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2 Australia's new PM is old Asia
hand By Andrew Symon
SINGAPORE - Perceptions can play an
important role in shaping international relations
and here Australia's prime minister-elect, Kevin
Rudd, will take office with some advantages,
especially in Asia.
As a fluent Mandarin
speaker - the only Western leader of government
now or ever, at least in contemporary times, with
this ability - the one time diplomat will clearly
be able to gain Beijing's
interest and attention. This
must carry benefits in diplomatic, security and
trade negotiations when leaders meet on a
bilateral basis or in multilateral forums.
Already this has been demonstrated at the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' meeting
in Sydney in September. As parliamentary leader of
the federal Australian Labor Party, then the main
opposition party, the 50-year-old Rudd joined
Prime Minister John Howard in welcoming Chinese
President Hu Jintao to Australia. Rudd broke into
Mandarin after a brief introduction in English,
upstaging Howard. Rudd later had a 30-minute
meeting with Hu without resort to interpreters.
And during the recent election campaign he was
interviewed by Chinese television in Mandarin
several times.
Appearances and style do
count. While a Rudd Labor government will not
depart radically from the foreign and security
policies of Howard's conservative Liberal-National
Party government, the relationship with the US and
the Bush administration will not be the sort of
lock-step affair that characterized ties between
Canberra and Washington under Howard.
Rudd
will demonstrate to Asia that his government is
more independent of Washington through his
commitment to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and
sign the Kyoto Accord on reducing the growth of
greenhouse gas emissions and combating global
warming. Australia will remain a loyal ally of the
US but Rudd should torpedo the view of some in
Asia of Canberra having a subservient relationship
with Washington.
At the same time, Rudd
has repeatedly affirmed that the US alliance,
under the broad framework of the 1951
Australia-New Zealand-United States Security
Treaty (ANZUS), will continue to be a cornerstone
of Australian foreign and defense policies. The US
military will continue to maintain important
communications centers in the US satellite defense
system and Australia will host joint and
multi-country military operations with the US.
Late on Saturday, with Labor’s success in the
election secured, Rudd spoke with President Bush
and plans to visit Washington early next year.
Australia will remain a loyal, although
more independent ally of the US. This has been
very much the usual Labor Party position in
government despite left-wing elements in the party
opposed to the US alliance. The troop withdrawal
is more symbolic, with Australia having only 550
combat soldiers in Iraq and Rudd saying Australia
will continue to provide aid for Iraqi
reconstruction. But these initial measures over
Kyoto and Iraq are important and will be seen by
Asian governments and public opinion as marking a
new era for Australia on the regional and
international stages.
Already, Indonesia's
President Bambang Yudohoyono has invited Rudd to
attend the key United Nations meeting in Bali in
December to determine a successor framework to the
Kyoto Accord when that expires in 2012, while
Malaysia's leader, Abdullah Badawi, says Rudd's
Iraq plan will "improve the country's
international standing".
Australia under
Labor will put more emphasis on pursuing
Australian objectives through multilateral
diplomacy in the UN and regional forums as against
the more bilateral style of Howard's government
and in particular its very heavy weighting on
close alignment with the US position. It was the
lack of UN support for the US's Iraq invasion in
2003 that is the reason for Labor's opposition to
Australian troop deployment, in contrast to
Labor's support for the first Gulf War in 1990-91
when in government under Bob Hawke, and Labor's
support for the UN sanctioned military invasion in
2001 against the al-Qaeda- supporting Taliban
regime in Afghanistan after the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks on the US.
Indeed,
there are suggestions that Australia will increase
its forces in Afghanistan as it withdraws from
Iraq. Rudd in fact may find that Afghanistan
becomes an early concern as the apparent
strengthening of Taliban forces point to a long
struggle ahead. And the situation there has
started to come into sharper focus for the
Australian public with four soldiers killed in
fighting in the last few months.
Looking
ahead at US-Australia relations, should the
Democrats take the presidency in the US in 2008,
which seems very likely, then almost certainly
Canberra, under the moderately left of center
Labor government, and Washington will see eye to
eye on the importance of a multilateral system,
the Middle East, Iraq, Kyoto, global warming and
many other issues
In Australia's relations
with Asia, there will be many continuities with
the outgoing John Howard government, with Rudd's
government building further on work done over the
last 11 years.
Howard was perhaps unfairly
seen in Asia, especially in his earlier years as
prime minister, as being not particularly
comfortable in
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