Australia at ASEAN: with friends like us, who need enemies?
The ASEAN summit highlighted Australia’s deepening divide with neighbours in the region, as diverging values and differing perceived interests defined the meeting in Melbourne.
Australia hosted leaders from across its immediate region for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Special Summit in Melbourne to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of ASEAN-Australian relations. Having the honour to host the summit, the Albanese Labor government tried to frame the gathering as an opportunity to reengage with the region and strengthen neglected relationships, trade and cooperation, but instead guest nations were treated with a dialogue centred around human-rights, climate change and China-related concerns of every variety.
Albanese and Wong’s social media teams crammed up their bosses’ timelines with generic platitudes and awkward handshaking photos with unfamiliar neighbours, and after the embarrassing cancellation of the QUAD summit in May 2023 that saw the bones of the event being repurposed for a series of Nahendra Modi stadium gigs, the ASEAN summit should have been the most important summit held in the country in recent years, and a chance to reengage with the bloc after a decade of estrangement under a Coalition government.
The Australia that hosted the inaugural ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in 2018 is quite different to the Australia that sat before neighbours last week. In the years between drinks, Australian governments today on both sides of the major party duopoly support Israel’s actions in Gaza involving grave human rights abuses, open new coal and gas projects as a political default, and parrot Washington talking points around containing China in the South China Sea. This stance formed the Australian posture and rhetoric at the summit in Melbourne, juxtaposes with a more nuanced and consensus driven multilateral ASEAN position. And considering its current geopolitical trajectory, particularly on China and Gaza, Australia seemed unable to carry on with the self-imposed “paragon of virtue” status it had traditionally taken into the forum over the decades, looking hypocritical and isolated from the important regional group even on its home soil.
On the eve on the summit, Richard Marles appeared on ABC - News Breakfast the week after announcing a $917 million dollar defence contract with Israeli arms giant Elbit systems amongst a genocide in Gaza that his government currently supports (with weapons and purported shared values) and most ASEAN nations (strongly) oppose. Speaking casually about alleged human rights abuses in member nations Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Marles stepped off a platform of hypocrisy not seen in a generation, and amongst his government’s callous and continued withdrawal of UNRWA funding, he somehow, without laughing, told the national audience “we always speak with our voice around the question of human rights”, to the sound of cosmic crickets stridulating throughout the infinite void.
Anthony Albanese, after getting to the Taylor Swift concert and the private Katie Perry gig at the Pratt family mansion, beset by complex domestic and global issues he seems to struggle to fathom, polished up his selfie lens on the iPhone and got stuck into his brand of Fox FM diplomacy at a gathering of the region that probably matters most to Australian national interest, at one of the more consequential moments in or region’s history. At the keynote address Foreign Minister Penny Wong obliged the guests with language about a “shared region” and “shared future”, before taking no time to get to the meat and potatoes: containing China through a US lens and badgering ASEAN member states to do provide more support.
As the summit from Australia looked increasingly to be about the “China” thing and less about the “shared region” thing, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim echoed a growing concern felt by visiting delegations: that Australia, and the west, were suffering from “China-phobia”, telling an audience “If they have problems with China, they should not impose it upon us. We do not have a problem with China”. This sentiment was summarised later by ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn who declared that the consensus driven ASEAN would never take sides on US v China, and instead of this position garnering criticism, it should rather be celebrated as a strength instead. Something Australia used to understand a bit better.
With the great power competition between the US and China ramping up, and worst case hypotheticals entertained daily in Western media coverage, the zero-sum narrative towards China generated in this environment seemed to split with the more nuanced take from ASEAN countries, its stance on Gaza greatly different from that of important partners like Indonesia and Malaysia, and it was evident from the get go that Australia now sees ASEAN increasingly as a counterbalance to China as opposed to a bulwark of stability between the tensions of two competing superpowers in the region.
Maybe a visionary government, in tune with its important historical involvement in ASEAN, could have used the summit, with the US and China absent, to reset its imperatives, in what might have been an opportunity to move foreign policy closer to home. Instead, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced $42m to ASEAN countries for a free and open South China Sea, and her government spoke with thinly veiled restraint about the importance of the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as it applies to China.
Without the rhetoric for conflict drummed up by nations with different interests (as indicated by Anwar Ibrahim and other attendees), Southeast Asia has generally seen a recent period of prosperity in a largely conflict-free and economically dynamic region. Much of this dynamism has been due to a set of agreed principals that form the position of the consensus-based organisation, due to clear guidelines and improved diplomatic and trade relations with China. In the years since Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” speech in Canberra, Southeast Asia has changed drastically, and for all we hear in the West about maritime tensions over shoals, atolls and reefs in the South China Sea, the less we hear about the economic integration, cooperation and interdependence in the region led by an ascendant China.
We have been an observer of some kind over the years, seeking ASEAN ties through our proximity, and once upon a time, due to a consciousness of our national interest by leaders like Whitlam and Keating, Fraser, and even to some extent Howard, there was a continuity that was applied to our regional imperatives, and a pre-eminence in relation to the extra-regional geopolitical outlook that has pervaded strategic thought since the Global War on Terror.
The ASEAN tradition, carefully folded into Australian diplomacy over decades, has been hastily dislodged by a new generation of bipartisan major party decision-makers who have off-shored our strategic future into the hands of another power at the expense of sovereign mobility. That rigidity was evident at the ASEAN summit. As Australia looked to bang the war drum on China while taking a controversial stance on its support of Israel, it found an audience looking like it is moving on, and although the Albanese government spoke at length about “cooperation on education, trade and investment, climate and defence”, the gathering concluded with minor gains in cooperation, trade, investment and climate, but saw a large part of discussion disproportionately centred on defence.
At the end of the somewhat tense and awkwardly unproductive ASEAN Special Summit, the Australian hosts managed to get signatures on a watered down version of the ‘Melbourne Declaration’ that loosely agreed to strengthen ties in the region. Albanese closed the summit speaking on Australia’s “destiny” in the region, declaring a strong commitment to Southeast Asia, yet stuck to his theme and buttressed it with assertions about Beijing’s insidious presence in the Indo-Pacific. But despite their efforts, the Prime Minister, his Foreign Minister and government representatives were ultimately unable to change the DNA of ASEAN on China, and made itself be known by all when trying to do so.
A government who has become obsessed with how the country must look to best receive a difficult and somewhat vague strategic reconstruction under AUKUS, has lost its geostrategic bearings, cutting its hard-earned diplomatic moorings with ASEAN neighbours in favour of playing a role in preserving short-term US primacy in the region. Anwar Ibrahim’s comments do not come in isolation, nor is Canberra’s current support of “America first” going unnoticed in the region, and perhaps more significance will be taken home with the sentiments of departing guests, than will be retained in the consciousness of decision makers in Canberra.