Bob Sercombe (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

If there was ever a time when we should realise the need to focus our foreign policy and related resources on our own region, it is now. From East Timor eastward, we see on a daily basis the background to why that focus is so important. We need to focus our public diplomacy, our development policy, our intelligence efforts and our security efforts on that region. In an article in the Canberra Times on 28 May, Mark Thomson, the head of the budget program for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that overseas deployments to multiple locations put a big strain on logistics and intelligence support from home. He said the demand for timely intelligence on what is happening on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomons and now East Timor is pushing the analytical capabilities of the Defence Intelligence Organisation to the limit. Mark Thomson previously worked in senior positions in Defence. He believes a choice needs to be made between deployments in our own region and further afield. His personal view is that our allies would understand if we withdrew from Iraq now that the burden has increased closer to home where fewer countries are able to help.

I want to quote from a couple of very interesting articles from very good journalists on the situation in East Timor. In an article in the Age on 27 March, Hamish McDonald talked about Australia’s role in East Timor. Young Australian men and women are taking a significant risk in East Timor and their efforts are supported by all sides of this parliament. Nonetheless, there are aspects of the history that we need to be aware of. Hamish McDonald said:

But where was Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, when this crisis unfolded over three months? Where were the Australian military advisers who, with Portuguese counterparts, trained the East Timor armed forces through to independence in May 2002?

Why was the Howard Government so strongly opposed to the UN peacekeeping mission continuing when its mandate ran out a year ago, apparently persuading the US to support its view?

East Timor’s Government was keen for a continuing UN security role. A modest UN presence, focused on guiding the young local army and police forces, might have helped nip this crisis in the bud.

The article goes on:

There are echoes here of the Howard Government’s refusal to send a small body of police to the Solomon Islands in 2000 when requested by its then prime minister. Three years later it had to launch its $2 billion regional assistance mission to revive a collapsed system of government.

In a similar vein, in terms of understanding the failings of Australian policy in this region—failings which I would suggest relate very directly to overloading our foreign policy establishment with deployments in parts of the world where, with the greatest respect to all those involved in those interventions, we have very limited and very much fringe effects, to the detriment of our own immediate region, where we can have a significant effect—it is worth continuing this theme of looking at the government’s failings.

In an article in the Australian on 31 May, Allan Behm, a former head of the international policy and strategy divisions of the defence department, says:

Australia compounded this tactical misjudgment—

in relation to Timor—

in four crucial ways: in a “beggar thy neighbour” ploy, it sought to drive the toughest possible deal on undersea resource development; it supported the creation of a freestanding East Timorese defence force, powerless in any serious defence role but a natural and armed alternative to an elected government; it withdrew Australian security personnel from East Timor as soon as it could following the Interfet deployment; and it encouraged the UN to do the same. A security vacuum ensued, which the events of the past few weeks have exploited.

Once again I would suggest that this analysis very much reflects the laziness on the part of the Australian government in focusing on our own immediate strategic environment, but it also reflects the fact that it is simply overloaded in its analytical capability.

A bit further eastward we move to the largest country in the region and potentially the most challenging for our nation and for the region, and that is Papua New Guinea. Having visited Papua New Guinea on a number of occasions I take a somewhat more optimistic view about the current state of affairs there than seems to be conventionally popular. You sometimes see stories in the media about New Guinea being a failing state or falling to bits. That is certainly a possible scenario—and a catastrophic scenario—for this country, but there are a number of very positive things about PNG at the moment, most of which do not have anything to do with support from Australia.

Democracy in Papua New Guinea is robust. There are extraordinarily high levels of participation in the operation of the Papua New Guinea government. The present government is, on an unprecedented basis in PNG history, about to serve a full parliamentary term of five years. Papua New Guinea is blessed with some outstanding national figures: Treasurer Bart Philemon and people like Rabbie Namaliu and the present justice minister, Bire Kimisopa—who is visiting Canberra—are outstanding leaders.

