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NEXT week's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth is already shaping up as something of a diplomatic failure for the Gillard government. There are two key indicators of this. The first, and most significant, is that Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, the largest and most important Commonwealth nation, is not attending.
The official reason is that in the midst of this busy summit season Singh has too much exhausting travel either side of the Perth meeting. The truth is we have failed dismally in our puny efforts to engage India. We continue to sell uranium to China but not to India, making us the only nuclear trading country in the world to apply a discriminatory ban against India. This doesn't hurt India much but it does hurt us and our engagement with India.
Perhaps even worse, secret Australian government polling shows we have a terrible image in India, mainly as a result of the student bashings of a couple of years ago.
The second indicator of diplomatic failure with CHOGM is the disinclination of British Prime Minister David Cameron to undertake any bilateral visit program outside of the Perth meeting. The Cameron situation is partly Stephen Smith's fault. When he was foreign minister, Smith insisted on getting CHOGM held in Perth, the most isolated Western city of its size in the world.
As an Australian state capital, Perth deserves to host international meetings. But you cannot expect international leaders to make two transcontinental journeys just for the sake of visiting Australia.
Canberra has failed to get significant bilateral visits out of everyone coming to CHOGM. The Howard government failed similarly with the last CHOGM we hosted, in Coolum on the Sunshine Coast in March 2002, but that at least was in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and an isolated location was necessary for security reasons. This CHOGM failure we've brought entirely on ourselves, for no good reason.
The singular, strategic failure with India was acknowledged by another source, at the highest level of the Australian bureaucracy, 10 days ago in Melbourne.
Dennis Richardson, head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is a super-heavyweight in the Canberra bureaucracy. A former head of ASIO, chief of staff to Bob Hawke and ambassador to Washington, Richardson is slight of frame but ferocious of intellect (and, just sometimes, temperament). Delivering the Zelman Cowen Oration, he outlined Australia's strategic outlook, arguing that the US would remain the dominant superpower in the short to medium term.
It would be unfair to take sentences out of the speech and highlight them at the expense of the overall analysis, but that is exactly what I am going to do. Because two other Richardson judgments stood out strikingly.
One was that, down the track, we will not be able to maintain our regional defence capability edge with our present defence spend of less than 2 per cent of gross domestic product. But it was his judgment on our relations with India that was most pungent: "We have yet to develop a genuine strategic partnership with India."
You can't get much clearer than that. It takes two to tango, of course, but given that we are by far the smaller and less powerful partner in this relationship, Richardson's judgment must form a serious indictment of Australian diplomacy towards India during the past 20 years. Indeed, the last time an Indian prime minister visited Australia was Rajiv Gandhi in the mid-1980s.
Richardson's point on defence spending was underlined by an equally frank statement in an important and under-reported speech by Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd a week or so ago to the Oxford Business Alumni Forum. Rudd addressed how Australia would navigate its way through the potential scenario of a "dual superpower world".
In a truly fascinating section Rudd listed what he saw as China's strategic ambitions in the next decade. Rudd cited various of China's aims, but among them was one that government ministers seldom advert to in public. Like Richardson, Rudd was admirably straightforward. He said: "China's strategic objective is over time to reduce US military influence and, as a consequence, US alliances in East Asia and the Pacific."
Sensibly, Rudd did not say how far he thought China was prepared to go in pursuing that objective. I may have missed something, but I think this is the first time a senior Australian government minister has tagged China's objective, to get the US out of Asia, or at least to reduce its military presence in Asia, anything like so explicitly.
Later in the speech Rudd identified a key Australian objective as maintaining and strengthening our alliance with the US. Rudd is certainly right in his analysis and he serves the cause of public debate by putting it on the record. But he also makes it clear that China's strategic objective -- diminishing US alliances and the US military presence in the region -- is in direct contradiction of Australia's strategic objectives.
This self-evidently does not mean that the closest economic co-operation and political dialogue between Canberra and Beijing is not possible. But it does show up in stark relief that Canberra and Beijing are not only operating towards different ends but contradictory ends.
In the same speech, Rudd further stated that another strategic objective of China was to "protect (its) sea lines of communication right out to the sources of China's long-term energy supply, across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf where most of its oil supplies come from, but also its land-based supply lines to various other countries in terms of delivery of natural gas as well".
This means that Rudd has concluded, rightly in my view, that China's massive military build-up is destined to go on for a long time and to reach extremely lethal capabilities to project military force over long distances.
