E. Timor troops mask Canberra's dire Asian role

By Greg Sheridan

SYDNEY: Australian foreign policy has entered a very dangerous phase, in which it is increasingly dominated by short-term populist appeal, and in which the public is consistently deceived about what is going on.

In truth, this has been a poor year for Australian foreign policy -- but it is difficult to assess things properly because the performance of our troops in East Timor has been so good that they have politically rescued the Howard government.

This was especially evident in the ridiculous Timor tax levy. After years of diplomacy pushing greater transparency and predictability in regional defense spending and planning, we announced a new tax to provide for new troops without any serious advance consultation with our supposed defense partners in the region, much less with the Indonesians. This is almost a textbook example of short-term populist politics trumping long-term policy considerations.

Now we have had both John Howard and Kim Beazley make their victory tours of East Timor. Our troops are to be entertained by a variety of knockabout acts. And all of this at a time when the merest commonsense would dictate that what we need now in East Timor is a period of calmness, in which we turn the volume down and limit our triumphalism.

But this week brings still new vistas of the great monarchical, Menzies-style future that beckons for Australia in foreign policy. We are to send next year a huge government jamboree, at vast cost, led by the Prime Minister and anyone else who cares to tag along, replete with cricket teams (and perhaps in due course dinkum Aussie circus jugglers and clowns as well) to London to celebrate the passage of the British legislation that enabled our Federation.

This is foreign policy as scripted by Barry Humphries. No doubt Les Patterson will be pressed into service. For this, the PM's third visit to London as PM, is in stark contrast to his failure to visit South Korea, our third biggest export market and a vital player in regional security. Similarly, Howard has not made a bilateral visit to the Philippines, though a Filipino general will head the UN peacekeeping force in East Timor.

These may seem trivial points, but they underline what is really a retreat from deep engagement with the region, which is obscured by the East Timor deployment.

In a small country such as Australia, the disposition of the prime minister has an enormous effect on the disposition of the nation. People and institutions look to government for a lead. Vast patterns of patronage are at stake. Many quasiautonomous institutions derive at least a portion of their funding from government.

Australia at the moment has a PM manifestly uncomfortable with Asia, a weak Foreign Minister and a weak Defense Minister. Alexander Downer is certainly not the embarrassment he was in his first year in office, but his performance is mediocre at best.

Apart from the Timor deployment, this has been a year of bungles, mismanagement, retreat, and strategic and political confusion for Australia in the region, and a pulling away from commitment to Asia. It is widely seen in those terms by people in the region who follow foreign affairs.

Of course, the East Timor deployment is a big counter to this and must be factored in. But discerning regional analysts have a clear-eyed view of all this. The troop deployment itself was more or less inevitable once the independence vote had been taken and the killing began. The Australian public were demanding it and once CNN made it an issue in the U.S., Washington pressured Jakarta to allow it to happen. Any Australian government would have made a troop commitment under those circumstances.

And the troops have done magnificently. Throughout the region, therefore, there is a basic respect for the fact that Australia is the type of society that can deploy troops and risk casualties, and rely on them to do a good job.

But the performance of the Howard government, apart from the one action of deploying the troops, is another thing altogether. This has been a year of gross, miscalculation from Canberra, followed by incoherent and mostly negative messages about its commitment to Asia.

We first made the mistake of undertaking such a big joint venture with so transitory, eccentric and illegitimate a figure as former Indonesian president B.J. Habibie. At the very least Australians also had an extreme economy of candor from the government about what intelligence was telling us was the real situation in East Timor, especially in terms of the involvement of the Indonesian army with the militias.

We have had a series of government statements that have been almost bizarre in their incoherence -- such as Defense Minister John Moore airily and gratuitously talking about the "right of hot pursuit" when military commanders were trying to calm things down. We've had the Prime Minister's bizarre Howard doctrine, involving us as deputy sheriff to the U.S., which ran for five days before it was disowned. The subtext of the Howard doctrine to an Asian audience is clear -- we white guys have superior values to you, and we've got big, strong friends to back us up. It played unbelievably badly throughout Asia. Likewise the abandonment of "special relationships", with no sophisticated effort to say how these differ from the "core relationships" in our foreign policy white paper.

Further, the government intrigued to get the military leadership of the UN force in East Timor while saying it did not really want it, showing its real commitment to populist exploitation of the Timor issue.

There are many other examples, among them the truly loathsome spectacle of an Australian Immigration Minister whipping up popular hysteria against Asian boatpeople.

This has been a very bad year for Australia in Asia. The troops alone have saved the Howard government politically, and to some extent saved the nation's reputation. But it's an unstable and dangerous equation.

-- The Australian

Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor.