Australia in International Politics

An introduction to Australian foreign policy

Stewart Firth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367717438
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000248524
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world changed for Australia after the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 and the Bali bombings of 2002. Security became the dominant theme of Australian foreign policy. Australian military forces remained in Afghanistan years later, opposing the terrorist threat of the Taliban, while hundreds of Australian troops and police worked with public servants to build the state in Asia-Pacific countries such as East Timor and Solomon Islands. The world changed for Australia, too, when the global financial crisis of September 2008 threatened another Great Depression. Meantime the international community made slow progress on measures to stem climate change, potentially Australia's largest security threat.

In a newly revised and updated edition, Australia in International Politics shows how the nation is responding to these challenges. The book describes how Australian foreign policy has evolved since Federation and how it is made. It examines Australia's part in the United Nations, humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping. It analyses defence policy and nuclear arms control. It explains why Australia survived the global financial crisis and why the G20 has become the leading institution of global economic governance. It charts the course of Australia's climate change diplomacy, the growth of Australia's foreign aid, human rights in foreign relations and the rise of China as a great power.

Written by one of Australia's most experienced teachers of international relations, Australia in International Politics explains Australian foreign policy for readers new to the field.

'. one of the best books on Australian foreign policy that I have read in recent years' - Samuel M. Makinda, Australian Journal of Political Science

PART I
The evolution of Australian foreign policy

1
Foreign relations, 1901–83

• What was the impact of World War I on Australia’s links with Britain?
• Was World War II a turning-point in the history of Australia’s foreign relations?
• What were the origins of the ANZUS Treaty?
• Should the American alliance be central to Australian foreign and defence policy?
• What was the policy of ‘forward defence’?
• Why did Australia send troops to fight in the Vietnam War?
• What were the achievements and failures of Australian foreign policy under the Whitlam government?
• What distinctive contribution did Malcolm Fraser make to Australia’s foreign policy during his time as prime minister, 1975–1983?
• What is meant by the ‘dependence issue’ in the debate about Australian foreign policy?
• In what ways did Australia’s relationship with Asia change during the twentieth century?

IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS: BRITAIN

An Act of the British Parliament, not a war of independence, created Australia the state in 1901. Australia was British, with a British constitution, a British head of state, a British flag and a British national anthem. Almost all Australians (though not the Aboriginal, German and Chinese, the most notable of the many minorities) were British by birth or descent.

Independent in many respects, Australia was still not a sovereign state. It lacked the legal capacity to make treaties with foreign states; it possessed no overseas diplomatic posts, except in London; the British government took charge of its foreign relations; and Britain had the main responsibility for its defence. Thinking of the British Isles as ‘home’ and of themselves as colonial British, Australia’s political leaders found nothing odd in this state of affairs. On the contrary, they set great store by their intimate political and economic connection with the world’s greatest power.

Australia had freedom to act, however, on immigration and foreign economic policy, and soon demonstrated a degree of independence in these areas. The first legislation passed by the inaugural Australian federal government was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (the White Australia policy), which prohibited non-white migrants and effectively defined Australia as a white nation.

The new Commonwealth then abandoned free trade, at that time almost an article of faith in Britain, and embraced protection, imposing an external tariff on manufactured imports at the same time as removing interstate barriers to trade. Under the prime ministership of Alfred Deakin, this ‘new protection’ was a high-tariff policy which was meant to protect manufacturers from foreign competition and, in return, required them to pay reasonable wages to their employees. The Australian standard of living in 1908 was probably the highest in the world, higher than that of the United States or Britain and certainly far higher than that of Japan. Protection was intended to maintain this standard of living in an island of European affluence far from England and amid Asian poverty. Protectionism became the credo of every Australian government for the next 75 years.

The national interests of Britain and Australia were bound to diverge, though decades would pass before this became obvious. For one thing, Australia was on the other side of the world. From 1906 Australia possessed its own colony, a piece of Australian territory in the Pacific: the former British New Guinea, now renamed Papua. The defence of the Pacific was a more urgent national priority for Australia than it was for the Motherland, and many Australians came to distrust Britain’s 1902 alliance with Japan that was renewed in 1911. As the British reduced their Pacific naval presence, the Australian Liberal prime minister, Alfred Deakin, pressed for an independent navy. Consequently, from 1913, Australia had its own small naval fleet, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). Under the Naval Defence Act 1910, introduced by the Fisher Labor government, Australian boys and young men between the ages of twelve and 26 became liable to compulsory military training for home defence. These first Australian initiatives in defence all took place within a loyally imperial framework, but they were evidence of uniquely Australian priorities and of a specifically Australian patriotism.

