Australia's Labor party eyes more active foreign role

Australia's Labor party eyes more active foreign role

CANBERRA (Reuters): Australia's Labor party pledged on Thursday to realign Australia's interests with Asia if it won the next election, and said it would forge broader ties with Indonesia and take a firmer line with the United States.

Shadow foreign affairs minister Laurie Brereton said Australia's disengagement from Asia, particularly Indonesia, and shift to Washington yes-man during the five-year rule of Prime Minister John Howard's conservatives has been a mistake.

"A Labor government would be far more active in foreign affairs, and ambitiously so," Brereton said in an interview with Reuters. "We would speak up for Australia's interests."

Center-left Labor, leading the government by between six and 10 points in public opinion polls, is a cautious favorite to win an expected year-end election under leader Kim Beazley, and Brereton is widely expected to be named foreign minister.

While Brereton's reputation as a blunt talker has already won him reviews as "a bull in a china shop" and "an embarrassment Beazley doesn't need" by local media, he said Australia had been letting diplomacy get in the way of the national interest.

While Beazley fostered warm U.S.-Australian ties during a six- year stint as defense minister in the 1980s, Brereton said Labor would be not be the compliant backer of U.S. policy he believes the current conservative government has been.

Australia's conservative coalition has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the U.S. missile defense plan, and has backed the decision by its long-time ally to abandon the Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Labor would reverse both positions, Brereton said.

"(Supporting missile defense) sends exactly the wrong message to our region and our neighbors," Brereton said.

"'All the way with the United States, right or wrong' is a bad call. I mean, that's what got us into the Vietnam war."

Asia first

Brereton said Labor's first priority would be to realign Australia with its Asian neighbors and repair relations with Indonesia, restoring the "Asia First" policy of former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Howard chilled ties -- or at least rhetoric -- with the region soon after ousting Keating in 1996, pressured by rising anti- Asian sentiment personified by Pauline Hanson's xenophobic One Nation, which won 10 percent of the vote in 1996.

"We do not claim to be Asian...neither do I see Australia as a bridge to Asia and the West as sometimes suggested," Howard said during his first visit to Indonesia as prime minister.

Canberra's relations with Jakarta have been particularly chilly since Australia led international peacekeepers into breakaway territory East Timor two years ago, and were only slightly thawed by a visit to Australia by Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid two weeks ago.

Flinders University foreign policy analyst Colin Brown said Asia will expect a return to warmer relations under Labor.

"There is a general perception around the region that the (Howard) government is more interested in the U.S. and Europe than it is in Asia, and compared with the Keating government," Brown said, citing Australia's recent efforts to forge a free trade agreement with the United States.

Brereton said Labor is far from convinced a U.S. trade pact is in Australia's interests, and would likely abandon talks. Instead, he said Australia should lead efforts to forgive some of Indonesia's US$30 billion aid debt, a third of which the World Bank has said was stolen by the regime of former president Soeharto, and seek broader overall ties in Jakarta.

"We want a new relationship at every level," Brereton said. He said the long-delayed visit by Indonesia's Abdurrahman Wahid was important, but too little, too late -- its delay aggravated by the current government's standoffish approach to Jakarta.

Brereton has taken the opposite tack, visiting Indonesia seven times since 1996. He has already met Vice President Megawati Soekarnoputri, the likely successor to Abdurrahman, twice.

But Brereton said foreign relations under Labor would not be all warm handshakes and diplomatic soft-shoe.

Support for human rights in the region would be stressed at every turn, and insults -- like a recent swipe at Australia's treatment of ethnic minorities by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad -- would not be tolerated.