Australia risking reputation in United Nations row

By Marie McInerney

ADELAIDE (Reuters): Australia's hardline response to refugees and UN criticism on human rights issues means it risks a return to its isolationist past and opens itself up to accusations of hypocrisy from Asian neighbors.

"On the one hand, Australia is up there telling places like Indonesia and Malaysia what human rights are all about," international politics lecturer Felix Patrikeeff told Reuters.

"And on the other, it is saying 'well, actually, if the UN tries to meddle in our business, it will run away with a bloody nose'," said the University of Adelaide lecturer.

"It also means that states to the north of us can be a little more brazen in terms of their rejection of UN standards of human rights," he said.

Australia's conservative government, incensed by recent criticism by a number of UN treaty committees over its treatment of Aborigines and asylum seekers, announced this week it would cut back its dealings with UN human rights watchdogs.

Prime Minister John Howard denied his government's stand marked a new shift towards isolationism.

"It does not represent, as some have suggested, a turning away by Australia from the principles of the United Nations," Howard told parliament on Wednesday.

"But it does represent a determination by this government that matters affecting Australia are resolved by Australians within Australia," he said.

The government's attack on the United Nations came soon after police used water cannon and tear gas to put down a riot by Middle Eastern asylum seekers at a remote outback detention camp.

The riot and Australia's row with the United Nations have taken place in the full glare of international attention as the world gears up for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, which kick off on Sept. 15.

Australia's 430,000 Aborigines, the country's most disadvantaged group who make up about 2.3 percent of the population, have vowed to stage peaceful protests throughout the Games to draw attention to their plight.

Sydney human rights barrister Sarah Pritchard says there has been a dramatic shift in Australia's human rights diplomacy.

"When countries who have historically been seen to support international human rights scrutiny start questioning the right of the international community to exercise supervision, then the whole system is placed at risk," Pritchard told Reuters.

But the government's new stand is drawing support from some conservative commentators at home and abroad.

"Australia has signaled it is no longer prepared to be the grandstanders' paradise it has been," wrote columnist Piers Akerman in the top-selling tabloid Daily Telegraph newspaper.

"The UN's raggle-taggle riff-raff can abuse the hospitality of some other country prepared to put up with unrealistic criticism," he said.

His attack came after one of Howard's Liberal Party backbenchers described the UN treaty committee system as a theme park for the global guilt movement.

Australia is remembered bitterly by its Asian neighbors for a "white Australia policy", a former government policy which was designed to keep out non-white migrants.

The policy officially ended in 1966, a year before the end of a statute ruling that Aborigines be governed under the country's flora and fauna laws.

The white Australia policy was echoed by the short but spectacular rise four years ago of populist politician Pauline Hanson, who angered Asia with her anti-immigration views.

Howard's government will be pleasing many of the people who supported Hanson but critics say events of recent weeks project an increasingly intolerant image.

Patrikeeff said Australia had successfully developed a role and reputation on the international stage as an "honest broker" but would now be regarded as more partial.

"That makes our foreign policy that much more difficult because in a sense...we really did have a very admirable position in the international community and that's beginning to tarnish a bit," he said. "It's a little bit bruised.

But Jeremy Rabkin, law professor at New York's Cornell University, told Reuters he expected no significant international outcry over Australia's rebuff of the United Nations.

"My guess is -- there is no reaction -- that this will flag to everyone, in case they had any doubt about it, that there is no consequence to doing this," he said after an Institute of Public Affairs address in Canberra on Thursday. "What country would jeopardize its relationship with Australia over this?"