As foreign policy takes centre stage in the campaign, the unstable global order is complicating Canberra’s century-long search for a seat at the table.
When the campaign began, Liberal party strategists clearly hoped to make this a khaki election. The developments of the past year, including the AUKUS security pact with the United States and the United Kingdom and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, seemed to add weight to Scott Morrison’s framing of a global contest between an “arc of autocracy” and the world of liberal democracies.
Australia’s policy response in these difficult times, Morrison said, should be to build the ADF’s capability, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereign manufacturing capability, widen Australia’s alignments in the Indo-Pacific and strengthen national resilience. With the addition of a promise to take action on climate change, that was Albanese’s prescription too.
For all Australian governments since the Second World War a primary objective has been to prevent hostile or potentially hostile powers establishing a foothold in the Southwest Pacific. Anxiety about a Soviet presence arose frequently through the Cold War. In 1987, the possible establishment of a Libyan People Bureau mission in Vanuatu was enough to send Foreign Minister Bill Hayden on an emergency overnight visit to consult with New Zealand about a response..
the world’s new challenges require Australia to give more weight to foreign policy and diplomacy as instruments of statecraft. The Solomons-China agreement ensures that the South Pacific – not just Solomon Islands but our other major partners as well – will be the destination of an early visit by the incoming prime minister or foreign minister.
In the absence of independent discussions with Beijing, Australia is less relevant to its Southeast Asian and Pacific neighbours as well as to its allies The Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s subsequent setbacks and the future of the war have reset the international agenda in ways that the next government will also have to grapple with. Europe, for the time being anyway, has rediscovered geopolitics. The invasion has recharged trans-Atlantic relations, galvanised the European Union, and given NATO new purpose and possibly new members.
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