| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Down Under | |
| PM Rudd following Hawke's path | |
| 2008-06-05 | |
Like Hawke, Rudd very explicitly wants this community to include the United States. Going beyond Hawke, he also wants it to include India. And like Hawke, Rudd has chosen Dick Woolcott as the vehicle of his ambitions. Woolcott now has a huge new task, to reform the unwieldy regional security and trade architecture of the Asia-Pacific. Rudd's speech contains important proposals that meld his traditional view of geo-strategic security with his multilateralist view of global governance. They precede his trip at the weekend to Japan and Indonesia, Australia's most important partners in, respectively, Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. With Japan, most surprisingly, Rudd has flagged a move for greater security co-operation, both bilaterally and trilaterally with Australia, Japan and the US. This seems to mark a reversal, or at least an evolution, from Rudd's position in Opposition last year. Rudd was then strongly opposed to a security treaty with Japan and opposed to the quadrilateral security mechanism involving Australia, Japan, the US and India. Rudd is presumably not reversing himself on the quads, but intensified security co-operation with Japan is bound to annoy Beijing. That Rudd will embark on this anyway shows an admirable independence from official Chinese views and an implicit acknowledgement that neglecting and mismanaging the Japan relationship has been his Government's biggest foreign policy mistake so far. Thus he is making a four-day trip to Japan, not only the longest trip of any Australian prime minister to Japan but precisely the same length of his trip to China. Similarly, he is going to beef up disaster-relief co-ordination with Indonesia. The precise terms of Woolcott's institutional reform mandate remain somewhat unclear. Woolcott, the most experienced prime ministerial envoy in Australian history and a consummate diplomat, will have partly a listening role as he tours regional capitals and consults leaders at the highest level. But he will also push the distinctive Australian idea that the most effective and important regional institution is APEC, which Woolcott did so much to create with Bob Hawke in 1989. Sensibly, Rudd has not laid down too prescriptive a model for how he wants regional architecture to develop. And, characteristically, he foreshadows another conference on the matter. One logical implication of Rudd's position is that APEC must expand to include India -- Rudd is explicit that the new regional architecture must embrace the South Asian colossus. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |