Quarterly Essay 25 Bipolar Nation: How to Win the 2007 Election by Peter Hartcher

Author:Peter Hartcher [Hartcher, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Campaigns & Elections, Political Science, Political Process, World, Australian & Oceanian, Writing, Politics
ISBN: 9781921825248
Google: 4Uj-AAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27307564
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2007-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Our national fearfulness explained for Renouf another of the central instincts of Australian foreign policy. He wrote:

Australians have traditionally and somewhat irrationally been vaguely apprehensive that Asians will some day sweep down from the north to fill their enormous empty spaces; the obvious source is Indonesia. If this happened, Australia would need help. The only supplier of effective help would be the US.

Australia’s exaggerated fear gave it an outsized need for reassurance, and it responded with a hungry embrace of a “great and powerful friend”. It clung to Britain until the fiction of London’s defence assurances to Australia was exposed by the Second World War, and then turned to the US.

“The US responded during the war in her own interests and Australians lulled themselves into the comforting conclusion that the US would do so again should the need arise,” Renouf wrote. “The Australian governments assessed that the need was constantly close to arising.” The ANZUS Treaty, signed in 1951 and taking effect in 1952 when fear of international communism was at a high point, formalised the Australian need for reassurance.

Foreign policy in the Howard government’s third and fourth terms has been dominated by Howard’s determination to be in the very front rank of the US’s supporters in its most difficult undertaking, the invasion of Iraq. This is entirely consistent with, indeed was prefigured by, Renouf’s analysis twenty-eight years ago. It was a feature of Coalition governments, he argued, to regard as an objective the best possible relationship with the US: “This end was so pursued that Australia gained a reputation in some countries as an American client state. This was seldom true but outsiders were given good reason to suspect it.”

More than a quarter of a century later, what sort of Australia does Ren-ouf look out on? What threats do we face? How have we come to regard the US alliance? Is it still the Frightened Country?

Renouf, now eighty-seven years old and in the midst of writing a series of lectures on the history of the British Empire, sets out his own sense of the risks, then gives a diagnosis of the collective Australian perception. In his own view, Australia is a country without much to worry about in defence terms:

Now, there is virtually no enemy. The only country that people mention to me as a threat is Indonesia. But they don’t have the capacity to invade. And even if they started now they would take fifteen years and we’d have plenty of warning.

And despite John Howard’s efforts to talk up the terrorist threat, there is little real threat to Australia. Of course, the terrorist threat to Australians overseas is real. But in Australia it is very limited. I think there’s a large political element to this terrorist threat in Australia. And as for the “Asian hordes”, I think that’s probably finished and any reasonable person would realise that.

Yet that’s not the way that the collective Australian mind perceives it.

We see ourselves sitting in a continent of great wealth, with more every day, and we are sometimes the subject of envy of other countries.

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