The Sir Thomas Playford Memorial Lecture

23 August 2007, University of Adelaide

Labor's Little Australia

Introduction

Thank-you Chris Browne; Tracy Marsh, Liberal Candidate for Adelaide; Fellow Liberals; Ladies and Gentlemen.

When I last had the opportunity to present the Sir Thomas Playford Lecture - back in 2003 - I reflected on the role of churches and religious leaders within our political system. The central point I made at that time was that some Australian church leaders had neglected their primary pastoral obligations in favour of grandstanding on complex secular issues in which they have little or no experience. In many cases they had assumed for themselves the role of amateur commentators and critics of political players - most commonly the Howard Government - and in some cases they had ventured beyond the role of commentary to become political activists.

Those comments provoked a range of reaction - and, ironically, not a small amount of criticism - from some church leaders. Today I intend to leave the churches alone - in the somewhat forlorn hope that they might reciprocate - and focus instead on a subject that is, in many ways, the diametric opposite.

Rather than dealing with an institution that regularly over-reaches its station, I would instead like to talk about an institution that continually seeks the timid course in public life. An organisation that never adopts a bold stance when a cowardly and introspective position is available. I refer to the Australian Labor Party.

And while timidity and policy cowardice are apparent right across Federal Labor at the moment, I intend to deal with its foreign policy, and specifically with Labor's perennial belief that Australia is merely a bit player in global affairs, and must not seek to wield any genuine influence on the world stage. This is a view that the Labor Party has carried through generations of federal leaders and through countless iterations of its foreign policy platform.

I call it Labor's "Little Australia" policy, and it has never been more rampant than it is in the political left today.

In order to properly examine this ideology of retreat, we first need to consider Australia's true standing in the world today, and how we have developed our bilateral relationships in order to positively influence a range of important international issues.

A Significant Country

Australia, by any measure, is a significant country. We are the world's sixth largest country by land mass. We have the 13th largest economy - and the 10th largest industrialised economy. In per capita terms we are the 8th most wealthy nation in the world. In population terms, we are in the top 25 percent of around 200 countries on the globe. We are the world's sixth oldest continuous democracy, and this is underpinned by institutions that have become templates for developing nations.

We have 10 per cent of the world's biodiversity. Our armed forces are significant in both a regional and a global sense. Our military expenditure is the 12th largest in the world and the 4th largest in Asia. We have fought with Honour and Distinction in the great struggles for freedom across the last century.

Australia has internationally significant scientists, inventors, doctors, writers, musicians, actors, businesspeople and artists. And we are all familiar with Australia's extraordinary successes on various sporting fields. They are too numerous for me to go into here.

Many of these Australian achievements will be known to you already, but I mention them because they underline a very important point. Australia genuinely is a significant country. We should not be surprised by the contribution we make in any field of international endeavour.

That includes the field of foreign policy.

A Significant Foreign Policy

Over the last 11½ years, Australia has enjoyed stability, success and influence in international diplomacy on a scale not previous experienced. Throughout our time in office, the Coalition's approach to international affairs has been characterised by realistic, clear-eyed assessment of how the world works, and Australia's place in the international system. At the heart of our foreign policy has always been what matters to Australia; our national interest - the security and prosperity of our people.

We have shown significant leadership on difficult issues in our region - including our successful response to the East Asian financial crisis, combating terrorism and our military deployments to East Timor and Solomon Islands.

We have significantly strengthened ties with our regional neighbours. This strengthening has occurred at both the multilateral level - as evidenced by our admission to membership of the East Asia Summit - and at the bilateral level, as the completion of the Lombok Treaty with Indonesia demonstrates.

On a range of measures, including investment, trade, counter-terrorism, development cooperation and combating people smuggling and organised crime, Australia has never been closer to its Asian neighbours than it is today. Ties to Japan have never been stronger, with our former war-time enemies now cooperating with us on security matters - a point neatly illustrated by our protection of Japanese forces in Iraq.

We have forged a strong relationship with China. We have, as I mentioned, negotiated the Lombok Treaty which formalises our myriad cooperative ties with Indonesia.

Yet we also recognise that are interests are global - they are not defined solely by geography. While we are located in the Asia Pacific region, we have maintained close affinities with North America and Europe, and sought to expand developing relationships such as that with India.

And of course, we have stood shoulder to shoulder with our most important ally, the United States, in the fight against terrorism - in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in South East Asia.

