A Role For An Ally In A Region Of Resentment
The Age
Saturday June 30, 2001
The good vibes generated by the visit of Abdurrahman Wahid this week should not mask the challenges the Australian Government will continue to face as it attempts to rebuild closer links with our neighbors to the north.
The Indonesian President's arrival in Canberra may well have been, as Kim Beazley noted, ``the most important visit to this country by a foreign leader for some time". But the truth is the benefits - largely symbolic - could prove transient, unless Australia follows through constructively.
Indonesia and the other crisis economies of the region are looking to Australia for sympathy and support in shaping Western responses to their predicament. In particular, there is an expectation that Canberra can exert a positive influence on the attitudes of the Bush administration.
The latest forecasts by the Asian Development Bank point to another sharp decline in economic growth in the year ahead for Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia. Growth rates hovering at 3per cent are nowhere near sufficient to boost income and job growth and relieve poverty.
Excluding Singapore, China and South Korea, foreign investment remains a trickle. Currencies are weak. Virtually all governments in the region are struggling to bring bank debts under control and get budgets back in the black.
The demands of Western creditors for greater structural reform remain a cause of resentment. Much of the blame for the social and political instability in South-East Asia, as indeed in Papua New Guinea, is being attributed to the pressures arising from the stringent policy prescriptions of the ``Washington Consensus": the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
It is not surprising that Australia, as the so-called ``white tribe of Asia", should come in for a share of the odium. We were conspicuous in having weathered the 1997 financial meltdown strongly.
That Australia was among the first to assist in rescue packages for Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia seems not to count for much in the eyes of those who wish to portray their misfortune as the product of an evil Western conspiracy. There are many influential figures across South-East Asia who still see Australia, strategically and economically, as a proxy of US global interests.
Canberra has done its best to ignore the cheap shots of Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad. But this is not to say Dr Mahathir's anti-Western ranting does not find echoes elsewhere in the region.
One of President Wahid's closest friends among Islamic intellectuals in Java is the poet Mustofa Bisri, otherwise known as Gus Mus, whose works are subject of a special public reading this weekend, during the Melbourne Poetry Festival at Chapel-on-Chapel in Prahran.
One poem in particular targets what he sees as the patronising and unfeeling attitudes in the West towards the hardship in Indonesia. It ends: ``You think you live in heaven while you profit from our hell."
It is an undercurrent Australia cannot afford to ignore. Indeed, it is among the themes of a conference at Sydney University today to mark the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS alliance: that is, how the relationship between Australia and the US should fit into East Asian diplomacy.
In an interview in Melbourne this week, Charles Kolb, the head of an influential Washington-based think-tank, the Committee for Economic Development, said President George W. Bush had to try to find a ``strategic consensus" both at home and with America's allies on how to win the arguments for the global economy. ``I don't think either his father or Clinton stepped up to the plate on this issue," Kolb said. ``It's time for an American president to explain these issues properly, to lead the debate domestically and to work with our friends and allies to explain what we are about."
Of the sense of grievance in Asia, Kolb said: ``We are going to continue with globalisation. Let's be very clear about that because, in virtually every instance, it works to raise the standard of living for people. ... But the pressures for dynamic change do hurt people, and I can understand there would be some resentment."
Kolb said he believed the issue gave President Bush an opportunity to surprise those sceptical of his capacities in foreign policy.
The leaders of South-East Asia would like nothing more than to be pleasantly surprised. So, too, perhaps, Australia.
© 2001 The Age