No wonder Rudd wants the US military to stay in the region. No wonder as PM he committed to doubling our submarine fleet from six to 12. And no wonder Richardson concludes we cannot live securely in this region with our present paltry defence effort. You won't hear much of this at CHOGM, but these are our realities. One of the many things we should be doing about it is getting closer to India.
| The Australian
The official reason is that in the midst of this busy summit season Singh has too much exhausting travel either side of the Perth meeting. The truth is we have failed dismally in our puny efforts to engage India. We continue to sell uranium to China but not to India, making us the only nuclear trading country in the world to apply a discriminatory ban against India. This doesn't hurt India much but it does hurt us and our engagement with India.
Perhaps even worse, secret Australian government polling shows we have a terrible image in India, mainly as a result of the student bashings of a couple of years ago.
The second indicator of diplomatic failure with CHOGM is the disinclination of British Prime Minister David Cameron to undertake any bilateral visit program outside of the Perth meeting. The Cameron situation is partly Stephen Smith's fault. When he was foreign minister, Smith insisted on getting CHOGM held in Perth, the most isolated Western city of its size in the world.
As an Australian state capital, Perth deserves to host international meetings. But you cannot expect international leaders to make two transcontinental journeys just for the sake of visiting Australia.
Canberra has failed to get significant bilateral visits out of everyone coming to CHOGM. The Howard government failed similarly with the last CHOGM we hosted, in Coolum on the Sunshine Coast in March 2002, but that at least was in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and an isolated location was necessary for security reasons. This CHOGM failure we've brought entirely on ourselves, for no good reason.
The singular, strategic failure with India was acknowledged by another source, at the highest level of the Australian bureaucracy, 10 days ago in Melbourne.
Dennis Richardson, head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is a super-heavyweight in the Canberra bureaucracy. A former head of ASIO, chief of staff to Bob Hawke and ambassador to Washington, Richardson is slight of frame but ferocious of intellect (and, just sometimes, temperament). Delivering the Zelman Cowen Oration, he outlined Australia's strategic outlook, arguing that the US would remain the dominant superpower in the short to medium term.
It would be unfair to take sentences out of the speech and highlight them at the expense of the overall analysis, but that is exactly what I am going to do. Because two other Richardson judgments stood out strikingly.
One was that, down the track, we will not be able to maintain our regional defence capability edge with our present defence spend of less than 2 per cent of gross domestic product. But it was his judgment on our relations with India that was most pungent: "We have yet to develop a genuine strategic partnership with India."
You can't get much clearer than that. It takes two to tango, of course, but given that we are by far the smaller and less powerful partner in this relationship, Richardson's judgment must form a serious indictment of Australian diplomacy towards India during the past 20 years. Indeed, the last time an Indian prime minister visited Australia was Rajiv Gandhi in the mid-1980s.
Richardson's point on defence spending was underlined by an equally frank statement in an important and under-reported speech by Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd a week or so ago to the Oxford Business Alumni Forum. Rudd addressed how Australia would navigate its way through the potential scenario of a "dual superpower world".
In a truly fascinating section Rudd listed what he saw as China's strategic ambitions in the next decade. Rudd cited various of China's aims, but among them was one that government ministers seldom advert to in public. Like Richardson, Rudd was admirably straightforward. He said: "China's strategic objective is over time to reduce US military influence and, as a consequence, US alliances in East Asia and the Pacific."
Sensibly, Rudd did not say how far he thought China was prepared to go in pursuing that objective. I may have missed something, but I think this is the first time a senior Australian government minister has tagged China's objective, to get the US out of Asia, or at least to reduce its military presence in Asia, anything like so explicitly.
Later in the speech Rudd identified a key Australian objective as maintaining and strengthening our alliance with the US. Rudd is certainly right in his analysis and he serves the cause of public debate by putting it on the record. But he also makes it clear that China's strategic objective -- diminishing US alliances and the US military presence in the region -- is in direct contradiction of Australia's strategic objectives.
This self-evidently does not mean that the closest economic co-operation and political dialogue between Canberra and Beijing is not possible. But it does show up in stark relief that Canberra and Beijing are not only operating towards different ends but contradictory ends.
In the same speech, Rudd further stated that another strategic objective of China was to "protect (its) sea lines of communication right out to the sources of China's long-term energy supply, across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf where most of its oil supplies come from, but also its land-based supply lines to various other countries in terms of delivery of natural gas as well".
This means that Rudd has concluded, rightly in my view, that China's massive military build-up is destined to go on for a long time and to reach extremely lethal capabilities to project military force over long distances.
No wonder Rudd wants the US military to stay in the region. No wonder as PM he committed to doubling our submarine fleet from six to 12. And no wonder Richardson concludes we cannot live securely in this region with our present paltry defence effort. You won't hear much of this at CHOGM, but these are our realities. One of the many things we should be doing about it is getting closer to India.
| The Australian