Our strengthening of the US alliance brings considerable direct benefit to Australia, and translates to extra diplomatic weight and influence in our region. The sum of these key relationships is unprecedented global standing and influence for Australia.

The true measure, however, of foreign policy success is not how many strong relationships you have or what influence you might exercise in theory. Rather, it is how you build on those relationships to achieve tangible outcomes in areas such as trade, security, regional development and climate change.

The Coalition Government has used our strengthened web of regional and global relationships to further Australia's interests in all of these areas. Perhaps one of the most obvious outcomes has been the creation of new trade and investment links with many of the world's most dynamic economies.

While a successful outcome to the Doha round of the World Trade Organization remains a top priority, the Coalition Government has worked hard to ensure Australia will not be left isolated in the event that there is no breakthrough in WTO talks. We now have free trade agreements with four of our top 10 export destinations - the United States, Thailand, Singapore and New Zealand - and we are actively pursuing others with China, Japan and Korea. And just this month, Federal Cabinet agreed to begin discussions on a possible FTA with India.

While this pursuit of our national interest has drawn criticism from the political left - which says we should place all our eggs in the multilateral basket - it has also delivered significant economic gains for Australia.

When the Coalition was elected in 1996, Australia's exports were worth $101 billion. Ten years later, they had more than doubled to $210 billion. One in five jobs in Australia, and a similar proportion of our GDP, now comes from exports. As I said, these are the most obvious results of our increased regional and global standing. We have, however, achieved significant outcomes in a range of other, equally significant areas.

In security and counter-terrorism, our close ties with our neighbours and with the United States have led to unprecedented levels of cooperation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the involvement of Australian Federal Police in the investigation of terrorist bombings in Indonesia, and in the joint pursuit of Jemaah Islamiyah. We have also used our strong friendship with Indonesia to forge a new partnership to counter people smuggling and organised crime.

We have worked with regional partners such as Japan to deliver comprehensive responses to natural disasters, including the Asian tsunami, and to other major events, such as the Asian economic crisis.

Australia has been a major player in global efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons technology, through our involvement in the Proliferation Security Initiative and through our strong support for the six party talks on North Korea.

And we have engaged with the major countries of our region in an approach to combating climate change that will deliver genuine results, rather than empty rhetoric. Instead of obsessing with the flawed Kyoto protocol, as our opponents do, the Government is driving a broader agenda and leading global efforts to build a genuine long-term solution to greenhouse emissions.

The Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate has brought together the United States, Japan, China, India and South Korea to address this important issue. These nations together account for half the world's population, half its GDP and half its greenhouse emissions. Together, we are tackling the twin challenges of reducing emissions while striving to lift the citizens of developing countries out of poverty. Equally importantly, AP-6 has brought business groups to the table for the first time.

Australia has also invested $200 million in leading the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate, which aims to protect the world's forests, reduce illegal logging and support new planting. We are doing this in close cooperation with Indonesia, which has 10 per cent of the world's forests. Deforestation accounts for around 20 per cent of CO2 emissions annually, so this Australian initiative has the potential to make a very real contribution to combating climate change.

We have also agreed to cooperate with China on the development of clean coal technology. Given that Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal and China is the world's largest consumer, we have a lot to offer the world by working together in this area.

Just recently, as part of a series of far-reaching initiatives to boost our relationship with the emerging powerhouse of India, the Government has decided to allow the export of uranium to India - subject to appropriate safeguards. A key element of this decision is the reality that civil nuclear power in India is set to play a major role in mitigating the climate change effects of India's rapid and massive development.

These various indicatives - from free trade agreements to climate change - underline the value of our bilateral relationships - and how Australia networks these to work in our interests. They are the product of our confident and genuine engagement with our region, and with the major powers of the world.

Without the backing of those crucial bilateral relationships, which have been constantly strengthened and nurtured over the last 11½ years, we would simply be unable to deliver these positive outcomes for Australia and indeed for our region.

Labor's Little Australia

In stark contrast to this confident world view developed under the Coalition, the Labor Party in 2007 is offering voters a timid and confused foreign policy alternative.

While it will try to claim it generally follows the policy positions set down by the Coalition - as it has done across a range of other policy areas - the Labor Party would, in fact, retreat from our current position of prominence and influence on the world stage.

Labor has already signalled its intention to downgrade the US alliance, to reduce our bilateral cooperation and to outsource much of our foreign policy decision making to the United Nations. Nothing could be more short-sighted: the United States plays a role in almost every issue of significance for Australia. Our influence with the United States ensures it plays in our interests, not against us. Without it we can do less for Australia. Australia would be less. Labor embraces - no urges - this sort of shrinkage. We emphatically reject it: think big.

