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.