Behold Abbott’s era-changing pivot to our Asian future

Tony Abbott is laying new foundations for Australia’s future.

THE pivotal plays in Tony Abbott’s foreign policy are with the big Asian powers — China, Japan and India — and not the US, despite Abbott’s pro-US disposition, commitment to Iraq and his effective working ties with President Barack Obama.

This trend, apparent for some time, was unmistakable this week. Abbott is laying new foundations for our Asian future likely to last for decades. While Australia enjoys a fully developed relationship with the US, there is greater untapped potential in emerging arrangements with China and India and still fresh opportunity with Japan.

Abbott grasps this and acts on an ancient law of politics — search for the big new breakthroughs. This is Abbott’s instinct and vision. He is not a leader for sophisticated strategic concepts. He is, instead, a man of action who believes in the power of personal relationships, picks the opportunities and has no truck for academic theorising about the contradictions in what he does.

It is extraordinary to think that no previous Australian prime minister has enjoyed such simultaneous close personal ties with the leaders of Japan and India, currently Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi respectively, while also striking an effective partnership with a Chinese president, now Xi Jinping.

Anybody who had ventured such predictions about Abbott two years ago would have been branded a lunatic. The key to much commentary about Abbott is that prejudices about him run so deep (often because of Abbott’s own failures) that people simply cannot commute what is happening before their eyes.

In one sense, Abbott merely follows the proven formula of John Howard — the simultaneous deepening of our Asian ties and our US alliance. This has become a deeply entrenched Liberal method of foreign policy.

Yet the irony was provided by Obama. When Abbott first met Obama in the White House this year, he came with a message: under my leadership Australia will assist America. For Abbott, such support was to be measured in deeds, not just words. He wanted to back the US and he did this in Iraq.

Abbott’s thanks came last weekend when Obama delivered his assault on Abbott over climate change. Issued on Australian soil, it was indulgent, unnecessary and gratuitous. The effect was to damage Abbott in political terms and assist his opponents.

Has any US president visiting this country ever spoken in such a fashion? No. Has any Australian PM visiting the US ever delivered such a domestic critique? No. This was not the action of a political friend. It was devoid of loyalty or respect for Abbott. This was Obama promoting himself at Abbott’s expense and Labor loved it. It is an insight into the reasons for the hostility towards Obama in the US political system.

The optics were amusing: suddenly the Abbott government felt compelled to promote Australia’s climate change performance, based, of course, on the Liberal-Labor bipartisan 5 per cent emission reduction target by 2020, a target roughly comparable with other nations including the US.

But the broader lesson this week was the absence of any Abbott government communications strategy about such transforming events. Can you imagine how an energised Paul Keating would have sold the world’s best free trade agreement with China and the inauguration of a new love-in partnership with India?

Keating would have commanded the media. He would have won vast newspaper applause for days while the ABC would have conducted endless radio and television homilies to his genius and our new vistas in Asia.

The Abbott government, by contrast, lives in an outdated media capsule where it seems to think results speak for themselves (an obsolete idea to which Abbott is deeply attached) and where, in an age shaped by gesture and fashion, it is unable to explain either itself or its successes.

The week revealed Abbott as a champion of hard power diplomacy yet defective at soft power. Asian economic engagement is about long-run dividends. But the public is hooked on short-run returns. Only an adroit political persuader can convert such hard power gains into immediate electoral returns.

In subsequent years, this week will be hailed as a transformative moment in Australia’s future. Xi called for a deeper and broader Australia-China partnership and put a path-breaking FTA on the table. Modi has publicly recanted India’s past indifference to this country and declared Australia as a “major partner in every area of our national priority.”

Asia is seeing Australia in a different way. This will complicate our national life yet create more opportunity. Our perspective will expand from east Asia into the Indo-Pacific as Western Australia grows its Indian Ocean consciousness.

Geography, resources, agriculture and first-world services drive the region’s re-assessment of Australia. Xi is playing a long-run strategy with Australia. For India, the Australian game is in its infancy. “India will be the answer to your search for new economic opportunities,” Modi told the parliament. Once this would have been a joke: India as the answer!

For decades, India has treated Australia with patronising indifference, modified over the past decade as mutual interest began to assume serious dimensions. “It has taken a prime minister of India 28 years to come to Australia,” Modi said. “It should never have been so and this will change.”

When Howard visited India in March 2006, his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh told him: “We have a lot in common but we have not had much to do with each other.” And Singh didn’t visit Australia during his long stint as PM. Modi is a different commodity.

The Lowy Institute’s Rory Medcalf told Inquirer: “There will still be frustrations but Modi is the first Indian leader who really gets what Australia is about. And despite the relatively modest scale of India’s economy and military budget alongside that of China, India is the one great power with vast prospects for growth. Barring ­catastrophe, it will be one of the three big economies and strategic powers by mid-century. Becoming a priority partner for Delhi is a major investment in our future.”

Abbott was his first state guest in India after Modi became PM. Now Modi has visited Australia, agreed with Abbott there should be a bilateral free trade deal and addressed the Australian parliament. In his introduction, Abbott said of the proposed FTA: “There are two can-do prime ministers in this chamber today and we will make it happen.”

Michael Wesley from the ANU’s School of International, Political and Strategic Studies told Inquirer: “I think Modi is an Obama-type figure for India. There is much hope invested in what he can do. His speech to the parliament was remarkable. If you shut your eyes and blocked out the accent, it was an American speech radiating a new brand of Indian confidence. I believe this is a turning point.”

Abbott draws a comparison between his “open for business” mantra about Australia and Modi’s invitation to “come, make in India”. India has been the second fastest growing economy after China — and it will have a lot further to run.

Three factors have transformed Australia-India prospects: the era of Indian economic reform starting in 1991; the new strategic concord between India; and the US’s and Australia’s decision to begin selling uranium to India. “The economic relationship has begun to bloom,” Wesley says. “We are now the sixth largest source of imports into India. We are providing two important commodities — energy and gold.”

It is the resources trade that gives relations a more tangible meaning. Every sign is this trade will expand. Coal, gas and uranium will be front and centre. Modi was explicit: he wants Australia involved in education, energy and power, health services and infrastructure.

The symbolic turn came when Howard decided to change Australian policy and sell uranium to India even though it was not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a stance that alarmed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and infuriated the Left. It was Howard who laid the basis for change. The Rudd government then refused to give effect to the policy. The green light was given only belatedly by the Gillard government.

The final element in the equation was George W. Bush’s opening to India that saw the burying of its pro-Soviet stance during the Cold War when it had poor relations with the US for half a century.

Abbott and Modi have agreed to a strategic partnership in defence, counter-terrorism, cyber policy and maritime security with regular naval and military exercises. A new Australian-Indian Gallipoli narrative is being lauded. It is vital, however, to realise that India is always a stop-start story. It has its own ways and its own pace.