After nine long years of neglect, Australia declares South-East Asia can rely on us again

At the meeting of the Quad in Tokyo yesterday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reaffirmed his government’s determination to put South-East Asia back at the centre of Australian foreign policy.

“The government in Australia has changed, but … the government’s commitment to the Quad has not changed,” he said in his press conference. He also said Australia’s commitment to ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) has not changed.

His comments came as US President Joe Biden unveiled a new US-Asia alliance that will include Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. 

In the final week of the election campaign Penny Wong detailed promises of a fresh South-East Asia policy. It included a package of additional — rather than redirected — aid worth $470 million and the appointment of a senior envoy for South-East Asian affairs who can “complement existing missions and cut through bureaucratic blockages”. As well, an Office of South-East Asia within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) would be created, modelled on the existing Office of the Pacific, that would coordinate Australian policies towards the region.

As well, when asked which country he would want to make his first visit to as Prime Minister, Albanese cited Indonesia — something many recent PMs, including Scott Morrison, did. But the imperative of the Quad meeting in Japan superseded his plans. Also, the position of DFAT secretary Kathryn Campbell is under a cloud.

“Australia’s regional policy has become out of kilter — a heavy emphasis on blocs to counter China, such as the Quad and AUKUS — and too little weight on policies to engage ASEAN, which is a key area of contestation with China,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to the United States, Indonesia and Japan and a high commissioner to India said last week.

Our closest neighbours were increasingly neglected in the later stages of the Coalition’s nine years in government. Malcolm Turnbull’s held a special ASEAN summit in Sydney in March 2018, but since then they have received only scant attention under Scott Morrison and his foreign affairs minister Marise Payne.

Although the Pacific is undoubtedly important, South-East Asia is widely acknowledged as the central battleground between democratic nations and China as it bids to increase its sphere of influence in the region. Already two members of ASEAN — Cambodia and Laos — have become effective client states of China, with civil war-racked Myanmar also over-reliant on China for investment and arms.

A key problem for Australia under the Morrison government appeared to be that the Pacific and South-East Asia was something of a binary choice, rather than two parts of the same issue. The so-called Pacific Step-up, announced in 2018, was largely a diversion of aid and resources from South-East Asian countries to Pacific nations. This did not go unnoticed in South-East Asia.

But while Albanese and Wong’s commitment should be welcomed — and granular detail is not yet available — it looks a bit like more of the same at a time when more innovative approaches could be considered.

Increasing aid budgets are all well and good but it’s important to know what are you going to spend it on, where are you going to spend it and why are you going to spend it. Too much aid is tipped into leaking and unaccountable buckets.

Still, Albanese did outline priority areas in his opening remarks in Tokyo: “… taking action on climate change and building a stronger and more resilient Indo-Pacific region, through better economic security, better cybersecurity, better energy security and better environmental and health security”.

The policy also seems to be lacking a credible narrative around the Australian and ASEAN economies and business ties, although the new Biden alliance looks to go some way to addressing this.

There is confusion in diplomatic circles about Wong’s promise to put in yet another South-East Asia tsar at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. DFAT already has an entire South-East Asia and Global Partners division headed by Deputy Secretary Katrina Cooper, as well as an ambassador to ASEAN, Will Nankervis.

A number of former envoys to South-East Asia who spoke to Crikey said the Office of the Pacific was structured and designed for a region very different in demographic and economic size, and appeared to be unsuitable for South-East Asia. 

DFAT critics say it is a highly — indeed overly — structured organisation where there are multiple overlaps between divisions, and this included South-East Asian capabilities, that insiders say often do not speak regularly if at all to each other. This is borne out in organisational charts seen by Crikey.

The proposed senior envoy is also tricky. Observers believe it requires a senior political player rather than a former diplomat — the only way to prise open the necessary doors to prime ministers and presidents, particularly given Australia’s on-again off-again attention to the region.

Any credible new focus on the countries of ASEAN must also be backed up with a regular schedule of visits by senior ministers and the prime minister outside the annual summit season, a process that has come almost completely adrift in the past 25 years. This needs to be complemented by senior ASEAN leaders visiting Australia regularly.

As well as the overdue foreign policy reset towards South-East Asia, there is talk that Albanese and Wong may be readying to ditch Campbell, despite her being in the job for less than a year. Her appointment as a DFAT outsider, moved from the Department of Social Services, came after the retirement of Frances Adamson, a career diplomat and the first woman to head the department and who is now governor of South Australia. Campbell’s move was widely seen as political and controversial for a number of reasons. Apart from having no diplomatic experience, she also has a military background and is a senior army reservist. “Her only qualification seemed to be wearing a uniform,” one former senior diplomat said.

Crucially, Campbell was also in charge of Social Services during the disastrous robodebt fiasco that cost lives and handed taxpayers a $1.8 billion compensation bill. Her retention at DFAT could prove extremely problematic in any inquiry or royal commission into robodebt.

“It has never been satisfactorily explained to me what Kathryn Campbell did or didn’t know about the four-year rollout and implementation of the unlawful ­robodebt scheme,” incoming cabinet minister Bill Shorten has said.