Four cheers for the Quad squad

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue meeting in Melbourne on Friday – bringing together Foreign Minister Marise Payne and her counterparts from the US, Japan and India – is not only a powerful symbol of the rapidly growing importance of this grouping but a stark reminder of how much is at stake in the Indo-Pacific region. China and Russia are forming an ever closer partnership, marketing authoritarianism and coercion, when the enduring interests of nations across the region demand a revival of open co-operation within the beleaguered rules-based order that was a legacy of global war and bipolar ideological tension.

The Quad is not a formal security alliance, but the troubling deterioration in the strategic outlook for the region inevitably gives a strategic and security dimension to the deliberations of its members. More broadly the Quad stands for universal values of democracy and an open society at a time when Vladimir Putin and his comrade Xi Jinping boast that their particular, often xenophobic, nationalism is demonstrably more successful than the dysfunctional model of the West.

Technology is a key area of co-operation within the Quad and a focal point for potentially destabilising conflict with the cyber soldiers of China and Russia. It’s unfortunate but necessary that the Quad gives close attention to technical standards – for 5G, for example, and artificial intelligence – to better protect the infrastructure of our democracies and markets from cyber subversion. The Quad also has lent vital support to Australia’s case before the World Trade Organisation in protest against China’s misuse of trade to punish and weaken our sovereign pursuit of national interests.

In the same way, Australia must decide on the merits its stance on the question, sensitive to Beijing, of whether Taiwan ought to be allowed to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact. On Thursday, a bipartisan committee of our federal parliament recommended that Australia support Taiwan’s entry to the CPTPP and simultaneously consider a bilateral trade agreement with Taipei.

By contrast, the committee report opposed any talk of China joining the CPTPP until it shows a willingness to abide by global trading rules. This advice is fair and principled. Taiwan is a robust democracy and a vibrant market economy (with a strength in semiconductors of interest to the Quad). China’s weaponising of trade barriers must not be rewarded.