Future Directions in Labor Foreign Policy

More disturbingly, it's the fourteenth election we have lost since the war - compared to the seven we have won. Over that fifty-seven (57) year period, we have been in power for twenty years, our opponents for thirty-seven (37).

In relative terms, our comparative performance against the conservative parties becomes worse when once we include the pre-war period as well. The combined Prime Ministerships of Watson, Fisher, Hughes (prior to Ratting), Scullin, Curtin, add only another eleven years to our tally, meaning that we have been the Government of this country for less than a third of it's federated history.

So why are we the oldest Australian political party by a country mile, we haven't exactly been electorally it's most successful.

Political and Party historians debate the reasons for this.

One is because of our history of splits - three times in a hundred years isn't bad going.

Another has been the electorate's view on at least two occasions that we were to be held electorally responsible for the two largest external economic shocks of the century; in Scullens case, the depression; in Whitlams case, the first world shock.

A third reason, relates to foreign policy.

Prior to the 1950's foreign policy was not viewed as a political liability for Labor. We should remember that during both World Wars, the Australian people turned to Labor for leadership. When the business got serious, Fisher replaced Cook just as Curtin later replaced Menzies and Fadden.

Things changed, however, in the post war years. During the Cold War, Menzies and his successors convinced a generation of Australians that we could not be trusted on the Soviet Union. We could not be trusted on China. And we could not be trusted on Vietnam.

Howard, our Menzie in pretender, is not adverse to employing the same routine. Could Labor be trusted on Asia? And more recently could Labor trusted on border security? Or even terrorism?

One thing is for certain. If the post-war conservatives have a consistent and continuing pathology it is this: when all else has failed, and when your domestic political stocks are very low, when the hospitals are in a shambles, the universities are falling apart, there is always old faithful, the foreign policy threat from without.

Our challenge today, and in the period ahead, is to deny them that opportunity by denying that space.

This will not be easy because the politics of fear are often more potent than policy of reason. But that is the task ahead of us and we must rise to it.

I believe we can. And the only we can is by engaging the debate - not hiding from it. Latham argued this on domestic policy in Sydney on Wednesday. I argue the same on foreign policy in Melbourne today.

We must expose foreign policy fraudulence when we see it - and under our current fearless Foreign Minister, there is a bucket load of it about.

Just as we must argue the alternative when an alternative must be argued.

All of which is a particularly long winded way of saying that a debate on the nation's foreign policy no longer belongs at the political margins. It is not simply the stuff of interesting academic seminars. It is central to the nation's future. Under this most expedient of Prime Ministers, it lies front, centre and core to his governments and his party's re-election strategies. So we have no alternative but to engage it.

The foreign policy of a nation is best defined as the articulation of that nation's interests and values, in the international domain. This articulation may be achieved by either declaration or action or both.

Some argue that foreign policy that has a self contained logic, that it operates within a self contained domain and that in dealing with conflicting interests between states we should therefore be unconstrained by the values we seek to apply to our political processes within states.

This is a conservative view of foreign policy. It is a view whose fundamental premise is that foreign policy is an inherently amoral enterprise. And to the extent that morality is alive in any aspect of public policy, it is a morality confined to our territorial limits. According to this view, the world beyond is a brittle and barbaric place which should be dealt with accordingly. In fact the prospect of actually improving the international order is not part of the conservatives vocabulary. Even less does it form part of the conceptual architecture of their foreign policy.

Labor has a different view.

Our view is that foreign policy, like domestic policy, is about both interests and values. Our view is that the interests and values that we seek to apply to our domestic processes are equally applicable to our international processes. Our view is that there is a continuum.

For example, when we speak in our domestic dialogue about the importance of a safety net to protect the weakest and the most vulnerable in our society, there is no huge leap of logic that prevents us from applying this principle of the "safety net" to the protection of the weakest and most vulnerable states within the international order as well. It applies to small states who cannot defend themselves against the strong, just as it applies to poor states that cannot break out of the poverty cycle. All those who our Foreign Minister delicately refers to as "busted-arse countries".

There is another reason why both interest and values should be alive in both our domestic and foreign policy debates. And that is the convergence of what for a century or more we sought artificially delineate as "that which is domestic" and "that which is foreign". If the events of September 11 demonstrate one thing alone it is that the demands for national security can no longer respect of the artificiality of the divide between the domestic and internationals. For example, the terrorism the twentieth century is no respecter of the neat delineations of the machinery of government of the twentieth century.

Similarly with economic globalisation. How do we continue neatly to divide that which is domestic from that which is not. This is a profound challenge to policy makers everywhere. So any attempt to sustain the artifice of what international relations theorists would describe as the "great divide" between the foreign and domestic collapses in the face of the unfolding reality before us all.

Against the same logic, it becomes equally pointless to quarantine from our discussion of foreign policy the interests and values that historically shaped are approach to policy questions at home.

That is not to say that this is a simple exercise. It is not. We will often find that our interests and values are in conflict with one another. For those of us who are social democrats there is nothing new to this. The task of politics is to reconcile those conflicts when they arise. It is not to pretend as conservatives often do, that those conflicts do not exist.

What then are the critical interests and values that should govern the future direction of Australian foreign policy.

I argue there are five;

Labor is committed to a secure Australia.

Labor is committed to a competitive Australia.

Labor is committed to a compassionate Australia.

Labor is committed to an Australia that is comfortable with its neighbours and engaged with its region.

And Labor is committed to an Australia that can once again hold its head high in the forums of the world and we once did.

To some, these interests and values may seem unremarkable, even common place. The truth is that each involves a body of work which is as complex as it is formidable. And the complexity derives from the uncertainty of the international terrain in which we must now operate; not just a post cold war world but now a post September 11 world as well.

There will of course be areas of agreement with the Government. Of course from a national interest point of view this is entirely desirable. A nation of limited critical mass such as our own should have a bipartisan foreign policy.

However, bipartisanship comes at a price. And that price is a broad consensus on the direction in which we seek to take nation - and the interests and values that shape that direction.

By in large we had such a consensus from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties. Whitlam had constructed a new paradigm for Australian foreign policy in the early 70's characterised by a continued alliance with the United States but an increasingly independent foreign policy posture in Asia. This "Whitlam Doctrine" formed the basis of the subsequent foreign policies of Prime Ministers Fraser, Hawke and Keating and Opposition Leaders Hayden, Peacock and Hewson.

In the last several years, however, this consensus has begun to unravel. It has become fragile, brittle and at times has verged on cracking altogether. It needs to be recorded formally that the breaching of this consensus and the breaking of this bipartisanship has not occurred by accident but by design.

And not by our design. Rather by design and conscious political decision on the part of our opponent.

If there is a central reason why this has occurred, it is this; sometime during the 39th parliament, the Liberal Party of Australia decided to make foreign policy the tool of domestic party politics. The father of modern strategic theory, Von Clausewitz, said famously that war was simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. John Howard has now added to Clausewitzean theory whereby foreign policy is not merely the continuation of electoral politics by other means. This, I think, is what we should properly call "the Howard Doctrine".

Under this Howard Doctrine, Hansonism could be embraced.

Under this Howard Doctrine, Tampa could be prosecuted.

Under this Howard Doctrine, our international relations could be "rebalanced" away from Asia and towards the cultural half of Western Europe and North America.

The common denominator to all three of these re-positioning is that they have been driven exclusively by the domestic political imperative rather than being subject to anything approaching rational foreign policy analysis.

In fact it is probably quite wrong to try and engage explicitly as part of a considered foreign policy debate. Because each has been conceived as a crude exercise in partisan politics driven Marx Texta qualitative research and key lines and themes.

But it goes deeper than this as well. What our political opponents have done in this country is plum the depths of the deepest fears of the Australian political physic.

In many respects, they have been both pioneers and pathfinders for their conservative confreres in Europe - politically as we survey the political landscape in Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark and France. Not to mention what might soon happen in Germany where the CDU candidate for the Chancellorship has reportedly campaigned on a slogan of "Kinder Statt Inder" which, roughly translated, means children not Indians. I believe Mr Stoiber was referring to the future manpower needs of Germany's ITC sector.

Make no doubt about it, the politics of the "Kultur Krig" are alive and well across Europe and the emerging political fault lines are no longer those of ideology and gender but rather those of identity, race and culture.

But where John Howard's have been true pathfinders has been incorporating the politics of this undeclared "Kultur Krig" into the main stream policy of a nation's main stream centre right party. Cherac has not done so. William Haigh, while tempted, did not do so although Schtober of Bavaria is showing less signs of restraint.

In fact, up until now, the politics of this undeclared cultural war around the issues identity, race and immigration have been confined to far right parties who subsequently found themselves in coalition with a series of main stream centre right parties.

John Howard's Liberals, however, have done the full monty in one fell swoop. And who knows where they might go to from here.

In this country, as in much of Europe, the term "asylum seekers" has become a symbol, a youthinism, a lightning rod for the entire debate.

Hansonism was a crude, blunt instrument. Asylum seekers, by contrast, are a much more rapier-like instrument in creating a much more neatly exploitable set of physiological fears and political possibilities.

Of course this provides fertile soil for the future. And we on our side of the political divide would be extremely foolish not to recognise the dangers which is supposes for us in the future. These fears are potent and, if not handled properly can be politically lethal.

There is, however, a fundamental flaw in this strategy. And the flaw is that our opponents offer no long term policy solutions to the political fears that they fan. That's what happens when you are engaged exclusively in an enterprise driven by politics and not by policy as in increasingly the pathology of this government. Or as one Canberra-based strategic analyst said to me recently:

"there is an almost un-erring mathematical principle at play with the conservatives in Canberra. Whenever they talk up the external threat, they look closely at the defence budget because what invariably happens is that is then goes down".

It is important, however, that we know our enemies. And it is an enemy whose overriding philosophical principle has become expediency. And tragically our country's foreign policy has not escaped becoming a casualty of this overriding political strategy.

What, we may well ask, has our fearless Foreign Minister been doing while all this has been going on? The short answer is that Alexander Downer has been MIA - missing in action.

Foreign Ministers are supposed to be keepers of the gate. They have in my view, a responsibility not dissimilar to that of Treasurers; their job is to look beyond the political ruck and to protect the national interest from the ravages of various of their domestic policy colleagues. In the case of Treasurers it is to defend our public finances against the enthusiasms of spending ministers in pursuit of some grand political scheme. In the case of Foreign Ministers, it is to protect our enduring international interests and our international reputation against the ravages of domestic Ministers who would ravage these in pursuit of some local political advantage.

Our Foreign Minister has failed this test. There is a danger in this country that we simply ridicule the Foreign Minister of some sort hybrid of Bill Bunter and Bertie Wooster. Whatever Alexander's eccentricities on this account, they are of minor importance. His major failing is that he has nothing to prevent the assault on the nation's international standing by his Prime Minister, his party and some of his more politically drive parliamentary colleagues.

Alexander has simply been missing in action.

Missing in action over Hanson.

Missing in action over Tampa.

And now missing in action over his Prime Minister's determination to disengage from Asia.

Alexander Downer will be recorded in the history as one of our country's longest serving Foreign Ministers. He will also go down in history as one our weakest.

He was simply not around when his country needed him most. In fact, on some things I fear he has been quietly cheering from the side lines. A pity he had not read more Rudyard Kipling and "Feats of Derring-do".

