Australia´s Relations with Southeast Asia Since 1972*

Abstract

The period since the election of a Federal Labor Government in Australia in December 1972 has witnessed a significant public deemphasis on those military aspects which so prominently characterized Australia's traditional involvement in Southeast Asian affairs. Partly this lack of emphasis has been because of altered international circumstances, amongst which can be included Britain's withdrawal of its hitherto sizeable military presence from Southeast Asian bases, American disengagement from the Vietnamese and Cambodian conflicts, China's entry into the community of nations, Soviet diplomatic and economic initiatives among the littoral states of the Indian Ocean, and the emergence of an international climate of superpower accommodation and d?tente to replace the bipolar rigidities of an earlier era. Because of these dramatic movements in global and regional relationships, there was a growing tendency to bipartisanship in domestic Australian attitudes towards the Southeast Asian states by the end of the .1960s. This tendency towards convergence in attitude was reflected in policy decisions. Thus it was a Liberal Party Prime Minister, John Gorton, who refused to increase Australian troop numbers for the Western cause in Vietnam (despite strong American pressures for him to do so), and it was Gorton's immediate successor, William McMahon, also a Liberal, who presided over the withdrawal of the bulk of Australian forces from that same country. It was Gorton, too, who began a series of varied and faltering negotiations with Chinese diplomats with a view to ultimate Australian recognition of the People's Republic. As well, it appears that leaders of both the major Australian political parties have been persuaded, if not comforted, by the advice of professional Australian defence planners that they can perceive no observable or significant external threats to the security of the Australian continent for a period of ten to fifteen years hence. The military strategists claim, further, that there will be no major conflicts in the Asian and Pacific region during the same period which will oblige Australian involvement. Such optimistic prognoses contrast in stark fashion with Sir Robert Menzies' fears of an earlier generation that world war was imminent, and that the communist forces in China had embarked on a thrust southwards