Papua New Guinea has a fiercely independent and very competent judiciary and some aspects of its economic future are looking very promising indeed. The PNG-Queensland gas pipeline which will emerge over the next few years and will deliver gas to Queensland and elsewhere in Australia is an extremely positive signal. But that is not to underestimate the problems, which include a very heavy-handed and patronising attitude that often emanates from this town of Canberra towards Papua New Guinea.

Further, I think there is a problem in relation to ignoring Papua New Guinea. I recently had the pleasure of attending the Australia Papua New Guinea Business Council forum—an annual forum—in Cairns. At that forum there were five Papua New Guinean ministers present and all the relevant important business leaders from Papua New Guinea and the Australian businesses that are engaged there. The Papua New Guinean government had five ministers—from the Deputy Prime Minister down, including the foreign minister. There was not a single Australian minister present at that forum.

To her great credit, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ms Gambaro, turned up on the second day—I think it was a fairly rushed trip—and good luck to her. But it sent all the wrong messages and reinforced this perception that is very deep seated in Papua New Guinea that, frankly, Australia is not particularly engaged. Papua New Guinea, as I said, is our nearest neighbour and probably our most important immediate neighbour, certainly in the Pacific region. One of the implications of a possible lack of success would be that the foreign policy and security challenges that it would pose for Australia would be catastrophic, yet none of our ministers could be bothered going to a very important meeting relevant to its economic future.

As time permits, I will talk a bit more about the aid budget. Aid to Papua New Guinea has been substantially scaled down in this year’s budget. We are providing less in our budget appropriations for Papua New Guinea this year than we are for debt forgiveness in Iraq. I think that, once again, sends all the wrong messages. Moving a little further east—and we are still in Papua New Guinea—we go to the autonomous region of Bougainville. Bougainville of course was a site of dramatic civil war and civil conflict up until recently. There are still significant challenges there—the activities of Noel Musingku and his group of thugs, and the concerning presence, apparently, of ex-Fijian soldiers there—and they simply cannot be ignored by this country, but too often, tragically, they are.

I spoke briefly before about the Solomon Islands and the failure of Australian policy. In 2000, at the invitation of the then Solomon Islands government, we were invited to intervene to stem the crisis that was enveloping that country. Our failure made the task extraordinarily more complex in 2003, when at long last the intervention occurred. But we saw just recently, tragically, the rioting in Honiara. In an article also in the Australian on 27 May, Mary Louise O’Callaghan—who is singularly well informed on Solomon Islands matters; she lives there—amongst other things, said this:

RAMSI also must get better, smarter and faster at getting its message out. Right now the mission still has enormous support from the broad mass of Solomon islanders, but there is never an exhaustible supply of goodwill towards an intervention force.

Ms O’Callaghan makes a number of very important suggestions as to how the quality of our role there—it is a regional role, but it is an Australian led role—can be enhanced, if the energy and the focus of Australian foreign policy goes on our region rather than on bit roles on supporting adventures from our great and powerful friend. She talks, for example, about the need for a common language. She says, amongst other things:

The absence of all but a few pidgin speakers is a major weakness of the mission. Learning even cursory pidgin should be compulsory for all new starters.

Certainly, there are going to be continuing and deeper problems in the Solomon Islands. The Solomon Islands economy in terms of foreign exchange depends overwhelmingly on the logging industry. The tragedy is that the place is nearly logged out and within the next decade the Solomon Islands’s largest source of foreign exchange will evaporate. To the best of my observation, having been in the Solomon Islands a couple of months ago in the context of the election, it seems to me that Australia, in effect as the regional leader, is not providing the focus needed to lay the foundations for a sustainable future for the Solomon Islands, so the problems will continue. One could go on to talk about Fiji, Vanuatu and other places but time prevents that.

A great deal of hoopla and self-congratulation from the government has occurred in the context of the 2006-07 budget, but the peak body of non-government aid organisations, ACFID, in its press release, stated: ‘The aid budget is disappointing.’ Despite all the spin, there has only been a 2.4 per cent increase in it, when you exclude the one-off debt cancellation for Iraq of $343 million.

