Teaching Australian foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific in an era of power diffusion: an introduction to a special collection

The trajectory of Australia's foreign policy during the 2010s was set remarkably early in the decade. Over a period of just five months, beginning in April 2010, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd abandoned his Emissions Trading Scheme, Rudd's Labour colleagues subsequently dumped him as leader in favour of Julia Gillard, and Hugh White's essay Power Shift: Australia's Future between Washington and Beijing was published.1 These events decisively framed three enduring and unresolved national questions that defined the past decade of Australian foreign policy: how should we respond to climate change?; are our political leaders still capable of delivering large-scale reform in the national interest?; and how do we navigate a world in which our key security partner and our key economic partner are not the same?

Australian foreign and security policy confronts a series of difficult challenges in coping with the emergence of an Islamic extremist threat in Southeast Asia. Australian policy makers are being drawn into unfamiliar linkages with moderate Islam, and into closer cooperation with Indonesia, the most populous Islamic nation in the world, in an attempt to offset Islamic extremists. Further, they must achieve those objectives at a time when important interests are at stake beyond Southeast Asia, when bipartisan agreement about the direction of foreign policy is waning, and when divisions over the appropriate trajectory of Australian security policy are intense. A delicacy almost unprecedented in Australian foreign policy will be required.

On 1 January 2013, Australia took up its seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC), having been elected to a two-year position as a non-permanent member of the council in 2012. By the end of June, the driver of Australia’s tilt at the UN Security Council seat — Kevin Rudd — had returned to the Lodge as Prime Minister. It was a spectacular comeback from the former leader, whose unpopularity within his own party had seemed to scupper any chances he had of returning to the role.1 The political turmoil associated with the Labor leadership was itself part of the broader federal election circus that defined the first half of 2013. Ultimately, this period was all about the election. In January, Prime Minister Julia Gillard had taken the unprecedented step of announcing a date for the federal election some eight months in advance, triggering what some described as the “world’s longest election campaign”.2 The dominance of electoral considerations in the first half of 2013 had important implications for Australian foreign policy. Confirming previous analysis that suggested Australians do not tend to vote on foreign policy issues,3 the first half of 2013 saw considerations of Australia’s place in the world and engagement with it feature even less prominently in Australian political debate than usual, despite Australia’s position on the UNSC and something of a breakthrough in relations with China. And those international issues that did feature in public debate (in particular asylum and climate change) were ultimately viewed and approached through the lens of domestic political considerations. These tendencies were crystallized with the 2013 budget, which included a delay in reaching ambitious aid targets and a stagnating budget for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade despite increasing diplomatic activity and growing criticisms of inadequate funding. Two key themes were particularly evident in Australian foreign policy in the first half of 2013, and feature prominently in this review: the (growing) gap between ambition and resourcing of Australia’s global engagement; and the growing tendency for Australian engagement with transnational issues to be defined by domestic political considerations, potentially at the expense of key regional relationships. This review begins with Australia taking up its seat in the UNSC, and notes Gillard’s diplomatic breakthrough in China before exploring the politics of funding for Australia’s foreign and defence policy machinery and the dominance of domestic politics in Australian political and foreign policy debates.

ABSTRACTThe issue of bipartisanship in Australian foreign policy is not often substantially addressed. The country’s relations with the world appear to exhibit strong continuity regardless of the political party in government. And yet, when it comes to engagement with African states and issues, the last two decades have seen highly prominent partisan differences in Australian foreign policy. This article utilises the example of Australia’s foreign policy engagement with Africa to argue that there may be two levels of understanding bipartisanship in Australian foreign policy. On the one hand, aimed at relationships and issues perceived to be of primal and significant security and economic well-being for the country, Australian foreign policy does indeed appear to be bipartisan. However, aimed at relationships and issues that have traditionally been perceived as holding minimal security and economic interest and importance for the country, Australian foreign policy does exhibit partisanship.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2007 The final six months of 2007 were eventful ones in both Australian domestic politics and foreign policy. Inevitably in an election year foreign policy became intertwined with the contest for political power in Canberra. While some observers have since asserted that foreign policy and “international” issues played no role in the election campaign, the following review of Australian foreign policy will demonstrate that foreign policy issues played a significant role in both the pre-election and election campaign jockeying for position between the incumbent Liberal-National government of Prime Minister John Howard and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) opposition under Kevin Rudd. Over the July to December 2007 period six foreign policy issues dominated both government and Opposition attention and had significant resonance for the domestic political contest: (1) terrorism; (2) Iraq; (3) Afghanistan; (4) instability in the South Pacific; (5) climate change and environmental issues; and (6) the future of the US alliance and great power politics in the Asia-Pacific. These issues largely fall within two broad trends of the contemporary strategic landscape that confronts Australia: the increased importance of non-state, sub-state and trans-national threats for Australian security and the reality of a changing distribution of power in the Asia-Pacific.

