AUSTRALIA DRIFTS, WITH NO GUIDING STAR / THE NEW YORK TIMES OP EDITORIAL ( RECOMMENDED READING )

August 9, 2010

Australia Drifts, With No Guiding Star

By JACOB RAMSAY

In easygoing Australia, the overwhelming focus on pedestrian domestic issues at election time is excusable. But the absence of genuine debate on foreign policy, trade or regional security has been alarming. With less than two weeks before election day, the Labor leader Julia Gillard, who became prime minister in June, and the conservative opposition leader, Tony Abbott, have set Australia on course for the foreign policy doldrums.

Over the past 20 years, Australia has capitalized enormously on economic ties with China while simultaneously strengthening its security ties with the United States. But during the last two years under Ms. Gillard’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd, the country has stalled.

Mr. Rudd launched the idea of a security-focused Asian community forum and pledged Australia to a tough climate-change regime. But these initiatives were quickly wrecked by an unseemly media outburst of criticism against China, gratuitous trampling of relations with Tokyo, and Mr. Rudd’s infamous reneging on a carbon emissions scheme.

Mr. Rudd inflated Australia’s international profile, then left it hollow. Either Ms. Gillard or Mr. Abbott will inherit this foreign policy vacuum. But they do not have the expertise in Parliament to make up for the deficit. Indeed, at no point in the last 30 years or more have two would-be leaders appeared so ill-experienced. Both are ill-equipped for the job of cultivating regional relationships to further the national interest.

The dangers are mostly subtle ones — ranging from undermining Australian business in some of the region’s most exciting emerging markets to allowing an erosion of influence on regional security. As an Anglo-European oddity in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia has no shortage of detractors who exclude it from regional forums on account of its perceived incompatibility due to its “Western values,” or because of its close military ties to the United States.

Despite ample opportunity, neither Ms. Gillard nor Mr. Abbott has outlined their diplomatic credentials or their view of where Australia fits in the regional mosaic. Debate has focused on the emotionally charged domestic issue of processing illegal boat arrivals in East Timor and Nauru.

Both candidates have projected the issue through the distorting prism of an immigration debate, which presumes Australia’s capacity to absorb new migrants should also be the problem of the region’s weakest states. At the same time both parties have dodged questions about Afghanistan: Neither has had the courage to argue for either a troop withdrawal or an increased deployment of forces.

Perhaps most astounding is that neither has articulated how they see the all-important U.S. alliance in relation to the country’s still evolving, economically-driven relationship with China. Ms. Gillard is bargaining on being able to fall back on the expertise of her predecessor, with Mr. Rudd likely moving into the foreign affairs portfolio. Mr. Abbott, meanwhile, asserts in his recent book “Battlelines” that even if China becomes stronger “this may not mean much for Australia’s international relationships or foreign policy priorities.”

How would Japan, India and Australia’s other important allies in Asia interpret such a comment? Washington’s policymakers must be baffled. How the relationships of these countries with China will change in the years to come will be crucial to Australia. The deficit of insight is astounding. Yet it comes as the U.S. seeks to reaffirm its security role in Northeast Asia, while offering to engage as broker between China and Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines in their disputed claims in the South China Sea.

At least since the 1970s, candidates for prime minister have been able to articulate how Australia will manage its Western alliances. John Howard, for instance, came to power in 1996 seeing Australia as an outsider in Asia, but famously recanted that view in 2006. While such statements of intent won’t win votes, they help anchor the significant business and people-to-people ties forged through trade deals and the flow of migration since the 1960s.

It is owing to such ties that Australia has become able to leverage influence in the region, whether on human rights or in efforts to fight international crime.

Australia’s subtle influence as a middle-strength power relies on maintaining key relationships that are dutifully cultivated. But already becalmed and without a guiding star, Australia under Ms. Gillard or Mr. Abbott will simply be left by its neighbors to drift.

Jacob Ramsay is a senior analyst at an independent risk consulting firm.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 10, 2010

An earlier version of this article misstated aspects of the debate in Australia over immigration. Illegal immigrants arriving on boats from countries in Southeast Asia are now processed in Australia, but the current government and opposition are hoping to send them either to East Timor or Nauru for processing.