I do not have any particular problems in supporting economic restructuring in Iraq but Iraq, by international standards, is not a particularly poor country. It is a deeply troubled country, but it ought not to be receiving—as a single item, the largest amount of Australian development assistance in this year’s budget; that is precisely what it has achieved—much more than what has been going to Papua New Guinea.

Even including the debt forgiveness for Iraq, Australia’s ratio of gross national income to development assistance only rises from 0.25 per cent of GNI to 0.3 per cent. Compare that with the rates of other developed countries: Canada, 0.34 per cent; the United Kingdom, 0.48 per cent; the Netherlands, 0.82 per cent; and Norway, 0.93 per cent. This failure of the government to take seriously the need for commitment to our geopolitical region in this budget—not to bells and whistles and self-congratulation about aid but to actually addressing the needs here—I think is very noteworthy when you compare Australia’s very poor performance with that of comparable developed countries.

The aid budget position is made even worse when you look at some of the rorts that are included in it. It does not seem to me, frankly, to be a legitimate charge on the aid budget to pay for keeping asylum seekers on Nauru or on Manus Island as part of the government’s Pacific solution, but that is precisely where it is funded from. Of course, Trevor Flugge traipsing off to Iraq with $1 million worth of outlays was also charged to the aid budget. It has nothing to do with aid, but the government seeks, off an inadequate basis in itself, to then rort the system by making all sorts of other charges on the aid budget. An article in the Age on 29 May says this:

The harsh reality is that the poor in our region are being denied more than $660 million in grassroots development projects because the Government chooses to use aid to paper over this commercial incompetence. It is certainly a slick accounting move, paying off export debt and calling it aid. It seems grossly unfair that the poor should have to pay for AWB’s mismanagement.

I think that point is extraordinarily well made.

As far as aid is concerned, the budget also has other significant missed opportunities in it. One of the very great achievements in aid and getting it to where people most need it, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, relates to microcredit. Last year was the United Nations International Year of Microcredit. In fact, in a recent discussion paper that I released on behalf of the opposition I proposed as part of our aid program the establishment of a Pacific development trust that would enable very small amounts of capital to go to communities, individuals and families to set up small businesses, to commercialise crops, to enable real benefits to flow very much to local communities.

To its great credit, one of the Australian banks—the ANZ bank, which is very prominent in the Pacific—is doing some interesting things on a commercial basis in relation to banking facilities, but more needs to be done. What we need in the Pacific particularly, as has been found in parts of Asia, are opportunities for poor people to set themselves up in small business—with cash to seed a crop, for example. The thing that is always surprising in the literature I receive on this subject is that the credit risks are extraordinarily low. People tend to repay their debt. Really, I would have thought this was consistent with a more conservative political party philosophy—actually encouraging a bit of entrepreneurship in poor communities—but this is a singularly great gap in the Australian aid program and one that I would be urging this government to seriously address.

Similarly, one of the things we need to be doing in the Pacific is substantially building the people-to-people links between Australian communities and Pacific communities so that mentoring can occur and so that service clubs, churches, schools and local governments in many parts of Australia—and I think in provincial Australia particularly this would be appropriate—can form sister links and sister relationships with communities in particular parts of the Pacific and engage in deep and meaningful people-to-people connections. There is no support from the government for that sort of initiative. In fact, the budget cuts back assistance for the efforts of non-government organisations. The government provides top-down support for Pacific countries, Asian countries and other development recipients but does nothing about mobilising the generosity of the Australian people in these areas.

Mr Deputy Speaker, because of the time I will look for another occasion to develop some of these themes. Thank you for your forbearance—I think we might have run over time a little bit—but I would certainly urge the Australian government to focus on where we can achieve significant bang for our buck and in our own region, which is sometimes perhaps a little overcolourfully described as an ‘arc of instability’. We really need to be focusing our resources there and we need to be ensuring that our aid program reflects genuine community priorities and not flights of fantasy by the government.

Debate interrupted.

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