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May 18, 2005
This is critical of Australia's foreign minister. I'll never forget him encouraging Indonesia to bomb the Kimberleys during the federal election to justify his neo-con foreign policy.
Geoff Pryor
What we have is Alexander Downer's Earl Page speech given at The University of New England, Armidale. He says:
"In a time when bipartisanship was imperative in Australia in the national interest, Curtin had chosen from 1935 on to placate the international socialists, pacifists and anti-conscriptionists within his own party.... Curtin's leadership of his party in the crises that preceded it was characteristic of the Lefts approach to international politics. Labor's policy in response to the Italian invasion was that it would not support sanctions and "the control of Abyssinia by any country is not worth the loss of a single Australian life".
Defending that policy, he began the long Labor tradition of wringing his hands over a Little Australia incapable of playing anything more than a minor role internationally: "Australia is but a minor power; it is a small nation, remote from the great centres of international civilization....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 worl....Australia should not resort to warlike acts against any other nation."
That Little Australia account (a small country in a world of giants) is a rewriting of Australian history. It ignores the way that the conservatives (eg.,Robert Menzies) were subservient to the imperial power of the UK and went along with the UK's foreign policy. It was Curtin who said no to Churchill around 1942.
It also ignores that, from H.V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell through to Bob Hawke and Keating, Labor leaders have sought to reconcile Australian dependence on its closest allies (first the UK then the US) with a measure of independence and international co-operation. It was a balancing act not a policy of appeasment.
Alexander Downer appears to think that Australia can, and should, walk the international stage as if it were a considerable power not a middling one. That can hardly be called a realpolitik view of international relations. It expresses a desire, a dream, a vision, an imagining, not realpolitik.
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