Julia Gillard is not the first Australian Prime Minister to come to office with no experience of or interest in international relations. Unlike most, however, she appears disturbingly reluctant to learn.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with a Prime Minister admitting that she has no particular passion for foreign affairs, limited interest doesn’t excuse a lack of competence.
Sadly, Prime Minister Gillard’s performance to date has been marred by a series of embarrassing incidents, of which the obsequious performance before the United States Congress and her persistence with the refugee processing centre in Timor Leste against the manifest objections of Timor Leste’s government are just the most recent examples.
Bendan Brown argues on The Punch today that Ms Gillard’s lack of interest in the outside world is a personality trait worthy of some admiration. The same article suggests that prime ministers have little or no ability to advance their country’s interests abroad, that diplomacy is largely a waste of time, and that the real business of international relations is purely about money and as such is better left to captains of industry than to prime ministers or “government elites”.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree.
The suggestion that politicians and diplomats have no role to play in fostering trade would be far more persuasive if governments around the world did not spend a great deal of time and energy intervening in markets, often corrupting them through things like protectionism.
While it might be preferable for people to be free to get on with the job of creating wealth unhindered by any sort of political impediment, sadly that’s not the way the world works. As things stand, the kind of government intervention which would indeed be undesirable in a domestic economy is a necessary evil in the global one.
Furthermore, trade is no longer strictly a function of trading organisations. If it were, the likes of the British East India Company would still be in existence. While the Company was unquestionably a great commercial success for much of its time, its business model, and the way in which it interacted with the governments and local communities of its trading partners, were hardly in accord with what today we might call “best practice”.
In the global economy of the 21st century, governments have an important role to play in setting the parameters within which international trade takes place. The absence of such a framework tends to result in predatory business practices, graft, corruption and on occasion, the wholesale exploitation of weaker trading partners.
But back to Ms Gillard. It is ludicrous to argue that a prime minister ought to focus exclusively on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy, as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive. The enduring embarrassment of the Timor Leste debacle ought to be example enough of the overlap between domestic and international politics – the ‘domestication of foreign policy’ as one of my teachers once put it.
Alternatively, we might usefully recall the diplomatic fracas that erupted after the former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s typically caustic description of the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad as a “recalcitrant”.
Deeply offended, the Malaysian leader threatened to sever diplomatic ties with Australia and the Malaysian Consumer Affairs Ministry actively considered implementing a boycott of Australian goods unless Keating apologised, something he subsequently did. Unpalatable as the idea may be, prime ministerial gaffes have the capacity not just to embarrass, but to harm and undermine the national interest.
Meanwhile, to argue that international relations is about economics and nothing more is to suggest that things like state tyranny, international terrorism, the protection of Australian citizens overseas and the development needs of the third world are trifling matters to which our elected head of government should pay no real attention.
Needless to say, this kind of mercantile myopia is somewhere between heartless and absurd. As well as demonstrating a profound ignorance of the role diplomacy plays in opening new markets, it betrays a cavalier disregard for national security and a callous indifference to the fate of the world’s wretched and downtrodden.
It also disregards the role strong inter-governmental relationships play in combating vile practices like human trafficking, drug smuggling and sex tourism, not to mention the absolute obscenity of child pornography.
Over the years, a number of Australian prime ministers have had great success in enhancing Australia’s standing within the international community. On current indications, Julia Gillard seems unlikely to be one of them. Indeed, there is more than a little irony in the fact that the Prime Minister’s faint footprints on the world stage are likely to be completely obliterated by the steel tagged size tens of a rampaging Rudd.
Speaking of the Foreign Minister, it is worth briefly addressing the perilous financial position of his department. As well as Australia having one of the lowest rates of diplomatic representation in the OECD, some insiders claim the funding levels for DFAT are scarcely adequate to sustain its core responsibilities, including provision of the most basic of consular services.
Unless you’re the type of person who considers the provision of consular assistance to be a “pointless practice”, this should be cause for concern.
Every year more and more Australians travel overseas. Of the six million or so who ventured abroad last year, approximately 30,000 required consular assistance of some kind. The demand is only going to increase in both volume and complexity. Yet there are still those who would argue that DFAT is ripe for further budget cuts. Hopefully the Government is not foolish enough to listen to them.
As a Liberal, I am generally of the opinion that there are few things government can do that cannot not be done better by relying on the enterprise of the private sector. International relations, however, happens to be one of the exceptions.
The national interest is not something that can be measured purely in dollars. It’s about our security just as much as it is about our wealth and as such Australians have every right to expect their elected head of government to show it more than a passing interest.
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