Dialogue: Can we help Australia out of Asian doldrums?

Terence O'Brien* says the crumbling of Australia's relations with South-east Asia dictates that New Zealand must play a fine balancing act in its policies for the region.

New Zealand's overall diplomatic relationship with Australia has always been enhanced by successful Australian foreign policy. Initiatives from Canberra in earlier times - which helped to produce Apec, the Asean regional forum and the Cairns Group of farm traders - were the result of imaginative Australian policy that served our interests.

The picture is now somewhat different. Australian relations with South-east Asia are in the doldrums. The successful leadership by Australia of a peace enforcement coalition in East Timor, with New Zealand's active participation, should have marked another highwater mark in regional relations for Australia.

The result has been, paradoxically, quite the opposite. Australia's relations with Indonesia are in the worst state in 25 years. There is more than one reason.

Australian presumption, it seems, served to infuriate the Indonesians. The reported assertion of Prime Minister John Howard that Australia would act as the United States' deputy in the region did not help.

Despite internal tumult, Indonesia still commands sufficient a place in the affairs of South-east Asia (Asean) that Jakarta's displeasure with Canberra is damaging Australian relations with Asean.

At a Wellington seminar, well-connected Australian commentators expressed pessimism about the consequences of all this for Australia's regional policies. And they implicated New Zealand in the sense that Australia's setback was portrayed also as New Zealand's setback.

Both countries would, it was suggested, need to work cooperatively to set matters back on a favourable course.

At one level, that conclusion is unexceptional. But at another, implicit is a view that New Zealand does not have much of a distinctive foreign policy on offer in Asia. It is hardly of comparable importance to Australia in the region but it has based its foreign policy approach on a belief that a small, non-threatening but serious, internationalist country, which has a different sort of relationship with the US, has a perspective that can be useful in the larger regional scheme of things.

New Zealand's own relationships with Indonesia, while of less substance, are on a sounder footing than those of Australia and that could, indeed, be of benefit to Canberra if the transtasman partners admit intrinsic worth in New Zealand foreign policy.

In all of this there is obviously food for thought. For New Zealanders who have become accustomed to regular expressions of disquiet in Australia about New Zealand's defence policy, it is a new dimension altogether to realise that Australian regional foreign policy idiosyncrasy could, in its turn, now be a complication for us.

New Zealand has every interest in assisting in a refurbishment of Australia's relations in the region. But it must also persevere with pursuing its own interests.

How far this can be done while Australia rehabilitates its regional foreign policy depends on several factors. One concerns the priority that New Zealand now accords human rights in the conduct of its foreign policy in Asia. It is clear that the Government has elevated the issue among its external objectives, and tumult in the South Pacific has reinforced this priority.

But human rights are one interest among a set of others, and not necessarily an overriding interest to which all else must be subordinated.

Since the 1997 Asian economic crisis, there has been a quickening regional interest in a more exclusive brand of regionalism involving North-east and South-east Asia but omitting New Zealand and Australia. This is not altogether a new idea, and progress is unlikely to be swift.

At an earlier stage when Dr Mahathir, of Malaysia, promoted his version, Australia responded forcibly to discourage such notions, while we adopted a less negative stance. Clearly, in the evolving circumstances it would be prudent to portray New Zealand as a country attached to Apec and the World Trade Organisation - that is, under the right terms, interested in inclusion in further development of complementary forms of regional cooperation.

Evidence is already to hand in the CER-Afta trade links now being explored. New Zealand rather than Australia has cultivated these. What response they ultimately elicit from the Asian side will, however, be influenced by the level of insistence on human rights in New Zealand's continuing foreign policy presentation.

Such considerations call for an exercise of judgment. Larger, more important countries than New Zealand face the challenge of finding the balance between interests-driven and values-driven foreign policy. How far can the one be pursued separately from the other?

One measurement of how New Zealand intends playing its hand will be the August 25 visit of Phil Goff to Beijing, his first call as Foreign Minister. His presentation of New Zealand advocacy will be watched with particular interest.

* Terence O'Brien is a teaching fellow in international relations at Victoria University.