Leadership changes in Australia after the first Kevin Rudd government have been a product of the very narrow balance in Australia’s Parliament for most of the decade. That has delivered power to dissidents within the governing party of the time and has enabled them to challenge, destabilise and ultimately overthrow their leadership.
The Turnbull government held only a one seat majority in the Parliament. Turnbull could have called the bluff of opponents in his own party by going to the national polls on a major issue if they vetoed his policies by threatening to cross the parliamentary floor. But his timidity to do so was ultimately his downfall.
In our lead essay this week, James Curran observes that ‘the toxic cocktail of ego, impatience and poisonous ideological rivalry has consumed both sides of politics and swung its own wrecking ball through a swathe of much-needed domestic reforms and been a serious drag on the development of foreign policy strategy’.
But with national policy stymied at every turn, outside observers reasonably ask: why has Australia seemed to do so well?
Last week, Australia recorded another stellar quarter in 27 years of uninterrupted economic growth. This economic success has been built upon reform and putting in place sound policy settings. The core elements of those reforms were put in place decades ago and have held firm to deliver robust outcomes since then. Economic success has only a little to do with luck, and much more to do with the strong, courageous leadership of previous generations of political leaders and current policy advisors who have so far held firm on sound policy settings.
In foreign policy, which broadly remains a bipartisan area of policy development and initiative, incremental professional policy advice has thus far served the country well and has burnished the reputations of a succession of foreign ministers who somehow appear a little less distinguished once out of office.
But what comes next?
Business-as-usual policy strategies, on major national policy issues such as energy, climate change, comprehensive tax reform or migration and in foreign policy will no longer suffice when the world has changed so fundamentally.
John Hewson, a former leader of the national parliamentary Liberal Party declares bluntly that, ‘rather than being able to “lead” in the region, on so many fronts recent politics has seriously damaged Australia’s regional reputation for political stability’.
Political stabilisation and the resumption of policy reform is now essential not only to the continuation of Australia’s economic policy success but also to dealing strategically with its stark foreign policy challenges: it has an unreliable ally in Trump’s America, and emerging powers in the region, like China, which still lack the credentials or capacity to assume a stabilising role.
Getting foreign policy right at this point in world diplomatic history has never been more difficult.
The economic growth that has come with globalisation has changed the international balance of power. The United States, which has been the dominant power in the Asia Pacific region since World War II is now challenged by the rise of China. The world is more interconnected than at any other time before. New technologies as well as the transmission of know-how and scientific knowledge lifts opportunities and prosperity at the same time as it spawns political alienation and the reach of non-state actors who would do us harm. Risks to the global commons demand collective action. These are the big challenges that Australia now confronts. And while the last government commissioned a Foreign Policy White Paper to think through these issues, the country’s leadership has been out to play, immersed in self-indulgence, as they demand urgent attention. Plan A — winging it with Trump — is clearly no longer a viable option.
The Australian government and bureaucracy, who have been so closely entwined with the United States in the past, are alarmed by the decline of US power and influence and by Trump’s discarding the conventions of the international economic order. He has abandoned the rules-based system — commitment to the WTO, the TPP, NAFTA, the Paris Climate Accord — on which the world has depended to bring order to the global system.
But Plan B is waiting to be articulated.
Curran makes the point that ‘Australia has endured previous bouts of political instability. From the January 1966 retirement of Robert Menzies until the December 1972 election of the Whitlam Labor Party government, three prime ministers in relatively quick succession — Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon — all wrestled with the challenges of a rapidly changing international environment. Though this period is often dismissed as one of “dither” in Australian foreign and defence policy, these leaders encountered the virtual collapse of Australia’s Cold War policy — namely the desire to keep the United States and the United Kingdom engaged in Southeast Asia’.
Today’s challenges are in a league of their own. Yet the political turmoil which engulfed the post-Menzies Liberal Party left virtually no time for its leaders to revise their fixed Cold War assumptions. ‘They had the inclination neither to think anew about China nor to reassess their fears about the “red peril”, and as a consequence they missed the signs coming out of Washington in the mid-1960s that the United States’ China policy was to undergo a profound metamorphosis. The result was paralysis and flat-footed diplomacy’.
Curran, perhaps a mite too sanguinely, suggests that Australia is likely to keep its balance in a period of strategic policy immobilisation, but the great tragedy of a revolving prime ministerial door is that it once more delays the task of coming to terms with the scale of the geopolitical transition taking place in Australia’s backyard and the wider world.
The speed with which Trump is set on dismantling the global institutions that protect our economic and political security in Asia means that strategic policy inaction today will bear a high cost in terms of prosperity and stability tomorrow.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.