Despite the undoubted significance of possible Australian participation in a five power Commonwealth security arrangement centred on Malaysia and Singapore, considerations of an Australian nuclear force, the presence of numerous American bases in Australia, and Australian policies towards a Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean, the public debate on Australian foreign policy continues to centre on the Indo-China war. This is understandable, for not only has Australia been supplying material assistance to the counter-revolutionary forces in that area since 1953, military advisers since 1962 and a task force since 1965, but the commitment has focussed critical attention on those strategic assumptions which have dominated Australian foreign policy for the last two decades.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2022

Emotions in international relations, as in human relations, are invisible but leave traces in the policy articulation. Such traces can reveal how emotional interpretations of the environment in which national states operate shape and frame certain policy and strategic choices. Drawing on the concept of the “institutionalisation of empathy and fear” developed by Crawford (Int Theory 6(3):535–557, 2014), I first operationalise and then apply this concept to the Australian foreign policy. This framework is applied to the analysis of the foreign policy documents and strategies published by the Australian government in the last decade. In particular, I focus on Australia’s foreign policy articulation and interpretation of the internet and digital technologies. New, pressing problems are emerging in the digital environment due to a range of cybersecurity threats, including an increase in the frequency of automated accounts and the dissemination of fake news and digital propaganda. From perceiving the internet as a communication platform that allows for listening to and dialogue with foreign publics, Australian foreign policy is increasingly framing the internet as strategic infrastructure that requires defending and guarding. The attention is, thus, moving towards short-term ‘defensive’ goals—as a result of a higher perceived fear of the latest evolution in the geopolitical context. The shift in Australian foreign policy indicates a form of institutionalisation of fear in response to the challenges emerging from the digital environment. I conclude by arguing that a more belligerent international environment highlights the tension between national interest—which evolves and changes due to political shifts and contextual elements—and the understanding of public diplomacy engagement as mutual understanding and mutual influence.

This article surveys some of the key contributions to the secondary literature on Australia's foreign and defence policy during Robert Gordon Menzies' two prime ministerships (1939–41, 1949–66), and seeks to identify Menzies' place in a “Liberal” and Liberal Party tradition through a reading of this work. Via a study of Menzies' imperialism, British race patriotism, nationalism, and attitudes towards Asia and the United States of America, it argues that the prime minister stands in an ambiguous relationship to the transformation that occurred in Australia's international orientation between the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1950s the Australian government's cold war foreign policy, and the political language that Menzies used in private and public to articulate it, were largely successful in balancing the competing claims of Britishness, Australianness and the newly-formed “American Alliance”. By the early 1960s, however, his nostalgia for a dissolving imperial order was sufficiently pronounced that it contributed powerfully to a symbolic and rhetorical defeat for his side of politics, allowing Labor to claim the mantle of Australian foreign policy modernity.

Conventional understandings of Australian foreign policy hold that a decisive break with the past in external relations occurred only after 1972 and the arrival of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. Whitlam, it is claimed, began the process of severing out-dated imperial attachments to Britain, thus setting Australia on an independent course in world affairs based on a more mature assessment of the national interest that defined Australia as part of a wider Asia region. In contrast, the period between 1949 and 1972—an era dominated by the premiership of Sir Robert Menzies—is seen as a time of docile subservience to great power protectors, which sustained a conservative and reactionary monoculture at home while alienating Australia’s Asian neighbours abroad. This study contends that this understanding of the beginning of the ‘modern’ era in Australian foreign policy does not accord with the historical evidence. It is, instead, an image that has been ideologically constructed to legitimize Whitlam’s self-proclaimed revolution in foreign affairs and to validate the abortive attempt to integrate Australia into Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. The ruling foreign policy orthodoxy, however, is one that is widely accepted, and little questioned, in Australian academic and journalistic circles. Yet it rests on a profound, and often intentional, misreading of Australian foreign policy during the Menzies era. In effect, the pillars that have supported Australian foreign policy for over two decades since 1972 are myths manufactured in hindsight.

