Tony Abbott pushes vision for closer India ties

Tony Abbott maps out a vision of India as a superpower not as politically overbearing as China.

Tony Abbott at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on Sunday. Picture: AFP

Tony Abbott has declared India “could be the next China” economically and Australia should help create a new democratic ­global superpower that would not be as politically overbearing as communist China.

In a speech on a free and open Indo-Pacific in New Delhi on Monday, the former prime minister mapped out a vision of India as a democratic superpower alongside the US, and creating a world “more free, more open, more prosperous and ultimately fairer to everyone”.

He said policymakers had ­neglected engagement with India by putting “too many eggs into the China basket”, and said it must be easier for Australia to ­develop a “deep commitment” across the board with India than with Beijing.

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He blamed years of “intermittent official drive”, benign neglect and a “passion for China” for the Australia-India relationship not being better developed.

Mr Abbott said the way to a free, open and prosperous Indo-Pacific was for the four great ­democracies in the region — the US, India, Japan and Australia — to co-operate. The relationship with Beijing was difficult, he said, because of China’s overbearing attitudes and actions over Hong Kong and Taiwan.

He said it was hard to see relations with Beijing rising much above the level of a “cold peace” in the short term and criticised its “confected territorial claims”.

Mr Abbott said there was an official view in Australia that India “was not the next China” but that was not what he believed.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott pays his respect at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

“Why would anyone, especially such a friend of India, be so sure India won’t be the next China, economically?’’ he said.

“Why should Australian officials think that what one country of a billion people could achieve under the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible in another that has the blessings of democracy, the rule of law and the Eng­lish language? Unless, of course, they’re closet admirers of a ­command-market economy, regard the Chinese as somehow ­superior to everyone else, or don’t want to admit that Australia might have put too many eggs into the China basket.”

Mr Abbott said as prime minister he was pleased to have ­revived the four-way security talks between Australia, India, Japan and the US and he hoped stalled free-trade agreement talks with India might be revived when Scott Morrison visited India next year. He was also proud of having finalised trade and security agreements with China and wanted the trade relationship with China to continue to grow.

Mr Abbott said given the fast growth of China in economic and trade terms, there was no reason such growth could not occur for India in the coming years.

“In 40 years, India’s GDP has more than quadrupled; it’s the world’s fastest-growing big economy for the past five years; and more than 500 million Indians have uncensored, unmonitored smartphones connecting them to the formal market economy.’’

He said advancing the “great goal” of a free and open Indo-­Pacific would require a deepening of the “partnership between the Indo-Pacific’s longest-standing democracies’’.

“A partnership between democracies such as India and Australia should be far easier to build than one between Australia (say) and a one-party communist state like China. Perhaps this is why the relationship between Australia and India, until recently, has largely been taken for granted.”