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)