To be fair to the current crop of Labor policy makers, this is not entirely their doing. They have inherited a position that has been developed over decades of careful and calculated Labor Party reticence, parsing and non-engagement with the world.

In fact, the origins of 'Little Australia' can be traced to the Curtin Opposition which chose, in 1935, to turn a blind eye to Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. At a time when a strong bipartisan stance was required, Labor opted instead to placate the international socialists, pacifists and anti-conscriptionists within its ranks.

Curtin declared that Labor would not support sanctions, and that "the control of Abyssinia by any country is not worth the loss of a single Australian life". He said: "Australia is but a minor power; it is a small nation, remote from the great centres of international civilisation … we must have regard to our position, to our circumstances, to the place we hold in the geography of the world and to what we are capable of doing towards the maintenance of the peace of the world"

Even as late as the Munich crisis of September 1938, Curtin persisted with a policy of isolationism and failed to acknowledge the threat posed by Nazism. And so began the now very familiar Labor Party narrative that Australia is just a small nation, which cannot and should not seek a significant role internationally.

Curtin did in many respects redeem himself as a wartime Prime Minister. But no thanks to his comrades in the trade union movement. The little-told story of how Leftist union militants sought to sabotage the war effort , undermining both Curtin and the national interest, provides a salutary lesson on the fickle attitudes of some on the Left towards Australia's security.

After the Curtin Government came to power in October, 1941, Australia lost around 4 million working days to strikes through until war's end. Many strikes occurred during the darkest days when it was thought Australia was under threat of imminent invasion. As the author, Hal Colebatch, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on Anzac Day this year, the battle of Milne Bay was fought without heavy guns because waterside workers refused to load them unless paid five times the standard hourly rate.

Shipbuilding of frigates and destroyers was cancelled or postponed. Australian forces in New Guinea and other islands were plagued by shortages of food and ammunition, because of constant strikes at home. A strike at the end of the war prevented the British aircraft-carrier HMS Speaker from berthing in an Australian port. On board were Australian prisoners-of-war liberated from Japanese prison camps.

These were just some of the shameful episodes of industrial blackmail which, I believe, Mr Colebatch will document fully in a book he is intending soon to publish.

As Curtin would wearily tell his colleagues: "Don't they know the nation is fighting for its life? They don't care a damn."

It is important that we reflect on this history. For although this scandal is many decades past, we hear echoes of it even today. As Colebatch has observed, the union heavies cared less about the war against fascism and militarism, less for Australia's role as a friend and ally in a global struggle, than for their obsession with the so-called class war at home. It is a reminder that no Labor leader has command and control over the industrial arm of the Labor movement. The union bosses held the power to disrupt Australia's prosecution of the war, and they used it ruthlessly, in spite of Curtin and in contempt for all this nation had at stake in the outcome. It is the heirs of this tradition of unelected, unrepresentative authority to whom Mr Rudd wants to hand back power today. Is he really any more likely than John Curtin to be able to stand up against them in a contest of wills?

The Curtin Government's creation of the Little Australia policy set a pattern which has been consistently replicated by Labor Governments and Oppositions ever since. It is a pattern of weak leadership on international issues, particularly those to do with confronting threats to global peace and security. Throughout the Cold War era, it was a pattern of idealistic apologia for some of the world's worst communist atrocities: a meek aversion when often we needed to be something more mighty.

Who could forget the grotesque and unseemly spectacle of Labor leader Bert Evatt, standing to his feet in our national Parliament in 1955, to announce he had written a letter to the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, and been given a personal assurance that there was no such thing as Soviet espionage in Australia. The foolishness and naiveté of that claim was widely ridiculed at the time. But that has not stopped the Evatt mindset becoming a consistent thread among elements of the Left in this country: a propensity always to defer meekly to the interests of other powers in international diplomacy; to assume what they are saying must be right, and we in Australia must therefore be in the wrong. Evatt was ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the Soviets. I fail to understand what was wrong , then or now, with giving the benefit of the doubt to our own national interest.

Gough Whitlam, far from confronting those who posed a threat to the world's democratic institutions, instead had breakfast with the Baath Socialist Government of Iraq, in an attempt to whip up financial backing for Labor's re-election campaign.