Not only was Australia set apart from Britain by geography but it was also, even before World War I, a somewhat different kind of society. Australia was a more democratic, more egalitarian and less class-conscious society than the one from which it had sprung. A quarter of the population was Irish or of Irish descent; their ancestral homeland had been colonised by the British for centuries and they often thought of England and the British Empire as oppressors. With immense sacrifices, the Irish in Australia had constructed a separate school system where religious brothers and nuns preserved the Catholic faith in the rising generation and taught a patriotism which focused on Australia rather than England and the Empire. The Labor Party, which attracted most of the Catholic vote, also espoused a national rather than imperial patriotism, putting Australia first and the Empire second.

When war broke out in 1914, most Australians reacted to the news enthusiastically. Before the war Australian schoolchildren in the state and Protestant schools were constantly reminded that they belonged to the greatest and noblest Empire the world had ever seen. The most important part of the Australian flag, they were told, was the Union Jack in the corner, and the time would come when they would be called upon to fight for the Empire in foreign fields of battle. When that time came, as politicians were fond of saying, Australians would show their loyalty to the Empire to the last man and the last shilling. In August 1914, party leaders on both sides pledged Australia’s support for the Motherland, and volunteers inundated the first Australian Imperial Force (AIF). While many wanted adventure, a chance to see the world, a job at five shillings a day or an escape from family problems, many were also filled with ideas of fighting for the glory of Empire.

The landing of Australian troops on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli in April 1915 was not Australia’s first military action in World War I—an Australian force captured German New Guinea in 1914—but Gallipoli came to symbolise a new feeling of Australian national identity in what contemporaries called Australia’s ‘baptism in blood’. Before the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—the ANZAC force—withdrew from Gallipoli in December 1915 almost 8000 Australians had been killed in a campaign which was to end in failure. As the war progressed and the demand for more troops grew, Australia divided sharply between those who thought young men should be conscripted for overseas military service and those who did not. Billy Hughes, the rabidly pro-Empire prime minister, led the country into two bitterly contested referendums on conscription in 1916 and 1917, seeking a popular mandate to draft young Australians for the murderous battles of the Western Front. With the Catholic Church, much of the Labor Party, the radical left and many farmers opposed to conscription, both referendums were lost. The 330,000 Australians who went overseas with the AIF during World War I were all volunteers.

At Versailles, Billy Hughes proved to be a cantankerous and influential voice for Australia. As he reminded the American president, Woodrow Wilson, Australia had contributed 60,000 dead to the war against Germany and its allies and deserved something in return. Most tangibly, that turned out to be German New Guinea, or at least those parts of it south of the equator. Against Hughes’s protests, the former German islands north of the equator—most of the islands of Micronesia—went to Japan, which had occupied them with Britain’s approval in 1914. Those Micronesian islands were to serve as Japan’s springboards in World War II at considerable cost to Australia and the United States. Though Hughes would have liked to annex New Guinea outright, he had to accept the next best thing: a ‘C’-class mandate over New Guinea under the supervision of the League of Nations; a form of territorial acquisition which allowed Australia a virtually free hand yet did not completely abandon the idea of international trusteeship. Australia, New Zealand and Britain shared the mandate over the phosphate-rich island of Nauru and thereby ensured a steady supply of cheap fertiliser to the farmers of the Antipodes.

The legacy of World War I for Australia’s links with Britain was ambiguous. In some ways postwar Australia was more British than ever, for the war had fatally weakened that radical stream of opinion which wanted a separate and uniquely egalitarian destiny for Australia, free of the constraints of the Old World. The war conservatised the country. All state governors, and most generals, admirals, professors, Anglican bishops and Protestant school headmasters in the interwar period were Englishmen. With one notable exception—in the person of Sir Isaac Isaacs, appointed by the Scullin Labor government—all governors-general of Australia were also Englishmen. Until the late 1930s Australian governments hardly interested themselves in foreign affairs—except on trade matters—and it was not until the Labor Party was in office in 1942 that Australia bothered to ratify the Statute of Westminster 1931. This complex piece of legislation, passed by the British Parliament, gave the self-governing dominions of the Empire the right to make their own laws without British interference, to give their own advice to the Crown and to make their own foreign policy. Apart from its representatives at the League of Nations and a single counsellor appointed to the British Embassy in Washington in 1937, Australia had no diplomatic representative in a foreign country between the wars. Australia was content to let London represent it.