Our job for the years ahead is to engage the debate and we must be intelligent in the way in which we go about engaging the debate. Foreign Policy under the Howard Government has become a synonym for wedge politics. It is not if the government is in the business of having a genuine intellectual exchange about alternative foreign policy visions for this national and world of the twenty-first century. No we must enter this debate with our eyes wide open because in the mind of this government it is more and more a debate about code language politics than it is about the finer points of policy differentiation.

We should not, for example, simply deliver up to the government the sort of responses the government would wish us to deliver up. We must agile in our thinking. We must be innovative in our language. We must be forensic in exposing not so much as what they as what they mean. We must be clear in our policy. And we must be resolute in the interests and values that we apply.

Labor first and foremost is committed to a secure Australia. Security is fundamental to our independence. Security is fundamental to our prosperity. Security is fundamental to our capacity to deliver a just society.

There is a danger in the politics of this country that we sometimes concede the concept in the language of security to the political right. There is no rational reason we should do so. Even less is there any reason of principal that we should do so. To live securely, and to know that our nation lives securely, is a legitimate interest of all those Australians we seek to represent in the Parliaments of this country.

Our political opponents would have us believe that this is their natural terrain rather than ours. They are wrong. And our task is to prove that they are wrong.

Because as with most things in the public life of this nation, the conservatives are long on the rhetoric of security but continue to fall considerably short on the reality.

The national security challenges this country are now complex than they have been at any time since the Second World War.

The threat spectrum we face is in fact broader that at any time in our history.

We must remain alert to any challenges to our military security as we live within a region which contains with it a large number of unresolved territorial conflict.

However the threat spectrum we face is far broader than classical military security.

We must be mindful of the threats posed by global terrorism and firm in our resolve to confront such threats.

We must be mindful of the continuing threats posed by weapons of mass destruction, particularly those within our own region and particularly those in the possession of states who are party to unresolved territorial disputes.

We must also be mindful of threats to our civil infrastructure - our telecommunication, transportation and communication systems.

We must be mindful of the threats posed my communicable diseases - both new and old.

We must be mindful of the threats posed by unlawful international people movements, or the international narcotics trade, and of international organised crime.

What the conservatives offer in the face of these threats to our security is fear. They offer little by way of durable policy. They offer less by way program and, despite the rhetoric they offer even less by way of resources. Those who doubt this, just take one cold hard look at the state of the capital budget of the Australian Defence Force. It has been bled dry by the explosion of personnel and operating costs to the extent that we are fundamentally compromising our future military capacity.

The good thing about Labor is that we have always been a practical lot. That is why I believe our people turned to Curtin and Labor in 1941. To deliver national security to the nation in those darkest times, Australia had to look beyond the square. Menzies and the conservatives resorted to the rhetoric of empire. Curtin and Labor looked to the reality of US military and naval power. And so Australia was saved.

Similar thinking outside square is required today. Old formula for dealing with new threats will need to be re-appraised. New approaches will need to be adopted. And that is one of the tasks that lies ahead of us over the next two years as we seek to give policy expression to this core concept of security.

A second interest and value we have as a Labor party is our commitment to a competitive Australia. We must be competitive in order to survive. We must be competitive in order to prosper. And we must be competitive in order to deliver through our prosperity the resources we need to assist the vulnerable and the weak and to enable those we can be strong to become strong.

The conservatives have been schizophrenic on this concept of a competitive Australia since Menzies and McEwan. The crude summary was something like this:

Labor had to be competitive while capital remained idle, languishing behind a tariff wall.

Once again, Labor demonstrated that we can be an innovative lot. Had Hawke and Keating not internationalised the Australian economy during the 1980's the Asian financial crisis would have created an Australian Argentina by the 1990's.

But we have not reached the end of the road. There is much more to do. There will always be much more to do. A competitive Australia means we must be active not passive in our multi-lateral trade diplomacy. It means we must be active not passive in our efforts through the international financial institutions to shape and reshape the international financial architecture.

A competitive Australia also means that we must be active not passive in the massive challenge of national capacity building - most particularly our knowledge industries; most particularly the generators of knowledge, our schools; our universities and our research institutes.

