Australia's Asia policy ambiguous: intellectual

Australia's Asia policy ambiguous: intellectual

JAKARTA (JP): A noted intellectual said that the Australian
government's neo-liberal economic policies to integrate itself
with the growing economies in Asian countries have produced
ambiguous results.

Richard Robison, the director of the Asia Research Center on
Social, Political and Economic Change at Murdoch University,
Western Australia, said that instead of investing in their
neighboring countries Australian businesses were encouraged to
invest in western European countries as well as in the United
States.

"I'm not fully convinced that the current policy in Australia
has clear goals," Robison bluntly said, criticizing the
Australian government's Asia policy.

Robison, along with dozens of other intellectuals from
Indonesia and Australia, like Desmond Ball, Abdurrahman Wahid,
Mari Pangestu and Jusuf Wanandi, took part in the one-day seminar
about political and economic ties between the two countries. The
seminar was held by the Jakarta-based Center for Strategic and
International Studies in conjunction with the ambitious
"Australia Today Indonesia 1994" trade and cultural promotion.

The ongoing promotion is the largest promotional event ever
undertaken by Australia in Indonesia, through which some A$12
million (US$8.65 million) will be spent. It includes a trade
forum and exhibition which was officially opened by Australian
Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Robison said that in 1983 the Canberra government began to
deregulate its financial and labor markets as well as to
privatize its state-owned firms and to reduce tariffs.

He noted that much of the capital raised abroad in the 1980s
was used for speculative investments in local real estate and
other non-productive sectors or to fund takeovers of existing
businesses, making the Australian economy slip into severe
recession during the 1980s.

He said that during the 1970s and 1980s, while its Asian
neighbors worked on tremendous growth, Australia's real annual
growth rate rose between two and three percent.

"The relatively sudden interest by the Australian government
and business in the Asian region has been greeted with some
skepticism," he said.

Robison also said that three factors have made Australian
business people not invest in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian
countries. The first factor was the need to earn profits in the
currencies in which their foreign loans were denominated, mainly
in the U.S. and West European countries. The second factor was
the reluctance of Australian banks to lend money to businesses
planning to expand into Southeast Asia because of the perceived
risk of doing businesses there. The last factor was the perceived
difficulty of competing successfully in a region where domestic
businesses and government cooperate closely and foreign companies
are barred from investing in certain industries. (09)