s top 15 trading partners. The list includes, in descending order: China (1), Japan (3), South Korea (4), India (5), Singapore (6), Thailand (9), Malaysia (10), Indonesia (11), Taiwan (12), Vietnam (14) and Hong Kong (15).

Emphasising a new approach, Wong underscored the importance of listening and mutual respect:

“People appreciate the energy. People appreciate the engagement. People appreciate the willingness to listen, and I want to approach this job being able to listen and not just to tell people what we think they should do,” she said during a 2022 trip to Malaysia.

“Though we are tied together by geography, the human ties of family, business, education and tourism are stronger. Australia wants to strengthen these ties further,” Wong wrote in Crikey in the same year.

Yet more than three years in, the Albanese government’s record — beyond its admirable repairing of ties with China and the set-piece pilgrimage to Indonesia after each election win — on drawing closer and gaining a better understanding of our region remains somewhat wanting.

“Most Labor governments come into office with good intentions about Asia generally, and South-East Asia particularly. But then they discover that: one, it’s a bit hard, because no matter what they might think, they have slightly different world views. And secondly, of course, there’s always the law and attraction that Paris is a much nicer place to visit than [Cambodian capital] Phnom Penh,” one former senior diplomat told Crikey.

Another critique levelled at the government by a number of former Asian envoys, who spoke to Crikey on the condition of anonymity, is the diplomatic lurch back towards the South Pacific. This was made by the Coalition government under Scott Morrison’s South Pacific “Step-Up”, suddenly alert to rising — and from Beijing’s point of view, understandable — Chinese influence in the region. This involved $3 billion in aid and investment and a rerouting of resources in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

One diplomat described this as an “imbalance” that remains, continuing to thwart resources and engagement better directed to South-East Asia. “Yes, the South Pacific is important, but ASEAN is where all that is — where the people [about 700 million of them] and the money is.”

The key players at the frontline of diplomatic and strategic efforts are the PM, Wong, Trade Minister Don Farrell and Defence Minister Richard Marles. It is little surprise that the latter has been so deep in AUKUS that he has had little time for the rest of the region, save for generally one visit to each country in the past three years, many coinciding with regional summits.

Indeed, the end-of-year summit season — including ASEAN and the East Asia Summit — has provided an opportunity for leaders to tick off relative minnows Cambodia (2022) and Laos (2024), with Indonesia hosting in 2023. Beyond that, visits by senior government ministers have been perfunctory at best.

“It’s hard to know what they see — when they do go — beyond hotels, receptions and meeting rooms,” one former diplomat said.

Timor-Leste, a country whose independence Australia fought for both diplomatically and literally as it transitioned from an Indonesian colony to the region’s newest nation, has been increasingly ignored.

“Sometimes it seems like Canberra thinks that the Timorese are not thankful enough to us,” a former diplomat with deep experience in the region said. Wong visited Dili in 2022 and 2023, but Albanese has not bothered.

Despite the obvious and necessary importance of and attention paid to India, the rest of South Asia has largely been ignored by senior government members, with no visit to Nepal — Australia’s third largest source of international students — or Bangladesh, and only Wong visiting Sri Lanka.

The other key element that former diplomats noted was the drop-off in visits to the region by other cabinet ministers, especially Home Affairs. The Australian Federal Police have a significant presence across the region working on drug and people trafficking, and has staff based in Cambodia, China (Beijing and Guangzhou), Hong Kong, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam (Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City). Australia draws most of its international students from Asia.

“We are not nearly as good as we used to be at building these relationships,” one former envoy said. “Asian leaders in all sectors really value face time.”

Like a conga line of governments before it — diplomats remember with some disdain Julia Gillard’s “Australia in the Asian Century” white paper that was promptly buried by Tony Abbott — Albanese’s has commissioned yet another report on the region. This time, he tapped former Macquarie chief Nicholas Moore, whose own experience of the region is thin, for the grandly named Invested: Australia’s South-East Asia Economic Strategy to 2040.

This falls into a recent critique of Health Minister Mark Butler by a senior public servant, that the government needs “more doing and less reviewing”. Former diplomats and a number of businesspeople with deep Asian experience were generally dismissive of the report and its follow-up.

The relative failure to step up engagement with Asia is not only with regard to trade and defence, but to conflict as well. While the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict have been given an enormous amount of attention by the government, devastating civil wars in Myanmar have not.

Indeed, in light of the human suffering it has inflicted and public opprobrium that the vile junta in Myanmar deserves, the key roles being played in Myanmar by both the Chinese and Russian governments should also be given plenty of attention. Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing has now been to Moscow three times this year, and on his last trip met Chinese leader Xi Jinping. As we saw during the election, Russia continues to try to wield influence in the Indo-Pacific beyond its arms sales with aid for a base in Indonesia. That failed, but its involvement in Myanmar has been barely noted in Australia.

“I appreciate that the war in Gaza is something of profound interest to a lot of people in Australia, as is the Ukraine. Of course, we can both walk and chew gum. It’s possible to be engaged with Myanmar as well, especially because of where Myanmar is and its relationship to the world around it. After all, we are a neighbour across the Indian Ocean — it really depresses how little attention we give it,” a former Myanmar envoy said. He noted that the days of Australia really stepping up — as it did in Cambodia in the early 1990s, Timor-Leste at the turn of the century, and the Solomon Islands in the 2000s — seem the actions of a different country.