weak accept what they have to accept. (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book V, Paragraph 89) Since its formative years, the central objective of Australian foreign policy has been to seek means of ensuring national security in a world where great powers were not in the habit of taking too much notice of smaller powers. The fact is that Australian policy and decision makers, tasked with protecting a small power with a vast land mass, situated on the fringe of Asia, have needed to be selective and clever when it comes to dealing with Australian security concerns. In effect, this has meant that Canberra has attempted to enlist a larger power to provide for the bulk of Australia's defence and to become the guarantor of the nation's security. The Japanese entry into World War Two and the resultant war in the Pacific marked a significant turning point in Australian defence and foreign policy with the decline and collapse of the great European icons of Pacific defence. The rapid fall of the Malaya peninsula and Singapore comprehensively undermined the concept of British Imperial Defence while the fall of the rest of South-East Asia shattered the notion that the European powers with colonies in this region could hold these possessions against a determined attack upon the region. Only the U.S. had proved itself to be interested in, and capable of, opposing and defeating the Japanese in the Pacific and this fact was not lost on Canberra. After World War Two, the communist threat to South-East Asia and, by implication, to Australia, dominated the Australian government's security concerns and Canberra began to turn to Washington for support. The U.S. was seen as the only nation capable of being able to effectively ensure Australian defence. To this end, Australian policy and decision makers were extremely effective in formalizing links between Canberra and Washington and this, combined with the declining but still significant British commitment to the defence of the region allayed Australian security concerns. So confident was Canberra that these two allies could be relied upon to protect Australian interests that a large or even moderate defence budget was seen to be unnecessary. What the Australian government did not appreciate was that these allies had interests that went beyond the scope of Australia's immediate region and that Canberra's interests were only being coincidentally served by Washington and Whitehall. Both these nations had no hesitation in leaving Australia to its own devices when Canberra pursued a different line to themselves over certain international issues. In such cases, Canberra could attempt to use what little influence it had with Washington to alter the American stance, yet the impetus for major policy changes could only come from the U.S. and such changes were only coincidental to Australian interests.

The three decades following the Second World War mark a high point in thought and policy regarding international development. Australian policy towards its largest colonial possession of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and foreign aid policy towards Southeast Asia were shaped by the evolving theoretical and political understandings of development. This article examines the varying conceptions of development that emerged out of different government departments involved in Australian foreign and colonial policy. The Departments of External Affairs and Territories generally maintained that Australia was a ‘rich’ and ‘developed’ country that should provide significant amounts of money to Southeast Asia or PNG. On the other hand, the Departments of Treasury and Trade and Industry maintained that Australia itself was still developing, an idea that had a significant impact on Australia’s engagement with international development. The developmental cultures that emerged during this period informed Australian perceptions of how best to promote development overseas, as well as how Australians perceived their own development.

Australian foreign policy traditionally claims middle power and good international citizenship credentials, although it also resorts to unilateral actions due to its deep-rooted condition of ‘frightened country’. This article argues that the country's irregular migration governance embodies this tension, and thus seeks to shed light on this increasingly-neglected aspect of Australian external engagement. Following a theoretical understanding of Australian foreign policy, it investigates the country's irregular migration policies between 2000 and 2024. The article finds that there is a strong continuity in such policies irrespective of the type of government in power, supported by foreign policy bipartisanship, resulting in specific foreign policy tools to stem seaborne arrivals. These include military missions; territorial excisions from the migration zone; offshore processing and/or externalisation agreements with Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka; pushback manoeuvres, and at-sea processing of asylum claims. Inevitably, such measures complicate Australia's international status as they emphasise the uneasy coexistence of both the globalist middle power and the self-interested nation images in its foreign policy, therefore warranting new research on this under-examined condition.

In the first half of 2019 Australian foreign policy was tumultuous, marked by the federal election on 18 May 2019. The election was won, somewhat unexpectedly, by the Coalition and returned Scott Morrison as Prime Minister. The initial moves of the Prime Minister, new Foreign Minister Marise Payne and new Defence Minister Senator Linda Reynolds in the diplomatic sphere were conducted against the backdrop of intense debates about “strategic competition” between China and the United States of America in our region.1 As 2019 began, many volatile events lay on the immediate horizon for Australian foreign policy, but due focus on these events was interrupted by the election. This chronicle considers how nimble Australian diplomacy was able to be during the first half of 2019, with some broader implications for the transitional nature of Australian foreign policy. When the then foreign minister, Julie Bishop, commissioned the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, she noted it was designed to help Australian diplomacy be more proactive. She said: “[…] it's about looking at the kind of framework that needs to be in place so that we're not reacting to events, we're strategically positioned to manage, maybe even shape, events”.

ABSTRACTThe 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper emphasises the importance of ‘maximising’ Australia’s power and influence. However, the White Paper and much of the commentary on Australian foreign policy do not clearly conceptualise ‘power’ or indicate how it ought to be increased. The Lowy Institute’s recent Asia Power Index implies one possible strategy via its resource-based approach to measuring power. We outline a different approach and argue that power should be conceptualised and evaluated as a specific relationship causing behavioural change, rather than as a general attribute of its wielder. To complement the Lowy Institute’s carefully catalogued database, and facilitate a more focused conversation about maximising power and influence in Australian foreign policy, we offer a typology identifying five pathways through which states can translate their material and non-material resources into outcomes that serve the national interest.