Australia: Good mates to U.S. -- and Asia

Tom Plate The Straits Times Asia News Network Singapore

Give Australians a break. Maybe they're not as daunting as China, as technological as Japan, as whip-smart as Singapore, as potentially gigantic as India or as centrally located as Hong Kong.

But for starters, they have a very competent military. It has helped keep incipient democracies in its region from reverting to civil war (such as East Timor) and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with long-time allies (backing the United States in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq).

And Australians, when they feel it necessary, can be cowboy tough on issues closer to home, such as blocking out illegal Asian immigrants (international human rights groups and Asians say too tough on this), controlling their political and corporate corruption, and pushing their culture in a globalising direction (in overall Internet usage, they rank about sixth worldwide).

They're also pretty good at managing their money: For years, they have been able to boast positive annual growth and are now the world's 12th largest economy with a population of only 20 million.

So it would be wrong to view them as nothing more than a dulcet dooh-dah koala animal preserve or a vast continental collection of crocodile hunters.

Australians don't like those images, but they don't complain when highly correlated with the notion of fun. That shrimp on the barbie business? It's for real -- they're world leaders at throwing a shindig.

That's exactly what they did last Saturday night at the sumptuous Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel here. It was a doozy. Five hundred guests showed up, including some of the celebrities that had gathered the following night for the televised Golden Globe Awards.

Australian stars shined on both nights, including actors Cate Blanchett and Anthony LaPaglia. Hopping tables were the likes of the criminally handsome Australians Mel Gibson (who starred Braveheart, Lethal Weapon etc), Simon Baker (Red Planet, The Guardian, etc) and countless other Aussies, dashing ladies as well as men.

The boisterous and good-natured bash punctuated a week-long festival bannered by the government as G'Day LA. Festivities included a film festival, an astonishing Aborigine art exhibition, the predictable family BBQ Day, a CEO golf outing hosted by Australian ace Greg Norman, an investment seminar at the Tony Milken Institute and enough food festivals at various venues around town to satisfy the inmates of the Sydney Zoo.

What was the point of these ostentatious displays?

Asked precisely this question, West Coast-based Australian Consul-General John Olsen, the festival overlord, responded: "To raise our country's profile here in the States, to show people we are a lot more than kangaroo admirers and crocodile hunters." No question, mission accomplished.

But in the process, a familiar question surfaced anew.

At the moment Australia's attachment to the United States has never been more evident. Rightly or wrongly, Prime Minister John Howard has all but converted the capital Canberra into a branch office of America's Asia-Pacific presence. He has minced few words over the controversial Iraq war; his government is as aligned with the Bush administration as Tony Blair's in London.

Could the bilateral relationship between the two countries be any closer?

This is why critics back home claim that Howard is a kind of Captain Kangaroo to U.S. President George W. Bush, just like Blair. That charge stings because Australians are naturally independent-minded, eager to do things for themselves, reluctant to ask for help and unlikely to reside in anyone's back pocket.

But along with Asians, many Australians believe their country has become excessively pro-American. Is the Howard government vulnerable on the issue, especially in the hands of the brash new Labor Party Leader Mark Latham?

Speaking for the government, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, slightly irritated, suggested the government couldn't care less.

"It's not for others to decide who our friends should be, either privately or publicly," he told me. "We see the role of the United States in the security architecture of the Asia- Pacific, and in particular East Asia, as being axiomatic to stability."

That's hard to argue with; so is the Australian policy of deepening economic and political ties with the Asian continent by negotiating closer free-trade relationships, as with Singapore, Thailand and the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Forum.

Certainly, G'day LA translates to G'day America. But it's hard to see why this linkage implies G'bye Asia. As long as the U.S. remains intimately involved in the continent, it's good for Asia as well as America that Australia is trying reasonably hard to be mates to both, without alienating either.