It’s time Morrison paid a visit to India

A trip to India should be on the agenda for Acott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The Prime Minister should make two more overseas trips this year, or perhaps one with two parts. If US President Joe Biden keeps his promise to convene an in-person summit of the Quadrilateral Dialogue involving the US, Australia, India and Japan, then Scott Morrison will certainly attend.

The other trip Morrison should make is to New Delhi.

India has had a terrible year with Covid-19. Infections and deaths are down now. As a result of the pandemic, India has not been hosting foreign heads of government. Nor has its Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, been travelling overseas.

There is thus room for an imaginative, gutsy leader to make a serious gesture by being the first big-deal foreign leader to visit after the Covid crisis.

If Modi goes to a Quad summit in the US, perhaps Morrison could visit India on the way or go back to India with Modi after the meeting.

It was very smart for the Morrison government to send Tony Abbott to India recently as a special trade envoy. Abbott is a former prime minister who had an excellent personal relationship with Modi. Abbott met Modi on this visit and progressed Canberra’s ambition to get some kind of free trade agreement with India.

The Quad is now a key part of regional architecture, infused with new life by the Biden administration. It is designed to balance China.

Naturally, it must aim for more than that. Just balancing China, by itself, is too narrow, too negative.

Thus at the first virtual Quad summit in March the leaders agreed to produce and distribute a billion Covid vaccines, mainly for Southeast Asia. India’s troubles derailed that, but it’s back on track.

There are too many international institutions and a lot of them are form over substance. But the Quad came into existence as substance leading form, when the four nations responded rapidly, effectively and co-operatively to the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

Now all four nations find themselves under serious political challenge from Beijing. India has endured murderous border incidents with 20-odd of its soldiers killed by the Chinese military. Japan experiences repeated Chinese air incursions that force it to scramble its jets in response. The US for its part faces from the Chinese one of the biggest and most rapid military build-ups in history, all designed to make it impossible for the US to operate military assets, and thereby defend its allies, in the western Pacific.

Australia’s relations with China have never been worse than now and this remains a grave matter for Australia. It is, of course, possible that Beijing will at some point simply tire of abusing and punishing Australia, and flick the relationship switch to a different setting.

But the proportions of the problem should not be underestimated. Not only has Beijing blocked Australian exports in a range of products, it is actively seeking a long-term alternative to Australian iron ore. This will take some years for Beijing to achieve. But all this represents a significant change in our national circumstances.

More than that, the Chinese Communist Party is now overtly and routinely hostile to Australia and frequently condemns and attacks us politically. Outright, naked and outrageous threats of military attack against Australia appear now semi-routinely in Chinese media. And as The Australian reported this week, Australian territory is now directly within the range of Chinese long-range missiles, as well as a wide range of airborne and seaborne Chinese weapons.

It is not the primary subject of this column, but it is worth noting in passing the extreme idiocy of elements of our defence policy in our lack of response. We don’t get our high-capability assets for a dreadfully long time yet. Having chosen unbuilt and experimental frigates, we don’t get the first of those until 2033. And we don’t get the first of our subs until 2034.

It is now more than 18 months since we announced an initiative to build a missile construction facility in Australia and we haven’t even yet chosen an industry partner. We are spending $30bn on tanks and heavy armour that cannot possibly have any relevance to any China-centred scenario. We still do not possess an armed drone and have made no serious investment in the kind of swarming, asymmetric, unmanned vehicles that will increasingly define modern warfare.

It looks as though we believe we can have no military effect on our own military destiny.

Our national fuel reserve is, bizarrely, physically located in the US. And we don’t have a merchant cargo fleet so in an emergency there would be no ships for an Australian government to press into emergency service.

So at the military level, despite a higher budget, we have done little or nothing of consequence. This is a shocking indictment of all the governments after John Howard’s.

But that’s all a story for another day. In so far as we have responded to the China threat at all, it has taken three forms.

First, and most important, we are drawing the Americans as close as possible. That is the sum of our military policy. The Biden administration has done well in reassuring US Asian allies of US commitment, re-prioritising the alliance system and expressing solidarity with Australia.

Second, Canberra has strengthened Australia’s internal political resilience against foreign interference through legislation and limits on Chinese investment in critical infrastructure.

Third, we have responded diplomatically, seeking common cause with friends. The Quad is a central here. And India is a central part of the Quad.

India is a much smaller economy than China but it is, like China, a huge nation of global consequence destined to be a great power probably forever. Our relationship with it is necessarily asymmetric. We have to do clever things to get its attention. Yet we have never made even a tiny fraction of the effort with India that we made with China for 30 years. We do not even fund any serious study of India in our universities and the relationship has woefully lacked serious champions within Australian politics.

By going to India at this time, Morrison can make just such a historic gesture, almost certainly gain a free-trade agreement as a consequence, grab India’s attention and make a lasting difference for Australia.

Trade deals follow politics and the politics is right now if we have the wit to seize the moment. If it’s a choice between that trip to India and the climate wind-baggery of Glasgow later this year, it should be no choice at all.