In the modern political era, when the Howard Government challenged the status quo in East Timor, there was no support from the Labor leadership or even constructive criticism. It is not hard to see why. When we had to make the hard decisions to intervene in East Timor, one of the early shocks for our government was that Labor had run down our military to the point where we were hard pressed to be able to deploy the forces we needed to do the job.

To give you some perspective, according to the Australian Defence Almanac published by ASPI, over Labor's last 11 Budget's defence outlays decreased by 2 per cent in real terms, whereas defence outlays increased by 48 per cent in real terms over the Coalition's first 11 budgets.

It's hard to imagine why, but in 1991 the Labor government cut two battalions from the Army, promoting the Australian Defence Association to say at the time that as a result "Australia would be seen by its foreign neighbours as weak and irrelevant".

Luckily the Coalition came to power to reverse the "Little Australia policy".

Australia's role in forming and leading INTERFET is now worn as a badge of national pride and was crucial to preserving peace in the region and the liberation of East Timor.

This exercise was followed by the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, which aims to lay the foundations of a secure and prosperous nation.

These interventions simply could not have taken place under Labor, which has as its bedrock a deep inferiority complex, adopted and espoused by all the key Opposition figures of the last 12 years.

Gareth Evans, my predecessor as Foreign Affairs Minister, saw Australia as a "middle power". It was a term he used ad nauseum and wrote a middling book about. It is a term that remains always at the ready for Labor politicians today.

In 1998, Kim Beazley told the Chamber of Commerce and Industry that Australia needed to be innovative - and I quote - "to compensate for what we lack in competitive clout by being a small nation". The following year, Mr Beazley said of Australia's standing: "We are a small country in a world of giants."

Mark Latham claimed repeatedly that we should limit our contribution to the global fight against terrorism to our own region, and that our military forces had no business confronting terrorists on the other side of the world.

Kevin Rudd echoes this today, as if terrorists draw neat regional boundaries. In 2004 Mr Rudd defined us in his Asia-Link speech as "a small country on the periphery of this region".

Most recently, on the second of this month, Labor's foreign affairs spokesman perpetuated the myth in his speech to the Foreign Correspondents' Association in Sydney. He went so far as to describe Labor's urge to retreat from world affairs as a "philosophical difference between the Australian Labor Party and the conservatives".

"We very much see ourselves as a middle power," he said. He went on to say that Australia had "no opportunity or very little opportunity" to exert influence on global affairs in its own right.

There are not a lot of things on which my opponent and I see eye to eye. But I wholeheartedly endorse his claim that Labor's plan for our nation to crawl back into its "Little Australia" shell is a fundamental philosophical difference. He sees it as a point of virtue: I see it as an insult.

By Labor's own admission, only the Coalition Government is prepared to continue to vigorously and unambiguously pursue Australia's interests and accept Australia's responsibilities as a significant global citizen.

What's most disturbing about this admission is that the Labor Party simply does not see how it sells short Australia, by seeking to paint it as - indeed, turn it into - a small nation.

What an insult to a proud, significant country. What a sad reflection on the Labor Party's utter lack of policy vision for Australia. What a dereliction of duty to the security and prosperity of every living Australian.

This is, however, the foreign policy alternative that the Labor Party offers voters at the upcoming election - retreat on all fronts.

Retreat On All Fronts

The most obvious manifestation of Labor's Little Australia policy is its plan to walk away from our allies and coalition partners in Iraq, and abandon the Iraqi Government, people and nation to terrorists.

Labor does not explain to Australians why fighting terrorists in Afghanistan is acceptable, but fighting terrorists in Iraq is not. It simply plans to devastate the Iraqi people, and their fledgling democracy.

Eleven million brave Iraqis voted for a better future because they believed in our vision of a different Iraq. Labor would break this trust, and leave them in the lurch. It would certainly lead to greater bloodshed in the country, and significantly increase the risk of a wider regional war. It would provide a dramatic psychological boost to al-Qaeda and its sympathisers world wide, including in our own region in South East Asia.

Make no mistake: terrorists would be emboldened - and we know from tragic experience that they want to destroy everything we cherish, and indeed our lives themselves. We must never forget how implacable is this enemy: "You love life, we love death" was how one of the Madrid bombers so chillingly put it.

Nor must we ever underestimate how much resolve we need to defeat this enemy: Osama Bin Laden does not think we are up to it, calling the West a "weak horse" that he and his ilk will outrun. Running away from Iraq would make him right, with very grave consequences.

Perhaps as serious, it would deliver an immensely damaging blow to the global authority of the United States.