Australia’s foreign economic policy between the wars was strongly pro-Empire. Under the Ottawa Agreements Act 1932, Australia entered a comprehensive system of imperial preferences which allowed Australian primary products into Britain duty-free; at the same time, Australia ensured that tariffs on British manufactured imports were always lower than tariffs on equivalent imports from elsewhere. The result was a pattern of trade that discriminated against Japan and the United States and tied Australia economically to the United Kingdom. The British people sat down to breakfasts of Australian eggs and Australian honey with toast made from Australian wheat, and what applied to breakfast was true of almost everything else. The United Kingdom was Australia’s best market. At the same time, Australians ate their meals with knives, forks, spoons, plates, cups and saucers stamped ‘Made in England’.

Yet popular sentiment for the Empire weakened after World War I. Gallipoli had become a symbol of uniquely Australian nationhood and Australians celebrated it more generally and more fervently than any English feat of war. ANZAC Day, which brought parades of veterans into the streets of Australian cities and towns every 25 April, far eclipsed Empire Day as a celebration of patriotism. At the depths of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, while tens of thousands of unemployed Australians were living in makeshift huts of galvanised iron and hessian bags, children at state schools were still being told of their good fortune in belonging to the greatest Empire the world had ever known. But many people blamed the British banks and bondholders for their poverty and despair. In addition, Japanese military expansion into China during the 1930s heightened Australians’ fears that their country might soon face a direct threat from the north, and that the United Kingdom was not doing enough to protect them. Everything came to depend on what most Australians hoped was an impregnable bastion of British military power in the Far East: Singapore.

IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS: THE UNITED STATES

World War II was a turning-point for Australia’s relationship with its first ‘Great Protector’, the United Kingdom. On 3 September 1939 Australian Prime Minister Robert Gordon (R.G.) Menzies told the Australian people in a radio broadcast that ‘in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great

GREAT AND POWERFUL FRIENDS

Ever since Federation in 1901 Australian governments have regarded Australia as vulnerable, a country needing a great and powerful friend overseas to defend it against attack. That friend was first the UK and later the US. To keep the friend, Australia was ready to fight with it in wars overseas. Nowhere has this attitude been more obvious than when prime ministers have committed Australia to war or reaffirmed a commitment already made.

Robert Menzies on radio, 3 September 1939:

It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.

R.G. Neale, ed., Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937–49, Volume II: 1939, AGPS, Canberra, 1976, pp. 221, 226.

Harold Holt in the presence of the American President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), June 1966:

You have in us not merely an understanding friend but one staunch in the belief of the need for our presence with you in Vietnam.

We are not there because of our friendship, we are there because, like you, we believe it is right to be there and, like you, we shall stay there as long as seems necessary to achieve the purposes of the South Vietnamese Government and the purposes that we join in formulating and progressing together.

And so, sir, in the lonelier and perhaps even more disheartening moments which come to any national leader, I hope there will be a corner of your mind and heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend that will be all the way with LBJ.

The Australian, 1 July 1966.

Bob Hawke in parliament, 21 January 1991:

On 2 August 1990, Iraq’s armed forces assaulted, seized and subjugated Kuwait. Now, with the authority of the United Nations, and only after Iraq had made it clear that it would defy the United Nations by remaining in Kuwait, Australia has joined a great coalition of nations in a military commitment to defeat that invasion and to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty and independence… Mr Speaker, the allied nations, with Australia, shall prevail against Iraq’s aggression. We shall restore the sovereignty of Kuwait, and in doing that we shall have done much more. We shall have established the conditions for peace and stability in the Middle East; we shall have protected the health of the international economy; and we shall have erected and strengthened the framework for a world order in which all nations can live in greater peace and harmony.

House of Representatives, Hansard, 21 January 1991.

John Howard in parliament, 18 March 2003:

Early this morning President Bush telephoned me and formally requested Australia’s support and participation in a coalition of nations who are prepared to enforce the Security Council’s resolutions by all necessary means. This request was subsequently considered and agreed to by cabinet. Around midday today, Australian Eastern Standard Time, President Bush delivered an ultimatum to the Iraqi leadership: Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours or face military conflict. Nobody wants a military conflict. The world has tried other means for years but, so far, to no avail. We cannot walk away from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I The evolution of Australian foreign policy
• Part II Security
• Part III Economy
• Part IV Issues in foreign policy
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index