Once a leader, Australia drags its feet on the world stage

Among wealthy countries on the world stage, Australia looks increasingly backward. At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the government’s response to the climate crisis was ranked last out of 60 countries. After fronting up with a net zero pledge — the bare minimum required to get some tepid praise from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson — Australia continued to act as a climate laggard. 

The climate story is a telling example of Australia’s abrogation of international leadership. But it’s not the only one. Our history is littered with examples of Australia taking a proactive, positive role on the world stage. Now, Australia leads the world for all the wrong reasons.

The then and the now

Australia wasn’t always like this. In the 1940s, HV “Doc” Evatt, then a former High Court judge and soon to be Labor leader, played an instrumental role in the creation of the United Nations. He served as president of the General Assembly, and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Fast forward to 2019, and Scott Morrison was hitting out at the UN as an example of “negative globalists” and an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy. 

Gough Whitlam’s trip to China in 1971 as opposition leader was momentous, a turning point in Sino-Australian relations roundly criticised by the government of the day. But US President Richard Nixon’s even more momentous trip a year later made Whitlam’s overture look like a forward-thinking piece of statecraft. In contrast, the Morrison government’s impulsive, unilateral calls for an inquiry into China’s handling of the coronavirus helped accelerate a deterioration of the bilateral relationship.

Through the Hawke-Keating years, Australia had moments of great moral and geostrategic leadership on the world stage. Both, along with foreign minister Gareth Evans, helped deepen Australia’s relationships with Asian neighbours, including driving the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Bob Hawke once named his opposition to Apartheid one of his greatest achievements, and he played a leading role in the boycott that made South Africa an international pariah, despite stiff opposition from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hawke resisted pressure from cabinet to allow some 42,000 Chinese students in Australia to seek asylum.

Recently, the Morrison government had an opportunity to show similar leadership on the world stage in its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead, the embassy in Kabul was closed overnight, and for months, calls to evacuate Afghan staff that worked with Australian troops were ignored, until plans began arriving after the Taliban had taken control of the city. The government also relied on arbitrary distinctions to narrow the number of visas offered.

It isn’t just Labor governments who have shown a greater capacity for moral leadership. Morrison’s decision to offer 3000 humanitarian visas to people fleeing Afghanistan was less generous than Liberal predecessors like Malcolm Fraser, who opened the doors to Vietnamese refugees and John Howard, whose government evacuated thousands from Kosovo and Timor-Leste. Even Tony Abbott promised to take 12,000 Syrian refugees in 2015. 

A climate laggard

But right now, it’s climate change where Australia drags its feet most. It’s been going on since way back at COP3 in 1997, when Australia signed onto a target where it would increase its emissions by 8% instead of reducing them — the infamous Australia Clause — much to the chagrin of the European Union.

Aside from a brief period of international goodwill during the Rudd-Gillard years (where carbon pricing was tearing domestic politics apart), Australia continues to fall behind on emissions reduction, and anything to do with addressing emissions reduction.

COP26 has been a case in point. This week, the United States and China announced an unexpected joint pledge to lower emissions. Meanwhile, Australia is working behind the scenes to dilute language around 2030 targets and the phasing out of coal in a key declaration. Fossil fuel giant Santos fronted Australia’s pavilion in Glasgow. The government is lobbying UNESCO to remove references to 1.5C warming from a policy document on world heritage sites.

As Crikey reported last week, the Morrison government is unprecedented in its indifference to foreign affairs, tending to view things outside Australia primarily through the prism of domestic political advantage. But when we do show our face on the world stage, our interventions don’t come with leadership or moral weight.