Labor pretends that its ill-considered proposal will not harm our relations with our key ally. Nothing could be further from the truth. Turning our back on the US at a crucial stage in its most difficult area of military operations would massively diminish Australia's standing in Washington and around the world.

The simple fact, however, is that the US alliance does not fit into Labor's "Little Australia" story, and the Opposition has given every indication it will downgrade this vital relationship.

On his only visit to the US as Labor leader, Kevin Rudd did not visit a single senior official in the Bush administration, or a single Democratic Party leader on Capitol Hill. He did not meet any of the Presidential aspirants from either party. This is not the behaviour of a leader who values the alliance.

In a similar vein to their attack on the US alliance, the Labor Party has taken every opportunity to criticise the Government over the various achievements I outlined earlier, that have flowed from our bilateral relationships.

Labor has opposed our free trade agreements and argued that our sole approach to expanding trade should be the drawn-out WTO process. Labor had to be dragged to a position of support for the US FTA when the legislation went to the Senate in 2004.

Similarly, the Opposition has attacked our climate change initiatives. They seek to replace our range of positive initiatives with a single-point approach - to ratify the flawed Kyoto protocol. Labor does not explain how this would achieve even the slightest reduction in greenhouse emissions, given that Australia is already on track to meet its Kyoto targets. Beyond this meaningless rhetoric, it has no substantial plan to contribute to global efforts to deal with this serious issue.

Labor has also opposed our strengthening of security links in the Asia Pacific. There will be no more important geo-political stage this century than our region, and Labor would again reduce us to bit players.

Given this intention, we should not be surprised that the leader of the Opposition reflexively, without really understanding what was on the table, opposed our security agreement with Japan. His concern was that Australia should not, to quote him: "unnecessarily tie our security interests to the vicissitudes of an unknown security policy future in north-east Asia". That is an almost disinterested position.

It is as if we should have no role in shaping our own future. We, in the Coalition, think differently, We think it is vital that we use all Australia's assets to shape our future in our interests. Forging closer relations with Japan for stability and security in the Asia Pacific is part of that. Again, however, Mr Rudd follows the long Labor tradition of small-mindedness. Labor opposed a peace treaty with Japan and it was left to the Menzies' Coalition government to see the benefit, and to fight for the ratification of the peace treaty in 1951 in the teeth of Labor opposition.

Labor also opposed our trade agreement with Japan in the 1950s. That would be the agreement that drove Japan to become our largest export market today. It's a perfect example of how Labor's "little Australia" policy causes us long-term harm if it is allowed to run unchecked.

Conclusion

Kevin Rudd wants to be the boy in the bubble. Labor wants to pretend that Australia can shelter inside its own borders, and be untouched by global events such as terrorism, climate change and globalisation. Labor would leave it to everyone else to carry the burden of these and other significant global challenges.

In place of the strength and mutual respect that today characterises our relationships in Asia, we would revert to the obsequiousness and self-effacement of the Keating years.

By downgrading our alliance with the US, we would not only damage ourselves in the eyes of the world's only economic and strategic superpower, but we would also garner less respect in Asia and our diplomacy would carry less weight.

In Iraq - indeed where ever we are challenged by terrorism - we would revert to Labor's default position of appeasement and pacifism. This in turn would make Australia a less secure place. A victory in Iraq would embolden terrorists everywhere, and give strength to their efforts in our own region.

The plan to replace our network of strong bilateral relationships with mushy multilateralism would damage our achievements in areas such as Pacific policy, counter-terrorism, crime fighting, non-proliferation and trade.

Gradually, Australia would lose its current position of prominence in world affairs, and our voice would be lost amongst the chatter of multilateral bodies, where talk is plentiful but action can be painfully slow.

Put simply, Australia will become a less significant voice in international affairs, a less significant force in the great global struggles of our time. Rather than leading responses to events such as the Asian tsunami or the breakdown of law and order in a neighbouring country, we would content ourselves with waiting for the international community to respond, and then muddle along behind.

In doing so, we would significantly diminish our standing within our region. We would damage our ability to quickly and authoritatively respond to fresh challenges as they arise.

Rather than working cooperatively with our neighbours - within international norms and towards the common good - we would shrink inwards. We would choose the path of introspection and isolation, rather than the path of confidence and leadership. We would turn our backs on the constructive global engagement of the last 11½ years, and resign ourselves to once again being Little Australia.

And as a result, we would be forever diminished as a nation.