Chris Bowen falls flat on Asian engagement

Frances Adamson, the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is a diplomatic kind of diplomat. Hard-headed, tough in her way, she is nonetheless as perfectly polite and as committed to good bilateral relations with our big partners as any head of DFAT could be.

Which makes her at times blunt speech to the Confucius Institute at the University of Adelaide this week important. In a response to the growth of untoward Chinese government interference she laid out some direct messages. The 200,000 Chinese students in Australia are entirely welcome. It is wonderful to have them. But some of them are clearly subject to manipulation by Beijing.

Adamson told Australian universities to “remain true” to their educational values.

She told Chinese students not to “blindly condemn” ideas they disagreed with, by which she meant things that contradicted official Chinese policy, and instructed them to “respectfully engage” with argu­ments. In a clarion call, she declared: “The silencing of anyone in our society … is an affront to our values.” She also said China could expect to experience “more scrutiny”, including of “the ways in which it seeks to exercise influence internationally”.

Adamson’s speech has to be seen as a strategic communication. Put it alongside new laws to limit foreign influence in our political system, and well-sourced reports of Chinese cyber espionage and intrusions into Australian defence and commercial secrets, and the government is telling the community some hard truths about Beijing’s improper attempts to influence our politics.

Communicating such a message is serious business and requires balance. The Turnbull government, like all Australian governments, wants a good and productive relationship with Beijing. It also wants to safeguard the integrity of Australian politics and institutions and not sacrifice any of our national interests.

The government deserves high marks for the balanced, sober and realistic messages it has communicated on these issues.

A rather weird contrast was provided by opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen’s recent big speech on Asian engagement, which has won almost universal praise. If this dreadful Meccano set of cliches and platitudes is the best Bowen can come up with after four years of alleged serious deliberation on the matter, and if it is indeed enough to earn plaudits all round, our debate truly is in a dismal state of disrepair.

Bowen offers the scintillating insight that Australia should engage more with Asia. Wow! There’s a breathless revelation. But he includes not one speck of the complexity the subject demands nor does he make one serious recommendation. Instead the speech is almost a museum piece of tired tropes trotted out regularly but meaninglessly over the past 30 years and more.

At times it seems Bowen has scooped something out of the wrong bag of cliches. He comments, for example: “We pat ourselves on the back that we are close to Asia and therefore understand it, ignoring the fact that Berlin, for example, is closer to Beijing than Sydney is.”

This venerable rhetorical chestnut is more often used by people arguing that Asia should be no more important for us than other regions. In any event, in itself it is a stupid factoid that offers no insight into anything. Is Sydney the whole of Australia? You may as well argue that because New York is farther from Hawaii than Mexico, the US is not a Pacific power. At low tide you can walk from northern Australia to Southeast Asia. You can’t walk from Berlin to Southeast Asia.

The whole of Bowen’s speech is pitched at a level of such irredeemable banality that if anyone in the region should read it, they will conclude that Australian politicians really do know as little of Asia as Bowen claims.

He makes a song and dance about our lack of Asian language teaching. I often make a song and dance about this myself. He does not acknowledge, however, that Julia Gillard’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper committed to remedying this but provided no resources for the task.

I once asked the former PM about this on television. How would she remedy the shocking shortage of Asian language teachers? She replied that with the NBN you wouldn’t need so many individual teachers as languages could be taught remotely. This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland Asian engagement. It has no perch on reality. The utterly minuscule amounts of money Bowen does commit to any of these projects are meaningless.

His boast of recently learning Indonesian himself is little more than a party trick. As treasurer he will never deal with an Indonesian policymaker whose English is worse than his Indonesian. Studying Indonesian politics and economics would be much more use. And he boasts that as Treasury spokesman all his overseas visits have been to Asia — as though New York, London and Berlin are suddenly irrelevant. This is undergraduate tokenism that suggests not seriousness of purpose but feebleness of intellect.

Similarly, Bowen does not acknowledge that the Rudd and Gillard governments continuously cut our diplomatic budget. We are wildly outspent in cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia by numerous European nations. Blah blah about Asian engagement, without specifics and resources, takes the debate back to about 1980.

Needless to say, Bowen’s speech contains not one speck of the sense of complex trade-offs and paradoxical challenges that infused Adamson’s speech, and which inform the much better speeches of his colleague Penny Wong.

When he does make specific recommendations, Bowen is dire. He actually wants more regional ministerial meetings. If anyone in Southeast Asia hears that he will never get a visa to an ASEAN country again.

He suggests, or seems to suggest in dubiously vague paragraphs, that Canberra formally sign up to China’s One Belt, One Road infrastructure initiative, but then seems to reaffirm existing policy by saying each proposal would be considered on its merits. Canberra, while welcoming Chinese investment — which has increased spectacularly in recent years — has declined to formally sign on to the initiative because of the geostrategic and political baggage it carries.

Bowen’s sentences are so woolly it’s impossible to know whether he is really proposing a change of policy or not. If he is, he should address the issue in substance, not try a too-clever-by-half semi-striptease on such an important matter.

Australia needs, and is in the process of having, a mature, sophisticated China debate. Until I read this speech I thought of Bowen as one of Labor’s better policy people. In office, supported by the bureaucracy, Labor will surely do better than this.