Ex-minister says Australia alienating itself from Asia
Ex-minister says Australia alienating itself from Asia
SYDNEY, Australia (Agencies): Australia is alienating itself from its Asian neighbors by gloating about its economic success and failing to stem anti-Asian sentiment, a former foreign minister said on Friday.
Gareth Evans said he feels "a sense of self-satisfied superiority in the air" among Australians about Asia, which threatens to destroy Australia's trade and military ties in the region.
In a speech delivered in the southern city of Melbourne, the former Labor government minister criticized the current Liberal administration for neglecting Asia in favor of "re-establishing our role as a loyal, dedicated and unquestioning ally of the United States."
"The regional landscape has been changing rapidly, with Australia becoming less and less a part of it," Evans said.
"The acute worry is that we have been playing ourselves out of Asia, without any compensating capacity to play ourselves in elsewhere."
Evans said Australia had gloated about surviving relatively unscathed the 1997 Asian economic crisis which shattered many regional economies.
He said Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government was perceived as "arrogant" for congratulating itself over its intervention in East Timor, where Australian armed forces led an international peacekeeping force when violence broke out after the 1999 independence referendum.
The government had also failed to "respond quickly and surely to the corrosive impact of (anti-Asian politician) Pauline Hanson," Evans added. Hanson, whose One Nation party was launched in 1997 on a platform that includes opposition to Asian immigration, has had a resurgence this year as voters grow disenchanted with the Howard administration.
Evans said it is imperative that Australia work on rebuilding its ties with Asian nations through increasing diplomatic efforts and reinforcing cultural links.
"We should not be looking out on Asia as a bunch of Anglo- Saxon cultural misfits trapped by our geography, but as members of a common neighborhood of extraordinary diversity and potential," he said.
It was particularly important that Australia improve its relationship with China as it becomes a greater world power, Evans said.
"This is not a time to be relaxed and comfortable about Australia's future: we have to go out there and win that future, in the region and in the world," he said.
Long odds
Meanwhile, Australia's Liberal Party, the senior member of the governing coalition, was locked in battle on Friday over who should run a state branch, but Prime Minister Howard insisted that the party's leadership remained united.
The party, which governs in a coalition with the rural-based National Party, is in tatters at the state level and faces long odds against winning a third term at an expected year-end federal ballot, trailing well behind opposition Labor in opinion polls.
Just days after a scandal over the leaking of a scathing internal memo rocked the prime minister and heir apparent Treasurer Peter Costello, the party is facing another crisis as the troubled Queensland state branch resists a federal takeover.
The Queensland Liberals, reduced to just three seats in state parliament after a disastrous state election in February and staggering under a debt of A$400,000 (US$209,800), were in negotiations with the federal executive on Friday in an attempt to retain control of their troubled branch.
Queensland vice president Neville Stewart began the day threatening legal action if the federal party tried to take over, but the state's parliamentary leader Bob Quinn said a compromise was being hammered out.