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Japan is at ease in the house of the risen Rudd-san

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In Brief

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith delivered the inaugural Crawford-Nishi Lecture in Australian-Japanese Relations to a gathering of scholars and government officials in Canberra earlier this month. Those fortunate enough also to have attended the minister’s presentation to the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo last December would have been struck by the similarities between the two speeches. Clearly they reflect current government thinking on the bilateral relationship.

What they reveal is that Labor policy on Japan is now far closer to the previous government’s policy than to its own in opposition. Rudd opposition policies have been largely overtaken by Howard-era policies.

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These aspects are most striking in the areas of trade, defence and whaling. On trade the Labor opposition was committed to multilateralism in both regional and international trade policy while, Howard was a committed bilateralist. His government proclaimed the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) as one of the most significant trade policy coups of his final term in office.

While preaching multilateralism, Labor has been happy to practise bilateralism. The Rudd government has pursued an FTA with Japan as assiduously as the Howard government would ever have done. Given the long and tortuous path of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, Labor would argue that any agreement on trade is better than no agreement.

The March 2007 Australia-Japan Joint Declaration on Security was another significant achievement of the Howard era. Then and since, speculation has centred on where the real initiative for this security agreement came from – the Japanese, Americans or Australians.

One Japanese commentator, Yasuo Kaji, in a retrospective published last March, argues that the agreement largely reflected US intentions. Dick Cheney’s sequential visits to Japan and Australia in February 2007 immediately come to mind. But Kaji points to the pivotal role played by Richard Armitage, former US deputy secretary of state. In his time he argued that Japan should abolish the ‘peace clause’ in its constitution; become the Britain of the Far East to contain the rise of China as a regional and global power; show the flag in Afghanistan; and make a boots-on-the-ground contribution in Iraq.

Armitage reportedly suggested to then Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer in early 2006 that Australia and Japan should sign a security pact. Howard also responded positively to the Pentagon’s plan to alter the existing conventional centralised hub-and-spokes structure of the US alliance framework in the Asia-Pacific. The protection provided by Australian forces to the Japanese military in Iraq further underpinned this Washington strategy as did the transfer to Tokyo of Thomas Schieffer, former US ambassador to Australia.

Because Rudd, elected opposition leader in December 2006, was a known China expert, Kaji concludes that the real American intention was to make the Australia-Japan Security Declaration an accomplished fact before Labor’s increasingly likely victory in 2007. This was an attempt to foreclose the Rudd government’s options in relation to China.

Rudd himself certainly raised several reservations about the prospect of formalising the Australia-Japan security relationship, describing any official pact as premature. In an article in The Age headed ‘Don’t Lock China Out,’ which was published just before the signing of the security declaration, he elaborated on these reservations. His key point was that embarking on a formal bilateral defence pact with Japan at this early stage might tie our security interests to the vicissitudes of an unknown security policy future in North-East Asia. Labor policy at the time was to prioritise greater practical cooperation between Australia and Japan in meeting common challenges such as combating piracy, narcotics and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Japan was also concerned at the time about the security implications of a Rudd-led government, not only for its own relations with Australia but for Australia’s relations with the US. As it turns out, this concern was unwarranted. Even the Japanese side acknowledged that no seismic shifts in Australia’s foreign policy settings were noticeable under the Rudd Labor government.

Labor has honoured all commitments made in the Australia-Japan Security Declaration, including further implementation of the action plan to advance cooperation between the two sides and the subsequent 2+2 talks between both countries’ foreign and defence ministers. In this respect, the Rudd government has been true to the original vision of the security declaration as being a framework for building upon rather than a finished work in itself.

On whaling, the strong position Labor adopted in opposition seems to have collapsed into the mildest of protests. It received two bland sentences in the Smith lecture.

On the surface, therefore, Labor policy on Japan seems almost indistinguishable from the Howard-era policy. One has to ask what’s missing to detect any subtle adaptation of the Howard legacy. Most significant in their absence are any references to the quadrilateral Australia-Japan-United States-India link-up, with its strong connotations of containing China. Only a faint echo survives in the talk of shared values, always code for excluding China from any grouping.

Rudd’s Asia-Pacific Community initiative announced just before his first visit to Japan early last June, also received a mention. The Foreign Minister clearly thought it deserved another plug, although Japan, like other countries in the region, has not responded as enthusiastically as it might.

Smith’s lecture referred positively to existing Asia-Pacific frameworks such as the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Framework and APEC. Rudd’s proposal for a new regional architecture had been justified in the first place by the supposed shortcomings of these organisations. Their value now seems to be freshly appreciated by the Labor government.

This article first appeared in the March 30 edition of The Canberra Times.

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