Labor is committed to a secure Australia.

Labor is committed to a competitive Australia but Labor must be equally committed to a compassionate Australia.

Labor can never be indifferent to violence and suffering beyond our shores.

From Evett to Evans, we have been committed to an Australia that sees itself - that defines itself - as a good international citizen.

The conservatives were once quietly disdainful of our historical predispositions in this direction. In recent years, they have become openly disdainful. They are increasingly exhibit a culture that says "that unless our immediate interests are at stake, the world beyond our shores is of no intrinsic interest to us". The conservatives treat the High Commissioner for Human Rights with open contempt.

They treat the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees with open contempt.

They treat our other obligations under international humanitarian law with an indifferent bordering on contempt.

They regard the multi-lateral system in general and the United Nations in particular with suspicion bordering on hostility.

They dispatch junior ministers to UN Conferences whereas the Europeans (who they say they seek to emulate) send Presidents and Prime Ministers. They did so recently at Monterey. And they will do so again next week.

I don't know about you folks but the thought of Larry Anthony representing Australia at the United Nations is just plain scary.

And finally there is the collapse of our official aid flows - reaching 0.5% of GDP under Labor and collapsing to 0.29% of GDP under the conservatives.

Whether the conservatives recognise this or not, what this demonstrates collectively to the rest of the world is a hardening of the Australian heart.

Our challenge in the period ahead is to turn this around.

Our challenge in the period ahead is to demonstrate to the Australian body politic that compassion is not a sign of weakness but a sign strength.

Our challenge in the period ahead is to cause Australian's once again to feel pride in being compassionately engaged in the suffering of others.

I argue that this is a very Australian thing to do. Just look what happens when a bush fire next hits an Australian country town or even metropolitan Sydney.

We are governed by a party that is indifferent to a long standing Australian tradition of international humanitarism (both public and private). Our challenge is to restore that tradition to its proper place in our national political culture.

Labor is also committed to an Australia that is comfortable with its neighbours and comfortable with its regions.

It is for this reason that we have been long committed to a policy of comprehensive engagement in Asia. This is not the product of some misty eyed sentimentalism as our opponents some time infer. Nor is it a product of our denying the western cultures and civilisation from which we predominantly derive. It is none of these things.

Labor's commitment to comprehensive engagement in our region is based on two very simply propositions. We believe that if you have good relations with our neighbours, it is good for our security interests and it is good for our economic interests.

Secondly, and conversely, we believe that if you have bad or indifferent relations with your neighbours the reverse applies. In their heart of hearts, the conservatives of this country have never been comfortable with the neighbours the geography has assigned us.

Where Labor has seen opportunity and challenge, the conservatives have seen difficulty and threat.

If the conservatives had their druthers in their heart of hearts and in their mind of minds, they would ideally prefer this continent to have been towed 10,000 kilometres to the north east and be located somewhere at about a mid-point between Hawaii and California.

But the debate between Asian engagement and disengagement has taken a new and dangerous twist. The Prime Ministers most recent language about rebalancing "our relationships between Asia on the one hand and North America and Europe on the other" is code language for something much deeper.

There are echoes of Hansonism and Tampa in all of this. It is intended to send a subliminal message to the Australian people that the region of which we are part is one which we should fear.

Our argument is that this does the nation a profound disservice. What our Prime Minster fails to comprehend is how this code language is interpreted across the capitals of the region.

He failed to comprehend (or did he fail to comprehend) how the Hansonite embrace was seen across our neighbourhood. He failed to see how his proclamation of the Howard Doctrine would be read by our neighbours and he has failed in just the last few days to comprehend how our neighbours would see the government's decision to abolish a long standing and bipartisan program to educate our children in the languages and culture of our region.

Remember also this is the government that destroyed Radio Australia.

It is also the government that destroyed for a season Australian Television International before being humiliated into its reconstruction and relaunch.

The task ahead for Labor, therefore, on this score is a daunting one. The damage has been extensive and the brand name has become tarnished.

But our core challenge is to argue the case to the Australian people that disengagement from Asia will occur at a price. It will cost us in terms of our security. It will cost us in terms of our economy.

We must also explode the mythology perpetrated by our opponents that our relations with Asia and our relations with America constitute some sort of crude, zero sum gained. They do not. And if evidence is needed of this is, we need look no further than the Hawke and Keating governments when a robust relationship with the United States was complimented by a comprehensive policy of engagement with the region.

Labor is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Even if the conservatives find this a arduous and difficult task.

I suspect however that the task is neither arduous nor difficult. Rather, it is a task they would prefer not to discharge because their political strategists advise that it is unwise to do so - and far better to try and wedge us once again on the way through.

I do not intent to allow that to occur.

Finally, Labor is committed to an Australia that can once again be properly proud of our standing in the community of nation.

Australians have a proud history of international engagement. We have played our part militarily when we have needed to do so. And we continue to do so today. We have played our part in disarmament. WE have played our part in peace processes like Cambodia. We have played our part in building the institutions of this region which until a decade or so ago effectively had non.

As a consequence, ours was a voice of reason, of commitment, of humanity - and one therefore listened to with respect.

I say with great sadness that that is no longer the case.

It gives me absolutely no joy to see the incremental shredding our international standing. It is a process that has gathered pace over the last several years.

Not everyone around the world paid attention to Hansonism or our Prime Minister's partial embrace of it.

They did, however, pay attention to the Tampa. The world saw it day in, day out, week in, week out, on television screens and newspapers in every capital around the world.

It was not a pretty picture. It conveyed an image that none of us in this room would admire, very few of us recognise and certainly none of laud.

Which is why the Prime Minister's recent pronouncement in his address to the Federal Council of the Liberal party that Australia's international standing is now higher than at any stage since Federation is either self delusion at its worst or the most purple form of propaganda at its best.

Labor, therefore, has an important repair job to do. It is important that we do so in terms of our national self respect. It is important that we do so in terms of the image we have of ourselves as Australians. But it is equally important that we do so in terms of our ability in the future to successfully to prosecute our interests.

What puzzles the world most is how the Australia of the Olympics, the confident and creative country of September 2000 became a country that gave us the Tampa phenomenon in September 2001.

The truth is that our international stocks rode high after the Sydney Olympics. We had created a positive goodwill for ourselves around the world upon which we could draw down in the pursuit of our interests.

Much of that goodwill has now eroded. And there is much less to draw down upon in capitals around the world - and in the multilateral institutions of which we are members.

Of all the tasks that like ahead of us, this is perhaps the most daunting one.

Our foreign policy vision for Australia then has these several ingredients.

A secure Australia. A competitive Australia. A compassionate Australia. An Australia comfortable with its neighbours and its region. And an Australia once again proud of its standing in the world.

These are the interests and values that we will use to shape the details of our policy program in the two years ahead.

There will be much hard work to do. A combination of policy research and development on the one hand. And of public debate as we take the argument up to the other mob on the other.

Alexander Downer has announced that he will be developing a new foreign policy white paper in the period ahead. I wish him well in that task. But I have grave doubts about some of the forces that will shape it - not least his own Prime Minister and his own party.

For this reason we need to map out our own blueprint for the future.

So today I am announcing the Labor will develop its own foreign policy white paper for release by July 2004.

I hope this might be a basis for brokering a return to bipartisanship.

But if not, will provide a basis for a clear articulation to the Australian public where we agree with this government on Australia's future in the world and where we disagree and why.

I invite each of you to join in this challenge with me. It will not be easy - not least because our resources compared with those of the government are thin indeed.

But our heart is large. We have ideas to harness both from within the party and beyond and we have energy which derives from our commitment.

A commitment to a new Australian foreign policy that we can all be proud.